How I Won the Yellow Jumper (40 page)

Five days later, we pulled up in a dusty car park in the middle of a forgettable little town called Bourgoin-Jallieu. Outside the HTC-Columbia team bus, there was a clutch of British cycling fans. Held back by barriers from getting too close, they were keen to get a glimpse of the little sprinter. Maybe to shake his hand, grab an autograph, or pose for a photo to SMS to their friends. They, like us, stared at the closed hydraulic door at the side of the bus, the livid yellow uncomfortably bright in the morning sun.

‘Will he stop and talk to us, Ned?' they asked me. It was a reasonable question.

‘I'd have thought so. You've come a long way.' I tried to sound confident. ‘Just stay as close to us as possible. We're
going to grab a quick word.'

In fact, that morning we didn't want an interview. I was there simply to warn him of Hoban's gift, to explain the significance of the gesture, and to allow him some time to prepare an appropriate response. For a week I had been worried at the prospect of springing the bubbly on him unannounced, and getting a nonplussed reaction.

He emerged, looking stiff and awkward on his cycling shoes, but spent plenty of time signing stuff and smiling. He was patient and generous with his time. He didn't move on, in fact, until every item had been signed and every photo posed for. He and I briefly talked records and bottles, and then we hit the road.

A few hours later, it was complete. The win in Aubenas was the clincher. His ninth win in two years. And, to misuse a phrase, he still had Paris. When I handed over the champagne, he smiled humbly, and turning to the camera, he addressed Hoban directly, according him respect and talking of honour. It was the gesture of a practised diplomat, made all the more remarkable by the fact that just a few seconds earlier he had been threatening to decapitate a French rigger whose TV cable had nearly upended him. Such adaptability is Cavendish, too.

We never saw him to speak to in Paris. Replaying the footage of that 2009 final stage win still takes the breath away. At the crucial moment, the director cuts to the moto camera riding alongside him, on the other side of the central reservation. Suddenly the speed becomes unreal, and the margin of victory almost unnatural. Five, ten bike lengths and still pulling away from his rivals. He sits up early, the race won, and coasts across the line open-mouthed, with teammate Mark Renshaw sailing along in his wake, mirroring the arms-wide victory salute of the winner.

As he passed me, positioned just yards behind the finishing line, I knew already that the moment had passed. The curse
of the history-maker fell like a shadow across the cobbles. With all that already done, what on earth could he possibly do next?

The answer, of course, was clear. On the 2010 Tour Mark Cavendish faltered briefly, when he lost out to a superannuated Alessandro Petacchi, but then imposed his will on the race once more. And he did this despite losing the services of his blue-chip leadout man Mark Renshaw, after Renshaw's extraordinary head-butting antics on Stage 11.

That day I had to interview Cavendish three times. Once for the ‘world feed', then again after he had come down from the podium just for ITV. Shortly after that, I caught sight of the race director Jean-François Pescheux holding court to the francophone media. I went to eavesdrop.

I was astonished to hear that he was explaining the Tour's decision to expel Renshaw forthwith. I glanced back at Cavendish, still conducting interviews a few yards away, and beaming from ear to ear. Pescheux was telling the media, before anyone had bothered to tell Cavendish. Eventually, a Columbia soigneur whispered in his ear. He took a visible step back, and looked up in shock. Such things are public property on the Tour. Dealings and rulings, which in other sports take place behind closed doors, are routinely carried out under the unfeeling gaze of the TV cameras.

I had to interview Cav again, with the updated news. He was monosyllabic. Not rude. He was just quiet, holding it in and picking his words with care.

He went on that summer to win two more stages. Five in total, making it fifteen stage wins already on the Tour de France. More will follow. And as the records pile up, the fascination grows.

So there I'll leave Cavendish for now. His career stretches ahead of us all. His domination as unfathomable as his mobile number appears unknowable (at least to me). He is a thoughtful
braggart, a cultured man of the world, an islander with a continental understanding.

He's the most un-British Brit you could summon into existence. Yet, at the same time, British to his bones.

The Tour turns molehills into mountains and makes neurotics of us all. We absorb the shocks, ride out the bumpy road, as the race throws the unpredictable in our way. Braced then as we are for events to drag us away from what we thought would happen, we cling to those fragments of routine which keep us sane, and without which we would lose all grip. They are the snags of rock just big enough to gain a fingerhold and prevent us from slipping off the sheer rock face of
the Tour de France: regularity, security, dependability, toilets.

