How I Won the Yellow Jumper (14 page)

Londres!

Now their day was ruined. There were wolf-whistles and some shouting.

I lingered a little in front of the Belgian monitors, watching a bizarre three-way hug featuring David Beckham, Seb Coe and Ken Livingstone, each of them wearing the kind of beige suit normally only ever seen for sale on the market down the Walworth Road.

Unexpectedly, I felt a little reflected glory. The Belgian crew started drifting back to work, patting their congratulations on my back as they passed. My inflated sense of self-importance grew a little more. I guess they weren't really crediting me with making the key late-night interventions that had swung the whole thing London's way. They were Belgians after all,
so I think they were probably just very pleased to see Paris missing out.

I gathered up John and Woody and we spent the next hour or so putting together a short package of vox pops to reflect the reaction among the locals to London's success. I don't know what I was expecting really. We were in a town called Montargis, a little to the south of Paris. During the Hundred Years War the Earl of Warwick laid siege to the town for months, until the residents got their act together and sabotaged the dykes and reservoirs in the local area, flooding the enemy lines and killing hundreds of Englishmen. Had the bloodlust been dispelled over the following 500 years? Or would their descendants still be hell-bent on exacting retribution for English perfidy?

I strolled up and down the finish line, microphone in hand, stopping every now and again to offer in broken French, ‘
Vous souhaitez sans doute feliciter Londres! 
' I wasn't totally sure that they would wish to congratulate London, but I felt they should be offered the opportunity.

It seemed, though, that they didn't feel the same way. Reactions varied from grudging acknowledgement that London might be a reasonable venue, to frank and forthright allegations of deceit and vote-rigging. One man looked directly at the camera, and drew his finger across his neck as if to cut the viewer's throat. I stopped and spoke to one of the Tour's legendary figures: the Cochonou salami-man. Small, permanently irate, and moustachioed, this terrifying elderly man spends every July pedalling a tricycle up and down the final kilometre of each stage handing out flimsy chequered sun-hats and miniature sample-sized cellophane-wrapped salamis to the waiting throngs. I have on a number of occasions tried to steal salamis from his basket only to get caught in flagrante and chased off in the style of a sped-up Benny Hill sketch. So I should have known
he wouldn't react with any great friendliness to my approach.

‘
Je m'en fous d'Angleterre! Je m'en fous de Londres!
' His words were garnished with fragments of Cochonou salami as they flew in my direction. Garlic, salt, fat and hurt pride.

‘
Je m'en fous de Blair!'
he added. And then he spat on the ground, in the manner of a man pretending to be a small, angry Frenchman, made all the more compelling since he actually was one.

There's a bit of me that understands his anger. His nation invents a great race and wins it a lot. Then they invite the rest of the world to come and join in and they stop winning it altogether. And now he is faced with this idiot from English TV trying to wind him up about the Olympics. As if he wasn't irate enough already. And would everyone please stop trying to nick his salamis.

But away from the vitriol, there is a touching faith about French support for their cyclists. The fact that they still care about an event their riders seem genetically incapable of even threatening to win does the nation great credit. In the years that I have covered the Tour, French success has been limited
to bit parts. Their participants tend to be attendant lords, that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two. Like going for a gold medal in curling at the Winter Olympics, the French seem to have been busying themselves with competing for the lesser prizes, in the sober knowledge that the big one will elude them for years to come.

Not that that doesn't have considerable appeal. Recent Tours have featured heartening, brave rides from Sylvain Chavanel, Brice Feillu and Geoffroy Lequatre to name a few. But they have also been characterised by the slow, saddening decline of Christophe Moreau. Moreau is a national treasure, we are led to believe, although I am not so sure. By and large, the French cycling public, despite their yearning for a hero to emerge, aren't daft, and I can scarcely accept that they have genuinely warm feelings towards ‘the greatest French rider of his generation'. A man who has five top twelve finishes on the tour to his name, Moreau has been masquerading as a contender. Since returning from a suspension for doping he has been holding his own only up to a point with the main men in the mountains. That point invariably would be the first major acceleration. With battle raging up front between the likes of Evans, Sastre and Schleck, French TV would treat the viewer to long, loving, lingering close-ups of Moreau falling off the back and riding all on his own in a world of pain. ‘There's Christophe Moreau again, struggling already to hold the wheel.' Every year. Even the French must have become sick of it.

But while Moreau confessed in 1998, his Festina teammate Richard Virenque, stretching credulity among swathes of the media, maintained his innocence. Not everyone believes him. For me, Virenque was another symbol of the impotence of French cycling. Year after year his targeted assault on the polka-dot jersey given to the ‘King of the Mountains' was as predictable as it was repetitive. But the stick-insect son of Morocco carved out an extraordinary niche for himself.
Seemingly ignored by the main riders, by dint of being half an hour adrift in the General Classification, he swept up intermediate climbing points on middling climbs, possibly because no one else could be bothered. ‘Oh go on, then,' I imagine them thinking to themselves, ‘give it to Virenque.'

He scooped up seven polka-dot jerseys in an era where not many other French riders were showing themselves. He won stages. He should have cemented his place in French hearts.

