The Accidental Tour-ist

It’s been over ten years since I wrote How I Won The Yellow Jumper, a book that quite unexpectedly seemed to ride the crest of a substantial new wave of interest in the Tour de France. I did not realise it at the time, but I think that a very large number of fans were discovering road racing (a deeply mysterious, continental pursuit) at the same time as I was. The accidental fact of my being the incoherent conduit, the unintended, shambolic TV medium through which they gained access to this hitherto hidden world, meant that my circuitous journey seemed to run in parallel with the reader’s. I had not intended this outcome. But then again, I had never intended to discover the Tour de France (things do seem to happen to me without design and without a plan. I must remember to raise this at my next therapy).

To this day, when I am touring the country with my stage show, or riding up Alpe d’Huez to get to work at the Tour de France, I am greeted with a familiar refrain; ‘Oy, Ned! Where’s your yellow jumper?!’ I normally smile back, with only the faintest hint of a wince, though the heckling is always well intentioned. The truth is that the mythical item of knitwear has become, whether I like it or not, a kind of cypher that stands for British confusion in the face of the deep and alien complexities of the Tour de France. I have grown to understand that the Yellow Jumper stands for a misguided enthusiasm, a faulty passion and wide-of-the-mark adoration for an event which is both simple and infinitely complex; both silly and splendid. But that was then.

A few years after the publication of How I Won The Yellow Jumper, I was asked to think about changing my role on ITV’s Tour de France coverage. I was encouraged to consider replacing the iconic Phil Liggett as the main commentator on the channel, a position of authority for which (once more) I felt decidedly unprepared. More than any other of the constituent parts of the media, the main commentator on the principal TV outlet sets the tone for how the race is understood and enjoyed across the land. If you love the Tour, which I passionately do, it is hard to imagine a heavier responsibility.

My continuing sense of Impostor Syndrome, impossible to eradicate entirely, meant that I resisted this move for a number of years, before eventually succumbing to the pressure being applied. I made a terrifying, awful commentary debut (alongside David Millar, making his equally shonky bow) on a windswept and chaotic stage of the 2015 Tour de Yorkshire. And little over a year later, the pair of us were pitched into commentating at the Tour de France, inflicting our far less familiar voices on unsuspecting British viewers weaned on decades of “Phil and Paul”. Our first day of commentary happened to end with Mark Cavendish pulling on the yellow jumper. Jersey.

That was nearly eight years ago. Cavendish is still racing, and we are still talking. The intervening years have given us both the time and space to bed into our routine, to find the words (I hope), the cadence and the rhythm adequately to reflect the way the long days of racing through the rolling fields of Picardie, the wooded slopes of the Vosges or the sultry heat of the Camargue can unfold: the hours of seeming emptiness, the occasional drama along the way, the inevitable crescendo – all these things need careful management. It is, I have slowly learned, something of a craft. And to be charged with finding the right words in the very instant something extraordinary and unexpected happens, is not something that you learn overnight, but becomes an instinct instead that grows inside (if something can become an instinct? Finding the right words, even with time, can be problematic). What to say when Chris Froome, bereft of an actual bicycle, sets off running up Mont Ventoux? How best to describe the disbelief when the 21-year-old Tadej Pogacar turned the cycling world on its head by destroying the race at the very last minute on La Planche des Belles Filles, and then, three years later, ashen faced and suffering, uttered the famous words, ‘I’m dead, I’m gone!’? What can you say when, in the blink of an eye, Mark Cavendish surges from the pack to win a stage of the Tour five years after his last and suddenly reignites a fire the whole world thought had been extinguished? If you love the Tour as I do, such moments represent both the weightiest of responsibilities and the greatest of privileges.

I have chosen - as a working title for this book - History In The Present Tense (although I know well enough that this may change). The phrase is a quotation from my commentary on Pogacar’s epoch-defining ride in 2020 that won him his first Tour. And though it was the best summation I could come up with on the spur of the moment about what I was witnessing, it might equally well be used to define the task of the commentator: the spontaneous reaction must chime with the developing moment, but stand the test of time for future generations.