Next to the cordoned-off area known as the Zone Technique, which houses the fleets of broadcasters' trucks, is the cutely named Zone de Vie. This is a tented village to which the actual inhabitants of the town have no access and which is there to sustain life among those of us lucky enough to wear the lanyard around our necks. Although it bears the title Zone de Vie, that would imply a fairly narrow philosophical understanding of what is needed to sustain life. This is a no-frills environment, its sole function to allow the Tour's mobile army to attend to their bodily functions.

Although washing is a priority, so too are toilets. If this is a word that makes you flinch inwardly, it might be worth skipping to the next chapter.

The Tour does its best with the circumstances that prevail, but there are a lot of people to provide for and the heat of July in the south of France is intense. There is only so much time you can endure inside a chemical toilet, with the midday sun bearing down on you. I would go further than that: I suspect there are only a certain number of visits you can reasonably be expected to perform over a lifetime, before the bleached air impairs your vision and leaves you with a blistered bronchial
tract. But they serve a purpose, and there have been times when I have been deeply grateful for their presence.

They are, of course, the result of carefully planned logistics, and, as with so many of the other feats of human endeavour on the Tour, they come at the cost of great personal effort.

On my first few Tours, the man in charge of the toilet operation was a prodigious, instantly recognisable operator. He was among the hardest working of anyone following the race, and I include the riders in that. Yet he guarded his fiefdom zealously, a Tsar of Ablutions who would do his darndest to make sure that your visit was as untraumatic as it could be under the circumstances.

He drove a distinctive open-backed truck round France marked ‘Pelicab'. It was festooned with a logo of a diligent pelican, its gullet worryingly full-looking, wearing blue overalls and carrying a broom. Each day he would unload half a dozen telephone-box-sized toilets, which he then dispersed around the place. At the end of the day he'd round them all up, empty them of their contents and drive off, presumably via a sewer.

He closely resembled Abel Xavier, the former Everton and
Portugal defender whose dark skin was offset by a bottle-blond head of hair with matching beard. But while Xavier affected this look voluntarily, I have a suspicion Monsieur Pelicab acquired it in the course of his duties, being exposed to dangerous levels of industrial-strength Harpic. His beard must have acted like a CO
₂
indicator on the side of a boiler. When the hair went totally white, he knew it was time to move on, career-wise. I can only hope he's got his feet up somewhere nice, and that someone else is cleaning his toilet for him. I wonder if his hair has returned to its natural colour.

There is a different man who does his job now. One searingly hot afternoon in 2010, when he was enjoying a well-deserved fag break, I introduced myself to the new Abel Xavier, and was amazed to find out that he wasn't French. I'd have thought that a job as prestigious as Toilet Keeper to the Tour would have been a reserved occupation only to be made accessible to French citizens. But no, Rudiger is from Dortmund, in the Ruhr valley, the industrial heart of Germany. He is a tanned, wiry, quick-witted man in his early fifties, who has an astonishing grasp of almost every mainstream European language, so long as you are talking about flushing, showering or generally sluicing.

I caught him on a bad day. There is a truck that houses six shower units. It is used principally by the army of lorry drivers, who drive through the night to park up in the small hours. They sleep in their cabs, by and large, and then expect to shower at Rudi's place in the late morning.

But the showers had stopped working and the patient German plumber was having to deal with a constant stream of complaints in a number of different languages from poorly slept truck drivers. Later on that day, I passed by his workplace once again. The problem with the showers was fixed, but something catastrophic had happened to one of the toilets. I glimpsed Rudi, down on his knees, pumping some blue effluent out of a tank into buckets as if he were single-handedly trying to save the
Titanic
from going under. I remembered him telling me that he had only accepted the job in order to help his son through college in Cologne. Quite a price to pay. I hope the boy appreciates it.

The experience of a few weeks on the Tour will teach you that the chemical toilet is really only there in extremis. Explore every other avenue first.

The matter is best dealt with in the relative comfort of the hotel that morning before embarking on the day's work. If necessary, any further opportunities to take advantage of more permanent facilities should be exploited, however unexpectedly they arise. Even if this means keeping Raymond Poulidor waiting in the foyer of his 4-star hotel while you attend to your needs. What you don't want to do is find yourself with no choice other than Plan B, even though it's inevitable that over the course of a three-week stage race that this will be, at some point, the only course of action open to you.