Praise for Boy Racer

Praise for Boy Racer “Boy Racer is Mark Cavendish’s brash, brutal and honest story of his life on the bike, full of the sound and fury of hand-to-hand combat at the finish line. Cavendish holds nothing back.” —Sal Ruibal, USA Today “Boy Racer . catch[es] the inner conflict between the impetuousness that makes Cavendish such a daunting competitor and the introspection that makes him such an interesting person.” —The Guardian “Refreshingly frank and entertaining.” —Scotland on Sunday “Boy Racer is essentially a master class in the art of winning, relayed through the eyes of a young, hungry, and sometimes impatient embryo superstar with a penchant for entertaining industrial language. It is also highly per- sonal and revelatory and gives you a unique insight into one of Britain’s most successful and respected sportsmen worldwide.” —Daily Telegraph “Few have brought the terrifying and visceral art of sprinting to life. Boy Racer redresses the balance.” —The Times “This book surprises and inspires with outspoken views, insider insights, and a life story to date full of fantastic highs and devastating lows. With the 2008 Tour de France as a backdrop, Cavendish takes us on a whirlwind tour of his life so far—a meteoric rise from young Isle of Man ‘scally’ to double World Champion track star. Along the way we learn of his apprenticeship with the GB track development team, getting taken on by the infamous T-Mobile squad (now Columbia-Highroad), and winning the Milan–San Remo classic. Inspiring reading.” —www.spoke.ie “Offers a unique account of the world’s fastest sprinter.” —www.roadcyclinguk.com “I have read a large number of sporting autobiographies in my time; some very good, many distinctly mediocre. This might just be the best one I have ever read. “The book reads in much the same way the man conducts himself in interviews: He shoots from the hip with his heart on his sleeve, occasionally inserting foot in mouth. But anyone who has ever seen Cav speak would expect no less; in a PC, PR-conscious world, here is a sportsman who is as brutally honest as he is fast. At times, it is painfully obvious who he does and does not respect in the cycling world, and yet he is surprisingly self- critical, self-effacing, and not afraid to admit when he has been proven wrong about someone. The book is full of little insights into the mindset of a master practitioner and behind-the-scenes revelations of what it is like to be a professional road cyclist, which make this a cut above the aver- age sporting autobiography. Add this to the fleshing out of a personality far more complex, meticulous, and magnanimous (to his team) than the one-dimensional cocky narcissist sometimes portrayed in the media, and what you have here is a compelling tale that had me tearing through the pages much like the man himself does when he has the sniff of the finish line in his nostrils. “Boy Racer was unputdownable. I’ll be first in line to buy the next chapter of the story of this incredible young man.” —sportingreflections.blogspot.com “Love the man or hate him, you won’t find much in Boy Racer to change your mind. It’s pure Cav—honest, outspoken, occasionally aggressive, imbued throughout with that trademark self-confidence you already find either charming or annoying. Even if you’re not a fan, this kind of peek into the peloton makes the book well worth reading. But if (like me) you do harbor a certain fondness for the Manx Express, chances are you’ll tear through this book with sheer delight and find yourself quoting bits of it for weeks to come.” —www.podiumcafe.com “Can a youngster obsessed with barging his way through several other bicycle missiles in a 70-kph scrabble string more than a couple of words together? Happily, the answer to that one is a resounding yes. This is an exceptionally well-written book; well-constructed, never tedious, well- paced, and above all else, highly interesting. “There won’t be any difficulty getting to [the final page]; probably more of a problem putting it down in between. Quite a surprisingly good book.” —www.thewashingmachinepost.net Copyright © 2010 by Mark Cavendish Published in 2009 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing A Random House Group company U.S. edition with additional material published in 2010 by VeloPress All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or photocopy or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations within critical articles and reviews. Printed in the United States of America 1830 55th Street Boulder, Colorado 80301-2700 USA (303) 440-0601 • Fax (303) 444-6788 E-mail [email protected] Distributed in the United States and Canada by Ingram Publisher Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cavendish, Mark. Boy Racer : my journey to Tour de France record-breaker / Mark Cavendish. