Free How Cav Won the Green Jersey by Ned Boulting Page A

tarmac once too often, and then getting sick.
    So it fell to Hoogerland to fall. Sponsors, naturally, only have the best interest of the riders at heart. But I wonder if there’s not a Hoogerland chart hanging on a wall in Vacansoleil’s dark blue and yellow headquarters somewhere uninspiring in Holland, with an arrow of interest in the brand rising stratospherically from the instant that Hoogerland unclips his right foot, wobbles, and then shoots over his handlebars and into a barbed-wire fence, tearing his arse to shreds.
    ‘Ouch’ doesn’t do it justice. Have you ever slipped while cutting a tomato, and nicked a little slice into your finger? That’s ‘ouch’. This was beyond description, but I should try, for the benefit of those who are too squeamish to look it up on Google Images, as I just have.
    The impression it left, to return to the tomato slicing metaphor, was this: Imagine Johnny Hoogerland lying face down on the kitchen counter. You rip open his shorts to reveal his left thigh and buttock (bear with me, I’m just illustrating a point). You sharpen the knife, and then you draw at least ten deep slices across his flesh. But your devilish work is not yet quite complete, and so you take a rolling pin and smack him on the head, the shoulder, the elbow, and probably just for good measure, the arse. Then he jumps down from your kitchen work surface, and hops onto a bike. After all, there’s a race on.
    I’m exaggerating. Actually, no I’m not. It was worse than that.
    Hours later, Johnny, swabbed, bandaged, perhaps in a heightened state of pain relief (I hope for his sake he was), and clad in his blood-drop red polka-dot jersey, hobbled over to say his piece to my colleague from a rival network.
    Normally I would have had an unseemly fight with them about this act of rank-pulling. Especially with this particular Italian colleague who sported hair oil, reflective shades and an unencumbered ability to kiss ladies on both cheeks without looking flustered, stopping inappropriately at just one kiss, going for an unwanted third, or bumping noses on the exit manoeuvre. Yes, he was that good. The Silvio Berlusconi of the Mixed Zone, turning the simplest post-race interview into a potential Bunga Bunga party. He wore a gold bracelet. He was the continental’s continental TV reporter, and needed a smack, frankly (which Matt Rendell offered to provide a few days later, I forget why).
    But on this occasion, I am reluctant to confess, he got it right. He had a bit of kit with him, attached to the front of his camera, which could play back footage to the interviewee. And so it was that Johnny Hoogerland, with the cameras rolling live on his reaction, watched back the moment that had nearly ended his career, and very possibly his life.
    Hoogerland was visibly horrified. I have no doubt that it shocked him to see the violence of the incident. He looked genuinely scared for the rider he saw tumbling through the air like a rag doll. It must have been hard to believe that he was looking at himself. But when he spoke, he was calm, dignified, and resisted calls for punishment. He let us play the role of lynch mob on his behalf. We readily obliged.
    That evening, at our hotel in Aurillac, a France Télévisions car, identical to the one that had done the damage, pulled up. They were staying in the same place!

    We scowled at each of their team over breakfast the next day, working out which one we were going to dob in. Was it the pasty youth in the crumpled polo shirt or the brunette with the shades, who took too long spreading the butter? Was it the overly cheerful chubby bloke in the cheap supermarket jeans and the Greenpeace T-shirt who set everyone’s teeth on edge by whistling Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’? It was none of them. It was, in fact, the wrong car. The actual vehicle, complete with the actual culprit, had been successfully spirited away. They disappeared from the race, and were never heard of again.
    I will