At Speed: My Life in the Fast Lane Read Free

you’d call an “easy” character. Together we’ve had the best of times—like in the Madison at the 2008 track worlds—and we’ve had the worst of them too. At the Beijing Olympics, I simply didn’t feel that his mind was fully in the velodrome after his gold medals in the individual and team pursuits, and our Madison race was an unmitigated, well-documented disaster. That night I called Rod and the British Cycling performance director Dave Brailsford into my room in the Olympic Village. I told them that I was disgusted with how I’d effectively been forced to leave the Tour de France to get ready for the Olympics, disgusted with Brad’s attitude in the race, and that their apologies were coming too late. For two months after we rode off the track in Beijing, in different directions, Brad and I didn’t speak. Then he sent me a conciliatory text—“Hi, do you remember me?”—and the ice was broken.
    Three years on, my biggest worry for a while hadn’t been my relationship with Brad but Dave Millar’s. That had soured pretty badly when Brad left Dave’s team, Garmin, for Sky at the end of 2009.
    For a long time, I feared that the tension between them would either keep one of them—probably Brad—from even riding in Denmark, or undermine whatever harmony we were trying to create in the team. The fact was that I needed both of them in order to win. I needed Dave because he is not only a fantastic natural athlete and hugely experienced but also one of the best in-race communicators in the peloton. Plus, Dave’s character is a kaleidoscope of eccentricitiestotally at odds with my own ticks and quirks, yet it somehow complements mine perfectly.
    Dave and I have roomed together a few times at races and training camps, and we almost invariably find ourselves staying up most of the night, just talking shit that to us at the time seems like the final word on modern civilization.
    The reason I needed Brad was even more straightforward: On the bike, he’s an absolute beast. If any doubt about that remained, even after his third place in the 2009 Tour and third in the 2011 Vuelta, he was banishing—obliterating—it now. Just a few weeks earlier, in August 2011, I’d won the Olympic test event in London and got everyone excited about my prospects in the actual Olympic road race a year later. The best thing to come out of that day, though, was a text sent to me by Brad that night. The gist, if not the verbatim message, was “Fuck all the grudges, fuck the issues with Dave, fuck everything. I want to be a part of you winning the rainbow jersey in Copenhagen.”
    That had been another big moment.
    Our next challenge with Brad before the race had been keeping him back until the last two or three laps, when he could act as our human Hoover—both pulling back breakaways and sucking the peloton along at such a rate that any fresh attacks or counterattacks would be doomed. Brad had initially been reluctant, knowing that this was physically perhaps the hardest role in the team, and potentially the most pressurized. He wanted to get his job out of the way early in the race, but from our point of view, that would have been like using a Formula 1 car for delivering the milk. Brad eventually acknowledged that, too, and it was bad news for everyone riding against us.
    This penultimate lap will be the only time in the race that I ride the finishing straight in the big ring. The circuit has been hardwired into my memory for a year now: a right turn 300 meters after the line, past the Rudersdal town hall, down to the foot of the first, 300-meter hill, up and down again to the bottom of Søllerød Slotsvej, at 480 meters the longest and hardest climb on the course. Then it’s a 2-km descent and another 650-meter drag before the relatively straightforward—and straight—second half of the course to the bottom of the 400-meter, steadily rising home straight.
    As we come toward the last 10 km, the last time up Søllerød Slotsvej,