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

knees and elbows and silly gears, pretending to be out of breath, with Chris chatting away to camera and sailing along effortlessly in my wake. My one chance to measure myself alongside Chris Boardman, to gain in kudos and rub off a little reflected glory. And I’d blown out my cheeks for comic effect.
    I thought of the impeccable Gary Imlach’s vow never to be filmed riding a bike, and, not for the first time, bowed inwardly to his greater wisdom.
    * * *
    With all this shamefully camp messing around on bikes with Chris, I nearly forgot the main reason for my having been sent to France: to track Mark Cavendish in his attempt to win the green jersey. I was sure that he and I were about to enjoy an easier working relationship. He had, after all, read my account of life covering the Tour, and would perhaps appreciate the particular pressures we have, in our own little ways, to contend with. He would doubtless be full of sympathy for my midnight sojourn in a Breton field talking to a French mechanic about hydraulics.
    Needless to say, it didn’t quite work out that way. Talking to Mark Cavendish, both on and off camera, remained a curiously subtle enigma. Undefined, uncertain endings are a hallmark of our encounters. Beginnings aren’t much easier either. He has an unusual way, for example, of giving the interviewer no clear signal as to when an interview should begin. Conventionally, with other riders, this will take the form of a nod, or a deliberate look up, a straightening of the shoulders or a quick, ‘OK, then.’ With Cavendish, you kind of drift into the procedure, unsure, even as you plough through your opening question, as to whether or not the interview has in fact begun. This is just the way it is; the way he is.
    Mostly, we got on smoothly enough with our defined roles. We even negotiated our way through a most surprisingly delicate encounter. He’d just pulled on the famous green jersey for the first time that summer, and, with the cameras rolling, turned with a coy three-quarters smile, and simpered, ‘Don’t you think it suits me, Ned?’
    I said I thought it did. Very much.
    He was happy, by and large, to accept the media obligations of his trade. But not always. There was a tense little situation in a car park in Lorient, which ended well enough, but had started with Cavendish claiming we were treating him like an animal by filming him walking to the bus. There was some truth in that assertion, I suppose. The Tour de France can indeed be bit of a zoo.
    But the ‘walking shot’, the ‘car park photo opportunity’ is the stock in trade of reporting the Tour. It might be slightly unimaginative, but it is quite normal, and quite essential. News channels call it the ‘today shot’. It lends the story immediacy, giving the viewer a visual context for the unfolding narrative of the morning.
    Riders expect it; sponsors and PR managers positively orchestrate it; the Tour demands it. Mark Cavendish has done it a thousand times. But that morning, it enraged him. I wondered what it must feel like to be subjected to that kind of scrutiny. He was there to win bike races, and certainly not to placate journalists. But the encounter told me everything I needed to know about our unchanged relationship, our unequal power play, the unique distance at which the athlete holds the outside world.
    By now, of course, Cavendish was in race mode, and as such, he was a different man. I guess his dealings with me, their ease, or lack of it, are a finely calibrated barometer for the pressure he is under. When the bike bit of his life isn’t quite right, the telly bit becomes a torture. I can understand that equation. But one-word losers are every bit as interesting as loquacious winners.
    The return to winning ways changed everything, anyway. It always does. And after that sour little exchange, we cracked on with the usual routine. Time and time again, we played out the same pattern as previous years. The towel, the iced drink,