POWER GARB
In an extract from his new book, The Yellow Jersey, Peter Cossins examines, 100 years after it was !/01"&+1/,!2 "!U"1%"" &+#2"+ ""$+!"-,4"/",#"1%"" & ,+& "$$/*"+1"$+!"%,4"&1" $+"/$&0""b"$+!"0,*"1&*"0" /2&+"b"1%,0""4%,"4"$/"&1
INaddition to the jersey itself, there is, Thomas Voeckler affirms, only one thing that every rider that has held the maillot jaune shares.
“When you first take it, you can’t imagine what the yellow jersey will bring to you in terms of attention and recognition,” the Frenchman says. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re only likely to have it for a single day or if you’re hoping to wear it all the way into Paris, it will have an immense impact on your career. When I had the French champion’s jersey in 2004, I thought to myself, ‘This is cool, being the French champion everyone recognises me.’ But once you take the yellow jersey that recognition rockets into the stratosphere. It’s so completely different it’s hard to describe it. You suddenly become more famous than the president. I was shocked by the intensity of it, by the focus that was on me. It’s absolutely mind-blowing and hard to come to terms with.’
Watching Fernando Gaviria’s reaction to his opening day success at the 2018 Tour de
France in the small Vendée town of Fontenay-le-Comte provides a complete endorsement of Voeckler’s assessment. Victory sealed, the Colombian has the bullish swagger of any bunch sprinter who has just blitzed his rivals, his elation obvious as he steps out on to the podium to be presented with the leader’s jersey. Even after autographing a couple of dozen replicas and conducting a television interview with the host broadcaster, his face remains radiant, his smile broad and beaming, the sunlight frequently glinting on his braces that are testament to recent dental work.
Half an hour later, the Colombian remains resplendent in yellow, but his podium sparkle has waned. Since receiving the cheers and applause of the crowd, he has completed – or endured if his expression is now anything to go by – dozens of interviews, answering a variation of the same two or three questions in all of them. What does it feel like to win the first stage of the Tour and take the yellow jersey? Is this a dream come true for you? Will you be able to keep it tomorrow? After the adrenalin rush of the sprint that left the rest of the bunch in his wake, and on his very first day in the Tour no less, Gaviria can’t escape the media’s shackles in the mixed zone.
He reaches the end of the line of broadcasters, websites and bloggers who have each paid thousands of euros for the right to grill the race’s protagonists, his smile broadening for a moment, until ASO’s media aide takes his arm. ‘Just the written press to speak to now. This way, Fernando.’ The fixed smile returns, although he is, at least, well versed in what to say by this point...
It’s manic, “Like being a movie star, or the king of the peloton” according to Frenchman Cédric Vasseur, who wore yellow in 1997. “It’s really difficult to deal with all the fuss and attention that you get and the thing you most look forward to is the start so that you can have a little bit more peace and quiet by being in the bunch. That’s the only place you can really escape it.”
But returning to that sanctuary brings another a new pressure. To every member of the peloton who is not part of his team, the yellow jersey is a bright target that they all have in their sights. Initially, this is surreptitious. The Tour leader can glide through the bunch, his colours opening a passage through the pack. “You do get a little more space, more respect. You feel like you own the world and that everyone is looking at you” says Thor Hushovd, who led the race on two occasions. “But you’ve got to remember that it’s the yellow jersey that they’re responding to and that extra bit of room you get will disappear the instant the race is on. At that point, nobody else cares about the fact that you’re in the yellow jersey, and you’ve got to do everything that you can to protect it.”
It is when this moment arrives, as it inevitably does, that the exponential power of the maillot jaune becomes apparent. “It does allow you to transcend yourself, assuming that you’re prepared to defend your position tooth and nail,” says Voeckler. “It’s difficult to describe, but you don’t feel that you have the right to yield and, as a consequence, you can push your degree of suffering further than normal. It does give you wings.” It is as if, suggests Vasseur, the jersey transfers a particular force to the rider who is in it. “It’s such a powerful motivator, you can do things when you’re in it that you would never ever imagine were possible.”