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-934030-64-6 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Tour de France (Bicycle race). I. Title. GV1049.2.T68C38 2010 796.6'20944—dc22 2010015130 For information on purchasing VeloPress books, please call (800) 811-4210, ext. 169, or visit www.velopress.com. Cover design by Katie Jennings Interior design by Anita Koury Cover photograph by Graham Watson Text set in Whitman 10 11 12 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS PROLOGUE vii INTRODUCTION 1 STAGE 1: Brest-Plumelec 15 STAGE 2: Auray–Saint Brieuc 29 STAGE 3: Saint-Malo–Nantes 43 STAGE 4: Cholet-Cholet 67 STAGE 5: Cholet-Châteauroux 87 STAGE 6: Aigurande–Super Besse 95 STAGE 7: Brioude-Aurillac 103 STAGE 8: Figeac-Toulouse 121 STAGE 9: Toulouse–Bagnères de Bigorre 139 STAGE 10: Pau-Hautacam 145 STAGE 11: Lannemezan-Foix 163 STAGE 12: Lavelanet-Narbonne 183 STAGE 13: Narbonne-Nîmes 199 STAGE 14: Nîmes–Digne Les Bains 213 MILAN–SAN REMO: 2009 229 EPILOGUE 259 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 287 PROLOGUE “Brian, I need you to do me a favor. I need you to call Unibet.” Brian was Brian Holm, my Columbia Sportswear team’s Danish directeur sportif, and Unibet was an online betting company. Brian knew what I meant. I could tell from the way he was smirking; but sitting next to him, my other directeur, Rolf Aldag, thought he’d either misheard or that I’d gone insane. He leaned over Brian in the passenger seat to get a clearer view and asked me to repeat what I’d just said. “I need you to call Unibet and put a grand on Mark Cavendish to win today’s stage. Got it?” Now Rolf was laughing. A hundred kilometers to go. A hundred kilometers and not much more than two hours until the most important ten seconds of my life. Hope- fully. I spotted the huge bundle of varicose veins that belongs to my teammate George Hincapie, and I kicked through a little window of daylight between the bodies and on to his shoulder. “Hey, George, I just went back to the car and told them I needed them to call Unibet for me. .” By the time I’d finished the story, he was laughing so much he nearly fell off his bike. Ninety kilometers, 80, 70, 60 to go. It was hot—the first really warm day of the Tour, and the sun happened to have showed up on a day when there was precious little shelter, just endless wheat fields acting like giant solar panels. Drink, Cav, gotta keep drinking. Four riders were still off the front, but now wasn’t the time to start fretting. Not yet. At the vii Copyright 2010 VeloPress All rights reserved. Excerpt from the U.S. edition of Boy Racer by Mark Cavendish. PROLOGUE 50-kilometers-to-go mark, I’d start picking my way through the maze and into the top twenty or thirty positions, close to my teammates and as far as possible from danger. My teammates might not see me, but they’d see my long white socks—the socks I wore deliberately so they could pick me out in the melee—I’d drift on to a wheel, maybe George’s, maybe Bernie’s, maybe Kosta’s, then the thinking, the planning, the wondering would all stop and the focusing would start. Nothing would count except the next turn of the pedals, the next shift of the gear lever, the next tweak of the handlebars, the next inch of tarmac. As far as I was concerned, you could psychoanalyze a bike race as much as you liked, but it basically boiled down to just you, the bike, and the road. The British Cycling team’s full-time psychiatrist, Steve Peters, had earned a lot of praise for his work with track stars like Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton, and rightly so, because I could see how much Steve had helped them. I could see that Steve had helped them think logically, override emo- tion and doubt—but I didn’t need any of that. I’d been to see Steve once, before becoming world Madison champion in Los Angeles in 2005, but nothing he’d said had really helped me to conquer my nerves. What I needed was the approach favored by another of the staff at the British Cycling Federation, Shane Sutton: Basically, I needed sunshine blown up my arse. A lot of professional athletes have performance anxiety or whatever psychology wants to call it, but winners, born winners like me, just want sunshine blown up their arses.

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