Lionel Birnie continues his countdown of Tour de France memories. Read part one from 1997 to 1999 here.
Words by Lionel Birnie
Friday June 28, 2012
2000
David Millar won the opening time trial in Futuroscope. He became the fourth British rider to wear the yellow jersey, after Tom Simpson, Chris Boardman and Sean Yates. It was an historic moment in Britain’s Tour history.
I wasn’t there, which I remember being hugely frustrating at the time. As a journalist, you want to be where the story is happening, not watching at home on television but my stint on the Tour that year was due to start in Nantes, which was the day Millar lost the jersey in the team time trial.
I interviewed Millar at his hotel that night as he reflected on his remarkable Tour debut. Imagine wearing the yellow jersey on your very first day as a Tour de France rider. It must be astonishing. What beautiful symmetry it was that his winning time was 19 minutes and three seconds. 1903. The year the Tour was born. What did it mean to him? How did it feel to have his family there? It was Millar Time.
Not long after, it was all over, in a way. Millar would slip back into the pack, un ancien mallot jaune, but no longer the maillot jaune.
Millar’s moment in the spotlight was not as glorious as it might have been. He had no idea that Channel 4 had dropped live coverage of the Tour, having won the rights to show English cricket. His victory did not dominate the front page of L’Equipe because France had reached the final of the Euro 2000 football tournament.
Over the next fortnight, I observed Millar and watched him gradually fray at the edges. This is what the Tour de France does to people.
Millar had said that he wanted to give it everything during the first mountain stage to Hautacam in the Pyrenees, not because he thought he could challenge for the overall classification but because he wanted to see bank a valuable experience for the future. He finished a very creditable 36th, ten minutes behind Lance Armstrong.
A few days later, he hauled himself up Mont Ventoux, taking off his cap and bowing his head as he passed Tom Simpson’s memorial. Earlier, Armstrong and Pantani had duelled with one another as they battled the strong headwind and the gradient. That was the day Armstrong says he allowed Pantani to win, sparking the famous “No gifts” quote.
The following morning in Avignon, Millar emerged from the Cofidis team’s camper van looking fragile. Joanne, Simpson’s daughter had been at the memorial and had noticed Millar’s gesture. She made her way through the crowd to talk to Millar. She thanked him and gave him a piece of rock from Ventoux’s fractured moonscape. Millar looked at it, muttered some thanks and put it in his jersey pocket. It was an awkward moment. There was a sense of sentiment but also futility. Note: A previous version said it was Helen Hoban, Simpson’s widow, who gave Millar the stone. It was actually his daughter.
He said to me later: “I didn’t know what to say. Part of me was thinking ‘Do you know what we’re going through, do you think I want to carry a rock around all day?’ but part of me wanted to cry. If you see her, can you say how much I appreciated what she said?”
The Tour was beginning to exploit the cracks in Millar.
He almost crumbled in Briançon after a brutal 249-kilometre stage that went over the Col d’Allos, Col de Vars and Col d’Izoard. Millar was on the bike for eight-and-a-half hours and then spent five hours in traffic as the Cofidis bus tried to make its way to the team hotel. He was too exhausted to be angry but he did not hold back when recounting the ordeal. He was angry that the demands on the riders were too extreme and Jean Marie Leblanc quickly stepped in to mollify the Tour’s new, young star.
Millar honoured the promise he’d made to himself on the final day by attacking on the Champs-Elysèes. He was determined to show the Tour could not break him. That would come later.
2001
In sport, I find dominance boring. I accept that not everyone sees the world the same way. Watching Wimbledon fortnight to see the same four players in the semi-final year after year makes me question the validity of the event. Sure, they’re the best four players but what’s the point of the competition if it tells us something we already know?
Admittedly, the Tour is a far richer and more varied exercise but it was in 2001 that I realised that the Armstrong story was going to drive the narrative for years to come.
On stage eight, a breakaway got away in the rain and gained 35 minutes over the peloton.
