Free How Cav Won the Green Jersey by Ned Boulting

matrix of the Tour de France interview pen, is saying something.
    * * *
    The next day, and still reeling a little from my encounter with Sanchez, I was buying a coffee, which seemed like the right thing to do. An espresso, with a little sugar to combat an early morning, mid-Tour slump. Suddenly there was a giant clap on my shoulder.
    ‘Hey. What about the Tour of Britain? Fucking great race.’
    I turned round, and was face to face with the marvellous, nearly murdered, Johnny Hoogerland.
    ‘Mr Hoogerland,’ I said. And I put out my hand. I have no idea what turned me so formal.
    ‘Call me Johnny.’
    And so I did, feeling giddily blessed. After all, here was a hero. No doubting it. He sat next to me at the bar, and over coffee we spoke about Colchester and Swansea, Blackpool and London. He seemed fascinated by the plans for that year’s Tour of Britain.
    Hoogerland. Roll it around the tongue. It is a great sound. Marry it up with that classic Northern European rocker’s throwback first name ‘Johnny’, and you’re in business even before you’ve hurled yourself over your handlebars and into Tour Legend.
    I have to say, that I’d seen the Hoogerland thing, or at least something like it, coming. Not literally of course. No one could have predicted that the France Télévisions’ car would suddenly surge up the left-hand side of the road, and then swing violently right in an attempt to assassinate Sky’s Juan Antonio Flecha. But I had come to the Tour knowing intuitively that one of that marauding mob who go under the collective umbrella of Team Vacansoleil would do something to leave us all both awed and aghast.
    Some background is perhaps necessary. Vacansoleil, for those who don’t know, are a Dutch campsite/mobile home-type holiday thing. I’m sure their advertising people have a snappier way of summing up their business than that, and indeed if you were to visit their gloriously blue and yellow website (no, I’m not on commission) you will get the gist straight way. Their main image is this: distant mountains, blue skies, birds a-flutter, kites a-flying, kids a-frolicking and young, beautiful couples lounging around in front of their sun-dappled wooden chalets.
    But look beneath the surface. All is not what it seems. The beating heart of Hoogerland Holidays is very different. There is, if you listen hard, Lou Reed blaring from a distorting beatbox across the road, where the parents have collapsed on half-deflated lilos in the pool with a bottle of Jack Daniels, a bong and a bargain bucket of fried chicken. This is what I fondly imagine to be the real Vacansoleil experience. Book now to avoid disappointment.
    I have reached this balanced conclusion not because I have ever had the great good fortune to experience a Vacansoleil holiday (as I said, I am not yet on commission), but because I have observed at close quarters their raucous rise through cycling’s ranks to the dizzy heights of the Tour de France.
    I was certain that they’d try something at the Tour. Part of the reason for my certainty was their liberating lack of a leader. They had no ‘A’ list sprinter (unless you count Romain Feillu, or Borut Božic, which you mustn’t feel obliged to). They had no ‘captain on the road’, and they certainly didn’t dream of being so pompous as to protect a ‘GC rider’. No, they just had a bunch of blokes with a propensity for unfettered aggression. They wound them up, they clad them in campervan-related logos, and they let them go.
    Sadly, it didn’t really work. The irrepressibly attack-minded Belgian Thomas De Gendt fell at the first possible opportunity, smashing himself up, and hauling his overdeveloped quads unconvincingly around the rest of France. Borut Božic and Romain Feillu weren’t good enough to mix it with the rest of the sprinters. Wout Poels, who I erroneously tipped for every Gilbert-like uphill finish, had brought the wrong pair of legs to the party. He abandoned after hitting the