How Cav Won the Green Jersey Read Online Free PDF

was equipped with a carbon rim thing, or something like that, which meant that braking, far from being a safe course of action designed to reduce speed and minimise the chance of falling from your bicycle, had become an act of suicidal self-loathing. We stopped, almost as soon as we had set off, while Chris re-fettled some things.
    A little while later, the filming got underway. Six little items were to be shot. Six vignettes designed to bring to life the basic underlying principles of certain aspects of road racing, things like drafting, crosswinds, team time trials. The water bottles were put to breathtaking slapstick use, when I had to pretend to be his domestique. Chris had scripted them all carefully. He would be the master. I would be the student.
    Somewhere during the filming of the first little piece though, things started heading in a certain and, from my point of view, somewhat regrettable direction. I think it might have been John’s fault. He was filming a sequence in which I was riding in front of Chris, giving him the paltry benefit of drafting on my wheel. Filmed from the side, Chris delivered a line to camera, and then, with a slight acceleration of the motorbike, the shot panned forward to me, ostensibly working very hard at the front. The problem was that we had to fake it a bit. We couldn’t ride at all fast, really, given that Chris was concentrating on delivering his lines, and I was concentrating on not dying. We were also on the open road, with the motorbike firmly on the wrong side of the carriageway. All in all, it would have failed even the most cursory health and safety audit. Which was a good job, because we hadn’t done one.
    The problem, as John informed me, stepping down from the bike, was that it didn’t look even remotely hard. And because it looked too easy, it was failing to make the point. And because it was failing to make the point, it was pointless. And because it was pointless, we were all going to get into trouble etc.. etc. etc.
    I should ‘Ham it up a bit, mate.’ That was John’s suggestion. And that was where I ran into a bit of trouble.
    For four years from 1991 to 1995, I had struggled under the illusion that I could make a living as an actor. I had cobbled together a CV consisting of sporadic low-key acting assignments. The highlight of my ‘career’ was playing one of the Montgolfier brothers to an audience of airline executives at the launch of the Airbus A330 in Hamburg. A glorified aeroplane salesman in a belle époque wig. I had scoured the German papers in vain the following day for a review of my performance. But it seemed that no critics had attended. Michael Heseltine, sitting alongside Helmut Kohl had appeared to enjoy it, as well as a posse of important South Korean airline types, who I had later spotted looking up at the Airbus and kicking its tyres as they pondered making an offer. But that was it, in terms of acting.
    So here I was, the best part of twenty years later, being asked to rekindle a thespian talent, which had flickered with such a modest flame in the first place that it blew clean out at the first cold blast of rent arrears.
    We re-shot the sequence, and this time I threw the theatrical kitchen sink at it. Cheeks-puffing, snot-wiping, legs-akimbo. I selected a ridiculously easy gear, so that I could best express the expended effort through the visual medium of spinning my legs ludicrously fast. I felt like I had captured the essence of suffering. This was a refined distillation of the very nature of the sport. I had brought the agony into people’s living rooms. I felt artistically fulfilled.
    Word had come back from the production headquarters in London, where these pieces had been edited together, that they were very pleased with them. I read in an email that ‘my contributions had made them’. Irony never transfers well to the printed word.
    Sadly, when I saw the pieces back, I realised that I simply looked an utter arse. There I was, all