How I Won the Yellow Jumper (11 page)

I would like to say that I have become adept at this down the years, but it would not be true. Any casual observer of our Tour coverage will recognise the wilting collars and ragged seams that characterise my sub-standard attempts at grooming. But assuming that I have managed to get down to the breakfast room wearing a shirt that doesn't draw open ridicule or even hostility from my colleagues, the next hurdle I have to overcome is the ritual of the morning bad moods.

Over an endlessly repeating cycle of croissants and stubby baguette ends garnished with pats of butter unfolded from foil wrappings and miniature pots of
confiture de fraises
, I have to confront the daily disparate psychopathologies of the crew with whom I share my professional life.

If Matt is with us, then he has normally jumped the starting gun by a good hour, found a local newsagent, and committed to memory every word of at least three newspapers in three different languages. His mind is fizzing with cycling minutiae, as he juggles breakfast and deep thought. He pushes his laptop's luck by sloshing coffee and orange juice around the table. He has cycling on his mind, and cannot conceive of a world not similarly obsessed. At this hour, he struggles to find like-minded conversation partners.

‘You know what?' No one answers. ‘The thing about Juan Antonio Flecha is this . . .'

‘Not listening, Matt.'

A moment later, he understands his error of judgement.
‘Yeah. Suppose so. Yup.'

Liam is always last down. Breakfast for him is the slow unfurling of a frown. It is his chance to emit silence.

Generally speaking, at the agreed hour of our departure, negotiated at midnight the night before in the lobby of the hotel, Liam will be loading up salami and soft cheese onto another baguette. As he heads for the car, he is still sloshing a steaming cup of black stuff and mumbling profanities about the quality of the coffee in French hotels.

Woody, having drained the orange juice dispenser dry, will have passed through almost unnoticed, save for a sneezing fit. He has a habit of sneezing three times, one after the other, and turning each individual sneeze into a foul-mouthed (nosed?) profanity. Atch-anker! Atch-ollocks! Atch-osspot! Just the three, and then he'll let it rest, before silently mixing a pot of honey into a plain yoghurt.

Still, he has his uses. He's the one who remembers to bring the squeezable Marmite with him from home.

On certain rare occasions, my colleagues might actually ask what we're doing that morning, who we would be chasing. They might feign interest. But if I start to explain the nuances of the cycling story with too much journalistic enthusiasm, I will be met with the ‘Partridge-shrug'. This takes its name from Alan Partridge's famous restaurant scene and is a gesture of such complete indifference that it withers the soul and diminishes both the shrugger and the shruggee. And so it is, lost in our private little worlds, that we load into our vehicles the stuff which we had unloaded only hours before.

And on we go.

We learnt long ago to switch off the voice on the sat nav. Our own monotonous blather is bad enough. There's no need to add another voice to the drone, especially if it belongs to someone who doesn't actually exist and can't chip in to buy the coffees. The downside is that we often sail blissfully past our motorway exit, adding an instant 30km to our journey. But it's our choice, and frankly we're too proud to accept the error of our ways. Besides, the car is our home for a month, and we have become unusually protective of its individuality.

The ITV crews travel round in three identical Renault Espaces. I say identical, although it hasn't escaped my notice that some are more identical than others. It appears that the car designated to convey Gary Imlach and Chris Boardman around France has tended, over recent years, to boast leather upholstery, whereas the others don't. It's not a complaint, just an observation.

These cars take such a hammering on an annual basis, it's a wonder anyone will let us rent them at all. In fact, it appears there is only one rental garage in the whole of France that is prepared to entertain such a patently loss-making undertaking.

Every year, the production team has a struggle on their hands with the particular branch of Renault Location who insist that they no longer want our business. Every year, though, some sort of deal is struck. The usual clincher is the publicity card.

ITV producers: ‘But, you must understand. These cars will be driven by ITV's team of high-profile presenters covering the Tour de France. Money cannot buy such exposure. The marketing impact back in the UK for Renault should not be underestimated. It must run into many, many pounds.'

Renault: ‘Ah, well, of course that changes everything. Please feel free to abuse our brand-new vehicles as much as you wish, and return them in an almost unusable and pretty much unsellable state. Also, don't worry about the flood of traffic offences that will reach us by post long after you've fled back to London with your tails between your legs. It would be our pleasure to settle all your debts with Police Nationale.'

I'm pretty sure that's how the conversation must run. Only in French obviously.

The worst job on the whole of the Tour, which I have
managed to swerve so far, happens on the Monday morning after the final stage in Paris. Someone, normally Matt since no one else volunteers, has to return the car to Renault at their hard-to-find depot somewhere behind the Gare du Nord. This much he has learnt: don't wait for them to ask questions. Drop off the keys and run.

