How Cav Won the Green Jersey by Ned Boulting Read Free Book Online Page B

which ended up with a little too much buckle for his swash. And there was Evans’ quintessential, lonely ride. No one helped him pull Schleck back, so he did it on his own, head set to one side, hurting. And Voeckler, flanked by the fluid, young and increasingly prominent Pierre Rolland, grimacing his way to his finest hour.
    As the mountain reared up ahead of them, Schleck began to fade. Evans remorselessly plugged away at the leader, keeping his losses within reasonable margins. And Voeckler held on. Although he lost touch just a little towards the end, he had done enough to defend his lead in the General Classification and, implausibly, to retain the yellow jersey through the sternest test of them all.
    ‘
Voeckler, ce héros
!’
L’Equipe
declared the following day. They devoted the cover photo not to Andy Schleck, who’d made the big move of the Tour, nor did they dedicate their attention to Evans, who’d probably just done enough to win. They decided instead that Voeckler’s image was the one that their readership needed to see dominate their front cover, squeezing aside all but a few adverts.
    In the picture, he has just realised he’s held on. His right arm is lifted in triumph at such an angle that his bike, unbalanced at the best of times on account of his extraordinary riding style, looks like it is about to topple over.
    It’s a photo that says, ‘This far. And no further.’
    And that, of course, is exactly what it proved to be, to the relief of certain people at ASO, I was astonished to learn. The following morning, I sat down for breakfast on Alpe D’Huez with a senior official from the Race Organisation.
    ‘How about Voeckler, then? What’d that be like; a Frenchman in yellow in Paris?’
    I expected his face to light up. But instead he slipped his shades further up his somewhat Gallic nose, and pulled a sour face, moving his tongue around his mouth as if cleaning his teeth of something unpleasant.
    ‘Hmmm.’
    ‘What do you mean, “hmmmmm”?’, I asked, adding a couple of extra ‘m’s of my own.
    He scratched his chin, in the style of Jean Paul Sartre.
    ‘If he wins, we have a big problem, I think.’ I stared at him, uncomprehendingly. ‘It would be a little nicer for everyone if he loses the maillot today.’
    It’s the reality of the Tour de France, which we had been able happily to ignore in our euphoric appreciation of Voeckler. But every performance that rips up the form book raises eyebrows as it does so. For a great portion of the non-Anglophone world in 2009, it had been the same with Wiggins’ unlikely fourth place overall. That is not to say that there was a shred of evidence to suggest wrongdoing with Wiggins or now, two years on, with Voeckler. Quite the contrary: a glance at their closest influences, their public utterances, and a sense of their privately expressed beliefs, stacked up overwhelming in their favour. British cycling and, more recently, the prevailing culture of the sport in France have been at the forefront of the fight against doping, with both Wiggins and Voeckler the public faces of those campaigns. But the ragged recent history of the Tour and the repeated unmasking of outstanding performances, have created an atmosphere of febrile suspicion. In a way, it was surprising that I had not noticed these darker mutterings earlier. It was a depressingly familiar moment.
    My coffee companion clapped me on the back, got up and left me alone to mull over his words. Tommy? Really? Not a chance.
    Besides, later on that day, he was exposed in all his familiar frailty, turning in the kind of collapse that spoke not so much of Superman, but of Mighty Mouse. On Stage 19, they tackled the Galibier again, from the other side, and from there they rode up Alpe d’Huez. The sight of him labouring up the first big climb all alone, after losing contact with the lead group and getting caught in no-man’s land, was reassuring in its vulnerability. We knew this Voeckler more