Suddenly the Tour had been turned on its head. Stuart O’Grady now led, with François Simon second, 4-32 behind. Armstrong had just over a fortnight to claw back half an hour.
At Alpe d’Huez, two stages later, Armstrong was up to fourth, still 20 minutes behind the new leader, Simon.
The story of Simon, the youngest of three brothers who were professional cyclists and the second of them to wear the maillot jaune was lost because the story of the day was The Look.
This was Armstrong at his most theatrical. Having spent the day bluffing that he was feeling bad, Armstrong looked over his shoulder at Jan Ullrich, open-mouthed and red-faced, and attacked hard. At the top of the Alpe, his lead over the German was a second shy of two minutes.
Although Simon was still 20 minutes clear and Andrei Kivilev had nine minutes’ advantage of Armstrong, the Tour had been reduced to a showdown between the Texan and Ullrich.
It seemed to me that the complex, layered storytelling that had characterised the Tour for all of its history was being eclipsed by its focus on one man.
There was an arrogance there too. The yellow jersey was almost out on loan, ready to be called back in when the time was right. Perhaps Merckx and Hinault had been regarded in the same in their respective eras but this felt like it was lacking subtlety. The Tour de France was morphing into the Tour de Lance and something was in danger of being lost.
The beauty of the underdog, the heroism of those who battled to succeed but ultimately failed, the right of those who make the race to their five minutes of fame was being eroded. And working for an English language magazine I suppose I was playing a part in that process.
The 2001 Tour de France should have been thought of as a classic but it wasn’t, partly because it took Armstrong only a handful of stages to close that huge gap and partly because the appetite for a one-dimensional story seemed so great.
2002
I’d left the cycling magazine and was working as a sub-editor on the sports desk for one of those papers they give out free to commuters in big cities. It’s fair to say a few of the staff enjoyed a bet and, with the football World Cup over, they turned their attentions to other sports.
The Tour, of course, is notoriously difficult to profit from unless you’re prepared to scour the markets and apply a detailed knowledge and understanding of the event. Betting on a rider to win a particular stage is madness – except when it comes to the time trials.
Stage nine from Lanester to Lorient was a 55-kilometre time trial and Lance Armstrong looked like a very likely winner. In fact, it looked such a good bet that I put quite a large sum of money on and sat back to welcome my winnings.
Impressed by my confidence and hoodwinked by my ‘detailed knowledge and understanding of the event’ several colleagues followed suit, although none were quite so bold as I was.
With money riding on the outcome, I managed to persuade them to put the cycling on one of the TVs overlooking the sports desk and we sat and watched.
The questions kept coming.
“What’s going on?”
“Why’s it so boring?”
“Have we won a lot of money yet?”
At the first checkpoint, Armstrong was down, but only by a handful of seconds.
“Don’t panic,” I said. “He’s the master of pacing, he’ll come on strong later on.”
At the second checkpoint, Armstrong and Santiago Botero were tied on time and everything was looking good.
“It’s all going to plan,” I said, mentally spending the significant windfall I was sure to bank. “Botero’s Colombian. He’s a climber. He will fade now and we’re all quids in.”
I sat back in my chair, feeling very confident and a little bit smug.
At the third checkpoint, Armstrong had slipped back and a bead of sweat formed on my forehead.
“It’s still going to be alright, isn’t it?” someone asked.
My throat was a little dry.
The camera cut to the finishing straight. The clock counted down. Bad news, worse news, disaster.
Botero had won the stage by 11 seconds and let’s just say I was three uncomfortable figures down.
My colleagues looked at me. I felt like a vet who had to tell a family their much loved pet hadn’t made it. But this was worse, because sports journalists and money were involved.
“Erm… I’m not sure how to explain this.”
The remaining five hours of the shift passed in an uncomfortable silence and the fact I got given some pretty bum jobs during the rest of the week was probably not a coincidence.