How I Won the Yellow Jumper (33 page)

We were soldiers from opposing trenches of the First World War playing football at Christmas. The next day, he was back in his uniform, looking angrily at me and signalling to me that I could ask just one question in the interview zone.

The next year, he never reappeared. Perhaps now he's propping up a bar in Mozambique. But without the rest day's spiritual blessing, I might never have known that he was just a thoughtful young lad doing a job. And now I have totally forgotten his name.

Drying requires extreme ingenuity, since the passage of the
clothes through the launderette invariably bottlenecks after the washing machines. It astonishes me every year how long it can take to dry a pair of denim jeans. The simplest option is sometimes to spread them out in the sunshine, although this can get a little edgy at times. Once in a run-down area of Toulouse, we commandeered the street furniture outside the washing salon, and when that wasn't enough, our pants and socks and shorts started to spread down the street until they almost completely eclipsed the front of the café next door, which was still closed. Sadly for us, the patron's brother owned the
tabac
across the road, and got on the phone straight away. We watched him, as he reported our disrespectful drying.

‘Hey listen up. Some English journalists have hidden your café from view with their pants . . . yes, you heard me correctly, their pants. I think it will reflect badly on your establishment for years to come, and may affect your turnover in the long-term. Shall I have them shot?'

And with that, he threatened to have us shot. And the pants.

Another time, on a ridiculously long transfer on the 2009 Tour, we stopped to enjoy a rest day in the middle of nowhere. It was a tidy little guest house in a miniature village somewhere not that far from Brive. It was run by a fussy Yorkshire couple who made us laugh by barking angry instructions at their staff in the kind of French that sounds as if it's a very specific dialect of Wetherby. With no launderette within a thousand kilometres in any direction, our host offered us the chance to use the guest house's own facility, a snip at ten euros per wash per head.

The problem was, once again, drying. So for a while his sunny little breakfast terrace drew admiring glances from all passing motorists as it lay festooned with a kind of sock-based bunting. It gave the impression that a colossal marital dispute had taken place, which had only been resolved when the husband's entire wardrobe had been tipped out of a first-floor window.

People passed by on foot and stared. We shrugged apologetically, and pointed at the shadowy figures inside of the man from Yorkshire and his wife going about their business of snapping at each other.

Eventually, and to protect the good name of his establishment, our host lent us a drying rack. We disappeared soon after that, our jeans still damp around the waistline, and beginning to poach in our suitcases as we drove.

Nonetheless, the washing of clothes is a ritual I have come to love. This is partly because it brings me into contact with a different France: one which is not putting on a show for tourists. Launderettes, in common with railway stations and kebab shops, seem to be a kind of town-planner's shorthand for Crap Part of Town. Once the machines are loaded up, there is often a thirty-two-minute wait, perfectly designed for a stroll around the local amenities. Occasionally, for a heavier soil, or an older model of washing machine, this can be as much as a forty-six-minute wait. This represents an ideal opportunity to have a nose around the dodgy-looking betting shop next door. Or perhaps to get your hair cut by friendly Algerian barbers who delight in burning off ear hair with cigarette lighters. You can even be a little more adventurous, and, as Liam once did, buy a ukelele.

Sometimes, there is nothing to admire in a place. Instead
of kebab shops we are served up a panorama of wild, jagged Alpine peaks. Of what possible use are they?

Disappointingly, in 2009, we spent the second rest day in a high-altitude cluster of wooden hotels and silly clothes shops, known to people who like that sort of thing as Verbier. After Monaco and Andorra it was the third tax haven we visited that year. If we'd hopped over to Jersey, we'd have had the full set, and could have started developing it with houses and hotels of our own.

Verbier is the kind of place that makes you want to pay high levels of taxation as a simple gesture of open defiance at the prevailing culture. I call it a ‘place', although it's not actually a place, except in the most narrow, GPS, Google Earth sort of a way. It is located in Switzerland, but that's about it. Neither the place nor the people seem to be genuine, in any conventional sense.

The Swiss may boast Italian, French and German as their national languages, yet in Verbier, a weird hybrid of English holds sway. From one minute to the next, as we wandered around the pine-clad hell-hole, we seemed to confront a wall of Hilfiger-clad clones who spoke the kind of English that doesn't differentiate between idiocy and marketing.

We were staying in a huge chalet, which was run by a Swedish family. The staff consisted of about seven generations of ostensibly bohemian Swedes, loosely affiliated to the same family, and all with serious investment portfolios. They seemed to hover around every corner, merrily swapping advice in a plethora of different languages on which restaurants served the best melted cheese. That's about all it is possible to eat in the Alps, it seems. A smell of paraffin and dairy farming hangs gloomily in the air.

The place was so booked out that parking was the biggest issue of the evening. With so many cars trying to squeeze onto such a small stretch of alp, risks were being taken. Some other French residents of our chalet, in their desperation, had dropped
the front wheels of their car over the edge of the road, so that they hung uselessly in mid-air. The car was propped on its underbelly. This was adventurous parking indeed, even by Tour standards.

