Tour de Force by Mark Cavendish

Author:Mark Cavendish [Cavendish, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529192483
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2021-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

STAGE 5

30 June: Changé–Laval Espace Mayenne time trial, 27.2km

I’d set my alarm for the morning because we had to go and recon the time-trial stage, but I hadn’t got to sleep until the early hours and was knackered when it went off. I messaged Tom Steels and said, ‘Mate, I slept shit last night. Can I miss the recon?’ It was OK with him, so a quick reset of the alarm and my head hit the pillow for a further two hours.

We were right by the time-trial course, so I knew I didn’t have to stress too much. I got up at about 9.30 and went to breakfast. Everyone was already at the start, so I shovelled down my granola, put my rucksack on my back and pedalled my bike through the melee of team vehicles to our team bus. My green time-trial skinsuit had already been delivered by the race organisers by the time I got there. I always thought that they custom-made it for you, taking all your measurements and cutting it to fit perfectly, but only the yellow jersey gets that treatment. They’d estimated my size and sent across one that they thought would fit snugly.

The next thing on the agenda was the recon. Although I obviously wasn’t going to go full gas in the time trial – Vasi’s plan was for me to get through it comfortably and save all I could for the Châteauroux stage the following day – I did need to know if there were any tricky corners or other parts where I needed to exercise some caution. It was getting on for 10.30 and my start time was at 12.51, so Fitte told me to jump in the car and he’d drive me round the course. It was only 27 kilometres, so it would only take half an hour or so. Or at least we thought it would.

We did the first bit. There were one or two corners where I needed to be careful, but it wasn’t overly technical. Then we hit an unforeseen snag. We caught the publicity caravan, an immensely lengthy and slow-moving convoy of sponsors’ vehicles in all kinds of garish shapes and sizes, blasting out dire French pop and advertising jingles, from which hyped-up holiday-job students chuck out all kinds of PR tat. We were only about a third of the way around the course and we now had just a couple of hours before my start time. Fitte went into full panic mode. You can’t pass the caravan and you also can’t turn around and drive in the wrong direction on the course. The only option we had was to find somewhere we could exit the route and get back to the start.

We looked at the map. ‘OK, there’s a corner here we can cut through,’ said Fitte, pointing to somewhere a couple of kilometres down the road. We got there and it was barriered off. ‘Shit! OK, we’ll have to go to the next one.’ We dropped back in behind the caravan again, restricted to 20km/h.

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