And, perhaps he did. For a portion of French cycling fans it never mattered that Virenque was morally compromised goods. I would often spot the Virenque fans on the Tour and was fascinated by what could possibly draw them to support him. Amidst the sea of painted names on the tarmac, the LANCE LANCE LANCE and the BASSOs and ULLRICHs, there would always be a fair smattering of ALLEZ RICHARD, often with a surprisingly neat tricolour painted alongside.

These would have been the proud handiwork of the die-hard caravanners, those French families from Rennes or Le Mans, who would have driven to their allotted switchback days before the arrival of the race, braced the vehicle with stones against gravity and then begun stolidly eating their way through a mountain of merguez, scowling at the new arrivals. Each day would bring more and more caravans from Holland and Germany, cluttering up their view, and bit by bit ALLEZ RICHARD would be swamped on all sides by an invasion of foreign-sounding names. It was a metaphor for the race itself, and it would have been enough to make them retreat ever more deeply into their morning's edition of
L'Equipe
, shaking their heads in despair. These were the people who represented Virenque's natural constituency.

Virenque can be astonishingly forthright. He once recorded a chat show on French TV where he gave quite possibly the most honest answer any sportsman has ever given, an answer
that recently has been echoed by Floyd Landis. This was the exchange between Virenque and the presenter Thierry Ardisson:

Q:
If you were sure of winning the Tour by being doped, but knew you wouldn't get caught, would you do it?

A:
(without blinking) Win the Tour doped, but without getting caught? Yes.

It's a wonder that corporate France still holds enough faith in the man to crave association with him. These days he has contracts with a sticky glucose drink (fair enough) and with a pharmacy (yup, I can see that, too). But there's one French business that will be forever Virenque. The years of his triumphs were the heady days when the polka-dot jersey was sponsored by the supermarket chain Champion.

Since Virenque seemed to own exclusive rights to their prize, and even appeared outside of the Tour in their TV commercials, they were intimately associated with the man, and were clearly pleased with the return on their investment. Their sponsorship of the event seemed to grow with each passing year. Each intermediate King of the Mountains point would be festooned ever more garishly with Champion's logos, and kilometre after kilometre of barricades leading up to each line would all bear the same supermarket's name. We fondly imagined that Virenque was by now so indebted to the sponsor that he had to spend every hour God sent working for them. We speculated endlessly about how every morning Virenque would put out hundreds of Champion barricades, before he was allowed back to his hotel for breakfast. ‘Virenque was up early again,' one of us would invariably comment driving towards a finish line past acres of Champion signage.

Since his racing career ended, he has been working for Eurosport, where, for me, he invites unflattering comparison
with the late, great Laurent Fignon and the idolised Laurent Jalabert, the pundit on France Télévisions, whose urbane charm has won him universal admiration. But at least he doesn't have to put out all those barriers every morning.

Which brings us to Thomas Voeckler: the anti-Virenque.

Few riders inspire as much affection and genuine respect as Thomas, the man with the widest beaming smile in world cycling. He has a naturally engaging temperament and an inclination to good manners, which puts us all to shame. There have been times when I have wanted to jump over the barricades and give the man a hug. The most recent of these came on the 2009 Tour when he held off Cavendish and the marauding HTC-Columbia train to ride out a solo win into Perpignan. It was a stage that the Manxman would have underlined three times over in red ink as a banker win. It would have been the last thing Voeckler would have wanted, naturally, an unrestrained hug from an English journalist. But that's the kind of reaction he provokes in people, not least the French. This is a man who they properly worship. He's also the only rider I've ever asked to sign anything. I have a poster at home advertising the Grand Départ of the 2005 Tour in Voeckler's
home department of the Vendée. He's been Photoshopped onto it so that it looks like he's riding over water. How fitting.

It's hard not to talk of this guy in the diminutive. Pick your patronising cliché; it probably applies. But as Matt has often turned to me and angrily pointed out, the man deserves and demands our respect.

His coming of age was in 2004. His was the kind of gutsy almost-achievement that you would more readily associate with English cricket teams. It bears comparison with Mike Atherton's mind-bending powers of concentration as he ground away at the crease over the best part of two days to save a Test match against South Africa in 1995. To cricket purists, that was deemed to be one of the greatest innings of all time. This is what Atherton wrote about his career-defining moment: ‘I was in an almost trance-like state. It was a state of both inertia and intense concentration and I knew that I was in total control.'

Never mind Voeckler, the whole of France, through his 2004 endeavours, entered an ‘almost trance-like state'.

Voeckler claimed the yellow jersey on Stage 5. He didn't win the stage, Stuart O'Grady did that, but he was part of a breakaway group in which he was the best-placed rider in the General Classification. Armstrong, containing the pace of the peloton and mindful that greater challenges lay ahead (he was always the master of targeted effort), had let the break get twelve and a half minutes up the road, allowing Voeckler to coast home in fourth place on the stage but straight into the yellow jersey.

Sitting wrapped up in a kagool to stave off the chilly Normandy winds, I pondered this scenario as I frowned at the TV monitor showing Voeckler, the ‘virtual yellow jersey'. Just one year into my life as a cycling correspondent, my internal mental slide-rule was still too undeveloped to cope. I found it hard to calculate how the race could now be led by a man who had so far finished no better than fourth on any stage. I failed
to understand the strange honour that was about to be bestowed on the short, awkward-looking rider from a team sponsored by a brioche bakery.