How I Won the Yellow Jumper (19 page)

With other resolutely French French-speakers on the scene, I am more typically inhibited.

At the start of the 2008 Tour I tracked down Bernard Hinault, who, in 1985, was the last Frenchman to win the Tour de France. He was known as The Badger, a nickname that implied feral aggression. I wondered if he'd taken the same approach into his post-racing career.

A busy man at the best of times, Hinault is in constant demand on the Tour de France, where he has a contractual arrangement with the organisers to turn up and be Bernard Hinault. Really, he is the only man for the job, and the French public can't get enough of him. I was aware of a queue of journalists, well-wishers, sponsors and other accredited Tour types building up behind me.

That year the Tour started in Brest, at the most westerly extremity of the country. This was Brittany, Hinault's country. I wanted to talk to him about the characteristics of cycling in that part of the world, which is battered by Atlantic winds most of the year. I wondered whether the rigours of the landscape had forged a distinctive type of man: no nonsense, bluff and a little gruff.

No sooner had I embarked on the interview than my French just fell apart, and was left in a heap of broken little words on the floor in front of him. What did for me was the whole Brittany thing. I struggled with the pronunciation of
‘Bretagne'. I forgot that the adjective was ‘Breton', and not ‘Brittanique', an error that became all too apparent when I ended up asking him if all Breton riders consider themselves to be fundamentally British.

The Badger looked at me with thinly disguised pity.

And in 2010 I came face to face with Laurent Fignon for the final time. A few years previously I had conducted a similarly shambolic interview in French with him at his hotel complex in the Pyrenees. He'd been a gentleman, and had refrained from showing open scorn. Perhaps because he knew that I was basically plugging his business. But also, I imagine, because he was curious to see how much longer I could continue groping around in the linguistic darkness before I finally broke down in front of him. I wondered during our last interview if he remembered our ridiculous encounter.

He seemed to be well enough in the summer of 2010. But he wasn't. A month or two later, cancer claimed his life. With him went a large portion of France's cycling heritage.

But where Fignon's memory is revered, others are less fondly remembered. Take, for example, Jan Ullrich: the earring-wearing, freckled, seemingly humourless German whose
repeated capitulations in the face of Armstrong's dominance in the mountains characterised my early Tours.

Ullrich showed a disinclination to speak any English, which led me, not unreasonably, to believe that he couldn't. Why should he after all? He'd grown up in East Berlin in the eighties, where learning English was an act of relative decadence. He'd spent most of his racing years in German-centric teams built in his image, and lived and trained in the mountains of southern Germany. The man was as retro-Deutsch as a faded denim jacket.

This shouldn't have mattered. After all, I had a good knowledge of German, having spent a few formative years in the early nineties in Hamburg, gazing into the dregs of Bier glasses wondering what to do with my life. So, I felt a little drawn to Ullrich, my ersatz-countryman. I claimed him, in fact.

There was much I liked about him. I liked the way he flattered to deceive. I found him to be frail, human, charmingly charmless. In some ways, he was the anti-Armstrong, prone to fits of pique, breathtaking weight gains over winter, and with a propensity for slapstick: most memorably flying through the rear window of his team's support vehicle when out for a training ride two days before the start of the Tour.

And yet, he and I never hit it off. In three years of covering those Tours that Jan Ullrich contested, I didn't actually interview him once. Not once. That's a pretty remarkable record really, given the fact that he finished second, fourth and third in consecutive races before disappearing feet first into a quagmire of doping scandals from which he never emerged.

I don't know what it was, but he always managed to swerve me. In big media bundles, I would hold my microphone into the middle of a clump of others, and would fail to get a question in. He would never look my way. Then, at the very last second, I would throw in my effort, just at the moment where
he would be turning on his Adidas heels and getting back on the bus. I was always too late.

There were two occasions when he did speak to ITV but I was there at neither of them. The first of these came when quite unexpectedly, a day before the start of the 2005 Tour, Jan Ullrich sat down in front of Matt to do an interview. To this day, no one knows why.

With the realisation of his mistake beginning to dawn, Jan stared at Matt. And Matt stared back, both men trying to establish who was the more surprised to find themselves in that position. Not one to shirk a linguistic challenge, Matt embarked on an interview in German, one of the few languages he hasn't mastered. He emitted a few words, judiciously sprinkled with occasional coherent meaning.

‘
Jan. Wie ist das Problem mit Ihrem Knie?
' [How is the problem with your knee?] This was a perfectly reasonable start. Except that Matt faited to pronounce the hard K at the beginning of ‘
Knie
', coming out instead with the English sounding ‘Nee'. A minor mistake, but one that rendered his accent ridiculous, just as it would be if a German asked in English, ‘How iz ze problem viz your K-Nee?'

To give him his due, Ullrich did well not to laugh.

On another occasion, on a finish line of a transitional stage in the 2005 Tour, Matt grasped the nettle and, with the camera rolling, posed the almost-intelligible question, ‘
Jan. Was ist gepassiert?
' Which would have sounded like this to Ullrich: ‘Jan. What gehappened?'

Don't geknow. Now gebugger off.

But what of Alessandro Petacchi? Well, to my great disappointment, he has learnt how to speak a little English. In 2010, when he had a month-long flirtation with the green jersey, eventually winning it, we came face to face often enough. Although some of the mystery had gone, both from his answers, as well as from my questions.

