How Cav Won the Green Jersey Read Online Free PDF Page A

that, but their entire riding career has been predicated on the principle of doing nothing that so much as even remotely resembles running. In fact, walking can present a problem for most of them. Even standing up a bit does them in. They are, it has to be said, wonderfully feeble individuals in lots of ways, with a propensity for catching colds. They boast weedy little upper bodies and hopeless one-dimensional physiologies. Pedal, pedal, pedal. They’re very good indeed at doing that. But stand around for twenty minutes at a bus stop? Forget it.
    Chris Boardman had also run the London Marathon. It galled me greatly that his time had beaten mine by fully twenty-six minutes. That crushing disappointment negotiated, I had been secretly relieved that the old ankle injury he had sustained when he crashed out of the 1995 Tour Prologue had flared up again. The doctor had told him to pack in the running and get back on his bike. I agreed with the doctor, by and large, and started to enjoy lonelier, slower runs during the month of July. By myself. Without him being better than me.
    So Chris had rediscovered riding his bicycle. At first gingerly, then with increasing frequency and duration. The fact that he owned a mega-successful bike brand with a warehouse full of sleek black-liveried road bikes with his name all over them, must have acted as some mild incentive. Not that Chris Boardman ever lacks motivation.
    So here he was, this born-again, lapsed, and then born-again cycling bloke, outside our hilltop hotel in the neatly panoramic Vendée village of Pouzauges. It was early in the morning as I left the breakfast room to find Chris out in the chilly morning air, down on his haunches and engaging in what he called ‘fettling’. It was a word I was about to hear often over the course of the day.
    Two bikes bearing his name in simple, minimalistic yellow and white letters had been loaded onto the TV truck back in England. Here in France they were being carefully unpacked in preparation for the day’s filming. Handlebars, cranks, stems and brackets. I barely knew the names of any of the pieces. I certainly couldn’t have assembled them.
    Chris was appalled at my choice of footwear. I was wearing ‘SPDs’. This was not good, it seemed. They are clipped shoes that come with their own special pedals, all right. But they are not designed for performance road cyclists riding ‘performance’ bikes in a ‘performance’ sort of way.
    Instead of projecting out from the sole like a metallic bunion, making the footwear unwearable unless clipped onto a bike, SPDs are smaller cleats, embedded into a shoe that might even pass muster for normal, non-cycling use. Apparently, according to cycling purists, they are worn and ridden by idiots. So, naturally, I was wearing them.
    I am used to being the only rider on organised rides not hobbling around like a penguin staggering back from the pub when off the bike. I had stopped off especially at a branch of Decathalon on my drive down from Brittany and picked up a brand new set of SPD pedals (
Les Pédales des Idiots
!). It was these that Chris was now taking a great lack of pleasure in ‘fettling’ onto the ‘cboardman’ pushbike I was to be loaned.
    Finally, after an hour or so of unbridled use of spanners and ratchets (probably), and having sent me out in a car to find yet another branch of Decathalon to buy an implausible number of water bottles as props for the shoot, Chris declared himself all fettled out, and we were good to go.
    John Tinetti, my taciturn cameraman colleague of every Tour I have covered, climbed onto the back of a motorbike ridden by Jacky Koch, the long-standing moto-pilot of the legendary Tour photographer Graham Watson. We rode down the steep hill through the village and headed for the open road. Instantly I encountered problems, which I was almost too shy to mention to Chris. It seemed that every time I touched my rear brake, I nearly died. It emerged that my bike