In the morning, miraculously, the car was gone. I guess it must have been towed away. Or they just let it drop.

Crash!

‘What was that?'

‘The Mercedes. We'll get another one.'

We weren't the only ones staying in Verbier that evening. Large sections of the fund management and banking communities of Western Europe and the USA had fled there too. Presumably on the run from the chaos they had left behind them on Wall Street. Team Saxo Bank were in their corporate element, annexing a posh chalet into which they had packed as many white, middle-aged, middle managers as they could fit. They stood in tight clumps juggling finger food and talking to each other in braying hybrid English about their heroic attempts to ride up to the summit on their team replica bikes. They were wearing out their iPhones as they flicked through souvenir photos of their deeds. I saw Fabian Cancellara, in his après-ski leisurewear, riding down to do his PR bit at the party on his bike. It can't have been more than 200 yards from their
hotel, yet he felt the need to ride there. Perhaps he'd simply forgotten how to walk.

Columbia, along with Mark Cavendish, two-thirds of the way through his six-stage haul of 2009, were lodged just opposite. Their hotel was a jagged wooden cliff face staring across a car park at more timber-clad nightmare constructions in the charmless ski resort. Outside the front entrance, where the team vehicles were parked up, a swarm of the curious and the obsessive were gazing with loving, jealous eyes at Columbia's team of German mechanics hosing down the riders' bikes. One fan stooped to take a picture of a track pump, and then picked up an empty water bottle to assess its weight.

In this way, the Tour was winding down before a rest day. A chill was closing in on the mountaintop as Woody, Liam and I snaked our way down through the dregs of the afternoon's entertainment. Hordes of Danish and Norwegian bike fans in their early twenties stumbled around the place in various states of disarray and undress, bellowing ribald songs in Scandinavian tongues, which sounded belligerent but which were almost certainly charmingly innocent. One of them, an ear-splitting chorus in support of Thor Hoshovd's campaign for the green jersey, ended with the stirring refrain, ‘Mark Cavendish is a fish.' It was passionate stuff.

Cavendish himself was spotted walking back up the mountain from their hotel arm in arm with his freshly acquired girlfriend, Fiorella Migliore, former Miss Italy. He was dressed, as riders are contractually obliged to do, even when not on active duty, in the team's liveried shell suit. He looked like he'd just finished a shift at the local leisure centre. But he smiled the relaxed smile of a man whose life was getting better by the hour. George Hincapie, in the role of gooseberry that night, walked alongside them, towering above the young couple and looking three times as old.

We had eaten somewhere forgettable, played pool
somewhere irritating, and were now looking to join up with our friends from the Organisation. The urbane and charming Olivier, and the unreconstructed stubbled, chain-smoking Mathieu, had vaguely indicated that we should meet them at the only bar still open in town. A place with an uber-prosaic name, such as The Room, or The Place, I forget.

Inside, the pub was heaving. Euro beats kept everybody pinned to their seats or against the wall of the stifling cellar. People stood three deep at the bar. I volunteered to get the beers. After a twenty-minute wait to get served, I was to be next. I watched as the man in front of me, an olive-skinned young hedge-fund manager with a jumper over his shoulders, ordered precisely what I was about to order.

‘I'll get three beers.' It was more of a statement than a request.

They were plonked in front of him, the tops flipped off by expert Swiss hands, ‘OK, that's twenty-five francs.'

I could see the mental arithmetic pass over my neighbour at the bar like a cloud. Why, that was about fifteen pounds for three small bottles of Becks. Oh well, so be it.

He passed over a luridly coloured note. The hand remained outstretched. ‘Each. They're twenty-five each.'

He turned and left. So did I.

I later established that the queue for the bar consisted entirely of people like us; an endless procession of drinkers reaching the front, and turning straight around, beerless. Within fifteen minutes I was tucked up in bed, back in my chalet.

Woody and Liam had less luck. They stayed a little longer out of politeness, but then, on their way back up the hill, they had the great misfortune to stumble across a 200-Swiss-franc note lying in the street. Presumably it'd been dropped by someone rifling through their chinos in search of their BlackBerry. My colleagues were soon bounding happily back to the bar, fully intending to hand the lost money straight in
to the nearest barman. Which is what they did, in exchange for beer. They returned very late indeed.

The Verbier rest day dawned along with the realisation that Bradley Wiggins, who had just ridden himself into a podium position, had decided to hold a press conference. We should probably cover it, even though it was technically our day off too. He was staying some sixty kilometres away, down in the valley below. Wearily, Liam and I drove to Wiggins's hotel, only to find out that he'd taken a helicopter to Lake Annecy to ride a bit of the time trial course. But he would indeed be back later to hold a press conference in the early afternoon.