History In The Present Tense will chart the intervening years, since I closed the final chapter of How I Won The Yellow Jumper in 2010, with Alberto Contador being stripped of his title for a doping violation, the last rider to be punished in that manner, and following on a succession of rotten victories which underscored the chaotic post-Armstrong era. Much changed thereafter: Sky arrived on the scene, first with Wiggins, then with Froome. The book will chart how their stellar reputation for innovation eventually became tarnished by both the tedium of serial success and their own less-than-transparent behaviours.

Following on from their narrative arc, a new generation of riders have come to the race with wholly different ambitions, unaffected by the mores of what went before and fearless in their pursuit of victory: prepared to fail in order to prevail in a manner which reminds many of the golden eras of cycling, of Bernard Hinault and of Eddy Merckx.

But of equal importance, and sometimes given far greater prominence, will be the journey behind the gated TV compound, the tales from behind the microphone, on the dark side of the camera, and even from the cramped back seat of David Millar’s sponsored Maserati; pulled over - on one occasion - by a furious gendarme, whilst I cowered hoping to remain invisible, watching on as the former maillot jaune of the Tour de France was hauled out of the passenger seat and pushed unceremoniously against the door of his silly sponsored sports car. The Maserati years were eventful. Until, that is, the ridiculous vehicle broke down in Grenoble with a 650 kilometres journey to Paris still ahead of us. We dumped it and hired a tiny Renault Clio.

My role may have changed, and the personnel on the ITV Team may have evolved. But the journey remains the journey, and will forever throw up its absurdities and its delights: descending off Alpe d’Huez in the late afternoon on a folding bike, trying to follow a heavily pregnant Lizzie Deignan as she weaved through the stationary vehicles of the publicity caravan. Pete Kennaugh’s mystification at hay bales (“are they just a Tour de France thing?”) and his equally stunned reaction to be served an entire steamed artichoke in Mégève that cost €35 (“what’s them leaves?”). David Millar’s obsession with visiting launderettes and branches of Decathlon, where he delights in equipping me and Pete with bespoke athletic clothing and making us run up mountains. Gary Imlach’s never-ending quest for verbal perfection, his astonishingly durable wardrobe (some of which carbon dates to 1985) and his uncanny ability to wear noise-cancelling headphones and yet hear absolutely everything that’s going on around him. Chris Boardman’s retirement, un-retirement (Sally was sick of him hanging around at home like a spare part) and subsequent actual retirement. From Bilbao to Copenhagen, Florence to Lille, criss-crossing the continent or stuck during Covid in a car park in Kent going faintly mad while Roy Keane gave me advice I ignored about playing “Wall Ball”, the voyage alongside the voyage is as much a part of the texture of the book as ever…

…but History In The Present Tense will also look beyond the confines of just the Tour de France, to encompass other races and other countries, too. Drawing from my own travels over the course of 2024, the narrative will trace a line across the changing seasons, stopping off at Milan Sanremo in the Spring, and Il Lombardia in the autumn; calling in at the Tour of Flanders, Paris Roubaix and the Giro and the Tour of Britain along the way. All these races, plus other smaller ones besides, will add to a sense that there is more to the world than just the Tour de France. As my own deepening involvement within the sport has evolved, so too has our understanding on this wind-swept separate island that the scope of road racing extends much further than any of us might have imagined. In fact, when you try to assimilate all the crazed detail, you realise that it’s almost infinite. I stand by what I wrote in How I Won The Yellow Jumper:

“Like those mind-bendingly difficult pixelated designs that were all the rage in the eighties, my hope is that if you stare at these chapters for long enough, suddenly a fully rounded 3-D picture of the Tour de France will emerge. Fleetingly.”

History In The Present Tense is to be a wider, more handsome, mature sequel to How I Won The Yellow Jumper. If that first book was the teenager; a bit daft, a bit puppyish and full of random enthusiasms, then History In The Present Tense is the same teenager grown a little older, a little wiser and groaning occasionally when standing up from a commentary chair after a six-hour shift. But still - at its heart - it speaks with the same voice: one that cannot help but ask, ‘what the hell is this thing? And how did I end up here?’