How Cav Won the Green Jersey by Ned Boulting Page B

seagulls of Plymouth docks, a flash of red, and the familiar curves of their deliciously eighties’ logo. The cycling bit of my heart skipped a beat. It was a truck, yes, but so much more than that. It was a Norbert Dentressangle lorry. Contracted by the Tour to carry out its daily grind, these beasts are the oily soul of the race. And as such they are dear.

    O canvas awning of blood red! O humble truck, workhorse of the French motorway network! What dormant longing your sudden presence quickens on this damp evening dockside!
Mon semblable, mon frère!
    I was quoting Baudelaire to myself. I was feeling pompous. I was off to cover the Tour de France. I think I should be forgiven.
    The 2011 race looked great on paper. At least that’s the impression it made as I gazed at its curves and contours. They lurched and jumped across the folded creases of the official Tour map, spread flat against the plastic table top of the ferry’s bistro. The channel was in full swell.
    The features swayed in and out of vision; those teasing uphill finishes, and the prospect of a well-proportioned wind in the north-west to blow holes in the race. Then there was the surprising scale and dangerous potential of the mountains of the Massif Central, before the Tour would throw itself at the mercy of the Plateau de Beille, the Galibier (twice!), Alpe d’Huez, and then a final time trial to seal everybody’s fates.
    And after that, Paris, perhaps with Cavendish in green? That seemed a long way off. Water to be crossed.
    With a black marker pen, I ringed the stages I believed he could win. There were seven of them. Then I pushed the map to one side and wolfed down a ferry meal, made palatable only because of the wine decanted from a series of plastic mini-bottles. I found my cabin in the windowless bowels of the ferry, took off my shoes, dropped onto the bunk and fell sound asleep.
    * * *
    It was strange how his story unfolded over the summer. Mark Cavendish, I have always understood, feels closest to those targets that are, well, closest to him. There is a certain remorseless pragmatism to his assembly line of honours. For a long time, I had known only his thirst for stage wins. It was absorbing to watch the growing dominance of the outstanding HTC team that had been assembled around him: their one stated aim being to shepherd the purest, most explosive sprinter in the history of the sport to his launch point. And time and time and time and time again, he had repaid their faith.
    The bunch sprint had become his signature. The Tour de France, his parchment. Or if that sounds too precious, his spread sheet, for he understood well the fiscal relationship between winning and reward, between celebrating and sponsorship.
    But what of his relationship with the green jersey? That was less clear-cut. He had ridden recent Tours with self-evident irritation in the face of an evolving Thor Hushovd, who had the presence of mind to throw his hands up in defeat when it came to outsprinting Cavendish, and decided to reset his targets by attacking the sorts of intermediate sprints where riders who looked only for stage wins dared not tread their pedals. Hushovd had become a marauding, opportunistic, classy attacker. Behind him, in 2010, Alessandro Petacchi, another grisly veteran, slipstreamed his way into green. And Cavendish, wisely, offered only meagre opposition. The green jersey, we read into his apparent ambivalence, was some sort of weird, and somewhat arbitrary, consolation prize for sprinters, who were one pedal turn away from obsolescence. The fastest man had no need for such fool’s gold.
    But he could only convince us, or indeed himself, of his indifference for so long. In 2011 the points competition was reconfigured, reducing the number of intermediate sprints to just one, while loading more points onto them as an incentive. It had been carried out with Cavendish in mind. It was, I was given to understand, a mark of respect from the race itself.