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

springiest, fastest, andmost deadly. I won by two bike lengths from Tyler Farrar, easing up in the last 20 meters. While I hugged my teammates—and this time held back the tears—the Spaniard Carlos Barredo and the Portuguese rider Rui Costa were grappling with each other on the tarmac, this after Barredo had detached his front wheel from his bike and used it to wallop Costa over the head.
    The Tour could get to you like that; I knew it better than anyone. It could be cruel, but it could also be kind. Three days after wondering whether I would ever win again, I was suddenly two stages to the good.
    a s the years and Tours passed, my confidence and ability in the mountains had followed a steady upward curve. Even so, every now and again you’d still get a stage that, a bit like Carlos Barredo’s carbon rim, hit you and left you dazed. Stage 7 of the 2010 Tour was one such day. On paper it was only a moyenne montagne (“medium mountain”) stage through the gently sloped, wooded Jura range, with a crescendo of fairly minor climbs culminating in the category 2 ascent to the Les Rousses ski resort; in reality, it turned out to be a brute. It was the perfect example of how it isn’t the route that determines the difficulty of a race but the way that the riders choose to tackle it. Perhaps more than any other race, because every kilometer of the route carries value for some rider, some team, some sponsor, the Tour was permanently beholden to a butterfly effect that would jolt it out of a fragile equilibrium and into balls-to-the-wall chaos. On this stage, all it took was one of the French teams, Bbox Bouygues Telecom, to miss the key break of the day and the next three or four hours were turned into a groaning, aching procession of agony.
    The heat was unbearable. On the penultimate climb, Bernie Eisel, Renshaw, and I had slipped behind the gruppetto, the last group on the road. We chased and had regained contact at the foot of the final climb, but by then panic was starting to spread through the gruppetto about missing the time limit. The humidity that had made a stifling sweatshop out of the peloton early in the day had now also built into a huge bank of storm clouds over our heads. It all contributed to the growing sense of urgency—and the quickening pace. Every 100 meters or so, someone, somewhere in the gruppetto, would scream at the riders at the front to slow down.
    We finally crossed the line 59 seconds inside the time cut. When I was later asked to describe the suffering I’d endured that day, I could only liken it to having your fingernails pulled off very slowly, one by one.
    After a day like that, you wake the next morning wondering how you’ll ever survive the same again—or worse. All that gets you through is knowing that there are other guys in the same boat, or who are even worse off due to crashes or illness. Over the course of a career as a cyclist, through experiences like mine at Les Rousses, you also become accustomed, almost brutalized, to making demands of your body that it simply wasn’t designed to fulfill. You either let that reality overcome you, or you overcome it with pure bloody-mindedness.
    In the Alps, just like every year, I did precisely that: I suffered, but I survived. Up the road, in a parallel universe, there was apparently a bike race happening, the Tour de France. We’d get back to the bus after mountain stages, hear maybe from the directeurs or on the TV that Andy Schleck had attacked Alberto Contador, that Armstrong was struggling, or that Cadel Evans had blown on the Colde la Madeleine, and we’d react as you do when your mum tells you that a second cousin has just graduated from university, or Maureen from down the road is moving house. It was news, but only of very vague interest to us.
    Most of the time, your sphere of consciousness and concern narrowed as the race progressed and as your fatigue levels crept ever higher. Eventually, you’d get to the point where you only