At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane by Cavendish Mark

Author:Cavendish Mark [Mark, Cavendish]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: VeloPress
Published: 2013-12-13T06:00:00+00:00

my only real objective in the Pyrenees had been survival. I’d not only accomplished that but also was heading north and east toward the Alps with an unexpected souvenir: the green jersey that I’d managed to defend from Rojas and Gilbert thanks to some canny and productive riding at the intermediate sprints. The scoreboard now read Cavendish 264, Rojas 251, Gilbert 240.

Despite the bigger gap back to Gilbert, I was now possibly more concerned about him than Rojas, and stage 15 to Montpellier showed why. In 2011, Gilbert had been without too much doubt the best all-round rider in the world, potentially deadly on almost any kind of terrain and at any moment of a race. On the road in to Montpellier, all it had taken was a few hundred meters of gently rising road to lure him onto the attack 3 km from the line. The secret to reeling in this kind of attack was resisting the temptation to panic and instead maintaining a high but steady speed. Gilbert may have been the best all-round rider, but Tony Martin was peerless in this particular exercise. Gilbert was swept up 2 km from the line, and Peter Velits, Gossy, Renshaw, and I did the rest. It was my fourth stage win of the Tour and extended my green jersey lead. I was now at 319 points, Rojas at 282, and Gilbert at 248. Now we were talking.

With one week to go, albeit one predominantly spent in the Alps, I was confident but wary. Peta had come out for the second rest day after my Montpellier win, for which our team had been billeted in a large, bland three-star hotel just outside a town called Loriol-sur-Drôme in the Rhone Valley. The scene in the hotel garden that afternoon showed two worlds momentarily overlapping—the bubble that we inhabited for the duration of the Tour, and the normality that we’d left behind two weeks before: ordinary folk on their holidays discussing current affairs or the minutiae of everyday life, people who couldn’t care less about the Tour. Then there were our partners and families, who had a foot in both realities, unsure of how to bridge the divide. We were protagonists in maybe the greatest show in sport, and yet for many of us, it was the last thing we wanted to discuss. This, admittedly, was the paradox that those closest to us had to reconcile on a daily basis, and not only at the Tour.

For me, it was especially hard to completely switch off on rest days, even with Peta around. There were press conferences, interviews, and team meetings. On this particular rest day, Bob, who had arrived at the Tour a few days earlier, and Rolf had asked me whether we could have “a chat” in the afternoon. There was no need for them to tell me what it was going to be about.

I wanted Peta with me, as per my new policy with Bob and Rolf. They had no problem

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