Like his compatriot, Voeckler talks of a before and after in relation to the yellow jersey, 2004 being the year when everything changed for him, in his case in Chartres where he took it as the best placed member of a five-man group that finished more than a dozen minutes ahead of the peloton.
There is a Bernard Hinault-like cussedness to Voeckler. Indeed, it underpinned his success and popularity. The two men also shared a hatred for training and relished racing. They loved beating people and were prepared to hurt themselves quite seriously in order to achieve this. Reflecting on the Frenchman’s career as it neared its end, Philippe Bouvet,
for many years L’Équipe’s chief cycling correspondent, described him as forging his own destiny in spite of obvious deficits in his make-up as a racer. “He creates opportunities in life and knows exactly how best to seize them. It was said initially that he was a bit limited in terms of his ability, but we’ve since realised that such an assessment is only half right. He’s won some great races because he’s so strong mentally. [His team manager] Jean-René Bernaudeau always says that if he had a rider who had the talent of Sylvain Chavanel and the character of Voeckler he would have had a super-champion. Voeckler really is remarkable and quite unique.”
Drawing on this well of bloodymindedness, Voeckler pulled off feats that seemed close to impossible, defending his corner in what could rightly be described as Badger-like ferocity. “Attempting those coups has enabled him to achieve greater ones. When he took the yellow jersey for the second time at Saint-Flour in 2011, he didn’t set out with that target in mind but looking for the King of the Mountains jersey,” said Bouvet.
Voeckler explains that the only similarity between his second spell in yellow and the first was that he had the jersey for 10 days once again. “The second time I was ready for it. I knew how to deal with it. I always said to myself after 2004 that if I ever got the yellow jersey again, even though I never expected to, I would try to do things differently. For example, I said to myself, ‘I won’t spend an hour with the press talking about the race after the stage. I’ll think about my recovery more, be focused on the race more.’ It’s not that I didn’t want to enjoy the moment, I just wanted to make the very most of the opportunity, not only because I wanted to keep the jersey for as long as possible, but also because I knew that this would be the only time that I could finish high up in the general classification in Paris.”
When the Tour reached Gap, the Frenchman had held the yellow jersey for more than a week. But, for the first time, like any other contender for ultimate contender for ultimate glory, he now had something to lose. When Georges Speicher took the lead halfway through the 1933 Tour, he described how doubt started to affect him, making him uneasy, cautious and nervous. “It’s known as l’angoisse du maillot [jersey anxiety]. Everyone who has worn the yellow jersey has known all about that. There’s no doubt that I had confidence in myself... I felt that I had the strength to keep it, but... you never know... You can’t make any mistakes, let your guard down at any moment.”
This anxiety preys on yellow jersey contenders far more than those whose hold on it is certain to be temporary, colouring their thinking and tactics. So lucid in his control of his physical resources and strategy up to that point, Voeckler became more aggressive and it led to mistakes. According to Cyrille Guimard, the Frenchman had entered another dimension, one where the yellow jersey inflates the ego and diminishes sound thinking, and it quickly resulted in the loss of his podium hopes. “What I saw of him on that Tour was illustrative of what can happen when the yellow jersey lands on your shoulders. For several days Voeckler became his own directeur sportif and, from the moment that he entered the high mountains, he rode tactically in the opposite way to how he should, and as a result his teammates and his management clearly had no idea how to react.”
If it hadn’t been for the maddening effect of l’angoisse du maillot, Voeckler would have started the final time trial in yellow, perhaps with a minute in hand on Evans. The Australian would surely have taken the title, but what a show Voeckler would have given us in Grenoble, hamming it up for all he was worth, delivering an unambiguous reminder that the yellow should motivate and thrill those watching it as much as those fortunate enough to wear it.