How I Won the Yellow Jumper (34 page)

We returned to Verbier, irritated beyond measure by the sudden removal of the word Rest from our Rest Day. We just had time to dump our stinking washing at the World's Most Expensive Launderette for a service wash, where the lady behind the counter nearly called the police at the sight of Liam's favourite pale blue Fred Perry polo.

She had a point. The smell released when Tour bags are peeled open is indescribably bad. On the 2010 Tour we arrived in the most beautiful little boutique hotel in Bagnères-de-Bigorre on a rest day. After a string of soulless chain hotels
in industrial estates, this was a place so immaculate, tasteful and welcoming that it made us want to weep.

But instead of crying, we unzipped our suitcases in the perfect sweet-smelling foyer and began to stuff dirty washing into black plastic bags to take to the launderette. We could have done this in the privacy of our own rooms, but instead chose to transfer our washing in full view of the charming lady who owned and designed this jewel of a hotel. Our hostess, still holding on to her smile of welcome, backed off visibly and, with one deft movement, opened a set of French doors at the back to allow the smell to dissipate a little. I hope we had the good grace to blush. I think we did.

Back in Verbier though, our washing safely under way, we had an issue to grapple with.

I had failed to mention to Woody the possibility that we might have to work on our rest day. So he'd taken advantage of the chance of a proper lie-in, by getting to bed at 6.30 a.m., about 100,000 Swiss francs worse off, no doubt. The trouble was, we needed him to come with us to the press conference. It was already midday.

We needed him to wake up. We had to wake him. Liam had to wake him.

I waited in the car outside the chalet, the kit loaded up, and ready to go. Liam reappeared to tell me how badly the news had been received. It seems I was not popular. It was just as he was relaying the extent and exact nature of the abuse heaped on my head by my loyal friend and sound recordist that we caught sight of a figure pressed up against a window on the third floor. Woody, it seemed, quite unaware that his shower looked directly over the street, was scrubbing himself into life under the running water, quite naked, and quite visible to anyone walking by.

Wonderfully, the shower seemed to last for ever. After three or four minutes, I had stopped crying with laughter, and simply sat gazing up at the window in delight.

He appeared a little while later, clutching his sound kit, and shades on. The act of telling him what we'd seen from the street set us off laughing again. Woody, it has to be said, didn't enjoy the joke.

‘Let's go.' We drove the rest of the way in silence.

One of these days he'll see the funny side of it. Probably when he reads this book and sees that I've included the picture.

I went to a branch of Radio Shack last July, mysteriously drawn in by the logo, the big round ‘R'.

Radio Shack, the US equivalent of Tandy, was the headline sponsor for Lance Armstrong's last ever team. But to me, and to millions around the world, the big round ‘R' was simply a visual shorthand for Armstrong.

I have a curious response to ‘out of context' sightings of things I associate with the Tour de France. For example, recently I was thrilled to discover how many UK hardware retailers now stock Quick Step laminate flooring, the main sponsor of the Belgian national team. Each time I come across
it in a store, I stop momentarily and consider laying some parquet wholly unnecessarily over my floorboards at home. I gravitate needlessly to branches of Caisse d'Epargne to withdraw money in France, and I would always favour Liquigas for all my Italian-based propane needs.

All right, I might have made that last one up, but the sight of a Norbert Dentressangle truck on the M40 is enough to send me careering into the central reservation. I simply forget that these products and services have a life outside their sponsorship of the Tour de France.

The 2010 Tour was scarcely five days dead, and here I was, in a small ugly town called North Conway at the foot of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, staring at the bland exterior of a branch of America's favourite electrical accessories retailer. I sat in my car, gazing at the store. What impulse had brought me here?

Primarily it was the need to purchase an audio jack lead. But also, I was curious. My last meeting with Armstrong had not gone well. I felt like he and I had a little unfinished business to resolve.

He would have been blissfully unaware of this, but as I sat and watched as the Radio Shack branch manager unlocked the doors at exactly nine o'clock (I was the first customer of the day), I was filled with the compulsion to make contact with him one more time, and settle so many conflicting issues once and for all. I guess a little bit of me hoped to find him there, beavering away in the storeroom, or dusting the digital camera display.