One time, when reversing the car out of the subterranean car park underneath the Place de la Concorde for its final journey home, Matt got too close to a concrete pillar and completely destroyed the entire left side of the car. It had made it all the way around France with no visible damage, until the very last movement when Matt delivered the
coup de grâce
.

By some extraordinary coincidence, Mike, our engineer, managed to do the same thing to another car in exactly the same place four years later, only without the same impressive degree of violence. He posed for a picture. For insurance purposes, of course.

On my first Tour Woody tried to back into a frankly non-existent parking space on the top of Alpe d'Huez, and in doing so, tore a ridge four-foot long down the length of the passenger side of the vehicle, ripping off the wing mirror. A couple of days later, Matt drove the same car firmly into the back of a
family saloon in the foothills of the Alps. Undeterred by his own obvious guilt, he leapt out of the car, arms flailing wildly and levelled furious accusations at the driver in front, neatly raising the temperature of the encounter to boiling point. Apart from internal bruising and mild concussion to its head gasket the Espace made it back to Paris in one piece. However, I suspect the young family who we shunted into disrepair may still be stuck on the hillside waiting for assistance. If they are reading this: sorry.

On another occasion, we let Liam drive. Years would pass before we ever let him try again. It was his first experience of getting up a mountain on race day, something that takes a lot of practice. On the morning of a big stage with a summit finish the road crawls with cyclists trying to ride the climb for themselves. There is no way of knowing how many there are on any given day. But it is many, many thousands.

They are, it goes without saying, insane. On any other day of the year (provided the mountain hasn't closed for the winter) they could tackle the ride in relative peace, passed only by the occasional chalet maid in a Renault Clio. They could freely enjoy the uncluttered sights and smells of the mountainside. But on race day, they form part of a vast crowd of cyclists veering all over the road, terrorised in turn by the ghastly clamour of a thousand accredited Tour vehicles. All manner of cars, vans and trucks, steered by drivers on the verge of exhaustion, gasp for air up the mountain as they nose through the crowds, edging people either into sheer rock faces or as close to the abyss as they can go. Into this craziness, and on his first Tour, we pitched Liam.

Now, I am no mechanic, but the Renault Espace has a shocking clutch. After no more than ten minutes of inching up an incline in first gear, you start to notice the smell. The trick is to stay in gear as long as you can, and if you have to stop (which is pretty much always), nip it quickly into
neutral and pull on the handbrake. Just never, ever, sit on the clutch.

Unfortunately, Liam hadn't got the hang of this. Despite our increasingly emphatic advice, he persisted with his clutch foot flat to the floor. The more we implored him to lift it, the less he seemed to listen. No more than a quarter of the way up, he was muttering to himself like a battle-shocked Vietnam veteran drinking alone in a Milwaukee strip joint. He stared fixedly ahead, sweat running in rivulets down his temples, as the car filled with the distinctive acrid smell of smoking clutch plate.

Suddenly, as we rounded a tight, steep corner, from somewhere underneath the bonnet a volcanic cloud of white smoke billowed, large enough to ground temporarily all flights in and out of France. We came to a halt.

Liam remained sitting, a gentle rocking motion had set in, and the shadow of a disturbing smile played across his lips. We had stopped mid-switchback and now sat blocking half the road, as exhausted riders, firing volleys of abuse in our direction, streamed past us. Instantly a bottleneck of Tour traffic started to form behind us.

To the spectators at the side of the road, we became a source of delighted amusement, a useful boredom reliever. Our smoking engine continued to betray our incompetence. A Dutch TV crew, in a non-smoking car, managed to nudge past us, stopping briefly to tell us that the clutch plate was by now probably white-hot, and that if we attempted to move, it would shatter like a plate of glass. Their best advice was to ‘get the lid open and maybe piss on it a bit'. We smiled our thanks, wound up our windows, and sat tight. A little island of Britishness marooned in a crap French car.

Descending is another thing altogether. Queues fifteen miles long routinely form on mountainsides, consisting of a dangerous
mix of accredited and non-accredited vehicles. With the right-hand lane chock full of stationary traffic, and the left lane empty of vehicles coming back up the mountain, sooner or later one of the Tour vehicles (usually a champagne-coloured Citroën belonging to France Télévisions) will pull out of the queue and start to hurtle down the wrong side of the road at breakneck speed. Instantly, it will be joined by a dozen others. The trick is not to be the first car in the illegal convoy speeding down the wrong side of the road. It's best to be in second place. That way, they, not you, take the impact of any head-on collision.