‘Alessandro. Congratulations. Are. You. Confident. That. You. Can. Win. The. Green. Jersey?'

‘I don't know. It will be very difficult, I think. Cavendish is very strong. So is Hushovd. But I try. It's normal, no?'

It may be normal. But it's not half as fun.

The winner of the 2006 Tour de France was Oscar Pereiro*.

He will, sadly for him, always be known as Oscar Pereiro-Asterisk. The other man in the race that year, the man who crossed the finish line in Paris quicker than anyone else, was Floyd Landis.

Do you remember Scooby Doo? There's a visual headstart. The wildly twitchy eyes, the peculiar little smile, and the crazed attempts at facial hair and the screechy voice. Norville ‘Shaggy' Rogers clearly shares some genetic material with Floyd Landis.

I often think about him, now he's made it his fate-bound mission to bring Lance Armstrong to his knees. I recall the day of his downfall. My memories are sharp, high-definition pictures. They are worth revisiting.

It was Thursday 20 July 2006. I ambushed him in the morning outside a modest chalet in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne.
We hadn't actively chosen the ambush mission, you understand. There was no great sea of hands volunteering to doorstep the man who had tossed away the Tour de France when he had cracked and haemorrhaged time the previous day. In fact, it was only a sense of duty, an obligation to the narrative of the race, that led me there. There was that and the fact that Steve Doherty had told me to go and do it.

No, this was going to be hard. I had to interview an unhappy millionaire cyclist dressed in a tight-fitting nylon leotard emblazoned with the name of a Swiss hearing-aid manufacturer. That much I knew. But what I didn't know was that he was about to rip the race apart, and then himself.

The crazy thing that morning, as we pulled our dusty, battered Espace into the gravelled car park, was that the Caisse D'Epargne team was billeted in the same hotel. In other words, Oscar Pereiro, the heir apparent to the 2006 Tour de France, was sleeping no more than few yards away from the man who had gifted it to him. Who knows, they might have passed each other the previous evening, in the carpeted corridors en route to the dining room, massaged and tired and wearing flip-flops. Would they have exchanged a glance? Would they have said hello?

There was a larger-than-average media throng present, as well as a good smattering of interested members of the public. They had made their way there to anoint Pereiro. Pereiro's movie-star good looks, rich, dark eyes and admirably chiselled sideburns were just the tonic for a Tour that was adjusting to the vacuum of life after Armstrong. Here was a rider who had some talent, but also immense good fortune on his side. His lead had been granted to him when the peloton failed to take him seriously enough to warrant chasing down. He held on for two days, before ceding the lead to Floyd Landis. But that wasn't the end of it. On Stage 16 to La Toussuire, Landis cracked spectacularly under the strain of defending his yellow
jersey. He lost eight minutes as Pereiro held firm and reclaimed the race lead. It was a thrillingly unexpected turn. Here we had a story to tell that was forged from fallibility – the polar opposite to the calculated successes of Armstrong's domination.

It was one of those mornings when we timed our arrival to perfection. In other words, we were very nearly too late. Just as Woody and John were plugging in and fumbling around with their kit in the back of the car, Pereiro emerged from an inauspicious side door, to whoops, cheers and whistles from the largely French crowd. He looked cool. He looked measured. He looked every inch a man in command.

We stopped him in his tracks as he tried to board his team's black bus. He had one foot on, and one foot off the steps. I can't remember much of what he said to us, because, to be absolutely honest, I wasn't remotely interested. I was practising the time-honoured journalistic technique of only pretending to listen, while all the time my senses were sharpened for the arrival of Landis. I was aware that at any second he would appear. Icarus on a bike.

Success is so much less attractive as a story than failure, especially when the failure had been so emphatic, the humiliation so public. What had taken place the previous day had been a very complete form of dethroning. Yellow jerseys are seen as an invitation to attack, but the wearer normally has it in him to respond. Prior to Landis's collapse, I had only ever seen riders hurl themselves at the edifice of Armstrong's unbreakable will, and achieve nothing. Moths to a flame. So, at least for me, this was new.

After such a loss, in what frame of mind could Landis possibly be?

A flash of Team Phonak green. Unnoticed by almost everyone, Landis had emerged blinking into the bright alpine sunshine, and was already hobbling his way towards
the privacy of the team bus. I thanked Pereiro for his time, politely cutting short one of his answers as I did, and sped off to intercept our man.

He'd wanted to avoid attention by slipping out the back door inconspicuously, but as he crossed the sunlit court, we cast a sudden shadow. Having conceded the yellow jersey, he looked stripped of greatness in his lime green and yellow Phonak kit. Apart from the odd clutch of cycling's more informed rubber-neckers, we were the only people to show any interest in him that morning.

The rider spoke in his high-pitched, almost-charismatic voice, explaining what he had in mind for the coming day.

‘I'll attack I guess.' He looked to the left, and he looked to the right. He looked at the sky and he looked at the gravel. He looked anywhere but at his interrogator. Me.

‘Yeah. I'll have to attack. There's not much else I can do. So we'll see.'

At that point, he did finally turn to look at me, with the twitch of a smile and a truncated nod of the head. It was the kind of perfunctory gesture which is shorthand for, ‘That's it. You've got your answer. Now leave me alone.'