I flipped back the days of the calendar, imagined my drive back to Boston. Mentally, I reboarded the plane, before arriving back at Heathrow the day after the Tour de France had finished. I rattled back in time on the Eurostar, chatting to Woody and Gary Imlach, before finding myself in the late warmth of an otherwise dull afternoon on the Champs-Elysées. The podium
ceremonials were reaching their conclusion. I was waiting for a last chance to interview Lance Armstrong.

The occasion was unusual from start to finish. Armstrong, who for so many years had annexed the top spot on the big yellow stage, and who only the previous year, 2009, had stood alongside Contador and Schleck in third place overall, had finished the Tour de France in twenty-third place. His presence on the podium was only required because his Radio Shack team had won the Overall Classification in the Teams Competition, a consolation prize so neglected, so meaningless in the grander schemes of the Tour de France, that even Armstrong looked a little sheepish in accepting it. He trudged off the stage one last time, and, allowing his teammates to slip ahead of him, turned to the waiting press cortege, and with a weary half-smile presented himself for his final duties; one last flourish in front of a cluster of microphones.

As ever, it was Frankie Andreu, his former teammate, who led off the questioning. With the weight of corporate middle America bearing down on his network, and therefore on him, his questioning wasn't exactly probing. ‘You gonna miss all this, Lance?' was about the gist of it.

I allowed for Andreu to get three questions away. Then I threw one in.

I wanted to know if his head had been right. It was plain to see that his body was no longer willing. I wanted to find out from Armstrong if he had been distracted by the growing threat from the FBI investigation into doping on his former team. It sounded implausibly melodramatic, but that was the sub-story. That summer they were after him. The stakes got higher every day.

‘Lance . . . !'

He turned ninety degrees and looked. He narrowed his light blue eyes minutely: a glance that I knew well, a balance of anger and disappointment. A muscle flinched at the base of his
jaw as he clamped his mouth tight shut. Then he turned through ninety more, and was gone.

I watched him go. He looked old to me. I have always been appalled and amazed that I am a couple of years his senior. He seems old enough to be my dad.

He walked barely five paces before he disappeared from view and was engulfed by a wave of The Accredited, those myriad officials whose function on the Tour is indeterminate but whose presence in large numbers always suggests the proximity of Armstrong. A flash of yellow on the trim of his cycling jersey, and he was gone from the Tour.

I dropped my microphone down by my side. That was it then. The closest I would get to him now, and for the rest of time, would be Twitter.

Ever since Lance Armstrong started to ‘tweet', he's been a mild disappointment to me. A man who used to inspire with his mental acuity, resolve and finesse now seems to have revealed himself as a banal kind of bloke. On reading his postings, I am often left with a feeling of deflation on finding that a man whose feral intensity so defined his aura drinks lager, insults enemies, toadies up to friends, waves the Stars and Stripes, guzzles chilli con carne and claims that digitally remastered American rock ‘kicks ass'. It's almost like a mid-life crisis hooked up to the World Wide Web.

I need, then, to return to an age before Twitter, an innocent bygone age. I need to return to 2003 to recall my first impressions on being confronted by the rider whose myth was about to outgrow the race that had spawned it.

Lance Armstrong's name was the only one to have crossed the divide from the Initiated to the Ignorant. He had done it in a way that neither Indurain nor Hinault had managed before him. Perhaps only Eddy Merckx, in the modern era, had jumped out of the acres of newsprint in a similar fashion to emboss his name in the totality of public consciousness. In
short, and it's a test I often apply as a gauge of someone's celebrity: My Mum Had Heard of Him.

And so had I. I hold my colleague and friend Simon Brotherton responsible. Afternoons spent listening to BBC radio in July would be characterised by an interruption to the Wimbledon rain interruptions, so that we could cross over to some anonymous town in France for the ‘closing kilometres of today's stage in the Tour de France'. Simon, in his excellent straightforward way, would then call home the winner of the day: Cipollini, Zabel, whoever, before briefly being invited to explain how come the stage winner of the day wasn't going to win the overall race.