One Stage at a Time: 2004

Most top sprinters get the chance once, maybe twice if they are really fortunate, to pull on the yellow jersey. Normally it only lasts a day. But who cares? It’s the yellow jersey, isn’t it?

In the most recent past, I can think of Wout van Aert (is he even a sprinter really?) flapping his long arms and lolloping into Calais in yellow, having stormed to victory on stage 4 of the 2022 Tour. Mark Cavendish (he of the Sports Personality of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award, to go with his actual Sports Personality of the Year from 2011) took his maillot jaune in 2016, before relinquishing it the following day as soon as the Cherbourg peninsula started to get a bit gnarly. Peter Sagan took it from Cav that day declaring that he wasn’t bothered that he would lose it because “if I don’t have yellow, then I have green and if I don’t have green then I have the rainbow bands”, or words to that effect. Then he probably did his high-pitched nasal snigger; a sound which is greatly missed from the modern peloton. And Marcel Kittel did a back-to-back sprinters’ yellow jersey double (this is not a thing really, I have made it up), by winning it in Corsica and Harrogate. Have I missed any? Maybe. It’s 6 o’clock in the morning, and the tea I’m drinking hasn’t quite kicked in yet.

Back beyond that, it starts to get a bit hazier. I have a strong feeling that Thor Hushovd wore it on more than one edition of the race, including in 2003. He certainly took it into the team time trial in 2011. But he’d taken it from Philippe Gilbert that year, I recall. I’m pretty sure I remember interviewing Tom Boonen in yellow (now we really are in the past), but not Alessandro Petacchi (although I may be wrong on that).

If you want a really hipster deep cut, then how about this? Jean-Patrick Nazon of the short lived and long since defunct Jean Delatour team took the yellow jersey after three stages of my first Tour, in 2003. I had completely forgotten about him: the last Frenchman to win on the Champs Élysées! Nazon, (also the last French sprinter to wear yellow unless I have forgotten someone, or underestimated Arnaud Démare) went on to win again in 2004, taking the incredibly Belgian-sounding stage from Waterloo to Wasquehal, just over the French border, near Roubaix.

Robbie McEwen, in the colours of Lotto Domo, finished third that day. He furious, as I recall, that he hadn’t been able to repeat his success of the previous day when he had taken the stage into Namur. It’s easy to forget just how good McEwen was; the winner of a total of 12 stages at the Tour from ‘99 to ‘07. In my early years at the Tour he amazing to watch in the race, ducking and diving his way through trouble, almost always flitting from wheel to wheel as he tended to go it alone, without any kind of lead out. He was also a willing and engaging interviewee, in years that were often without scant British representation, we kind of co-opted Robbie into being British, even though he wasn’t. In fact he was more Flemish than anything else back then, apart from Aussie. He was always that.

I remember my predecessor at the Tour de France Beverley Turner, who is now a GB News presenter (an avenue of employment post-ITV that I think it is unlikely will open up for me) interviewing Robbie in 2002 after a stage win.

‘Robbie’ she’d said (which was a good opener), ‘where did you get the energy from for that sprint?’

‘Breakfast,’ he’d said. Then he’d turned away and walked off.

I digress. That 3rd place behind the mighty Jean-Patrick Nazon (what’s he doing now?, I suddenly wonder with an uncommon degree of urgency) was enough to place Robbie in yellow. For one day.

The following morning it started raining. It rained all day. In fact it only stopped when Lance Armstrong determined that it should. It was team time trial day into Arras. Back then, US Postal would often wait until TTT day to stamp their authority all over the race. And in 2004, Armstrong took the jersey as the road mysteriously dried out for their time trial, and he never looked back, crushing the life out of the Tour and dispensing with any illusion that it was a competition. Man, they were tedious affairs in 2004 and 2005. Can’t wait to conjure something up for the next year’s blog entry.

Anyway, here’s what I remember of Robbie’s big day out in yellow: it was horrific. Lotto Domo stank the place out as a team time trial unit. They had a horror show of a time trial, finishing 18th of 22 teams, losing over five minutes to Armstrong’s dope-fuelled express train.

Before we leave alone the subject of Armstrong, I could perhaps have written about one of my encounters with him towards the end of the race, when I asked him the same question twice because I thought he’d lied the first time he answered. Look at the sudden change in his expression. There are around 8 seconds between the two freeze frames.

HAPPY LANCE

LESS HAPPY LANCE

Leaving aside Lance Armstrong, and returning to Robbie McEwen, the race leader on stage 4, I had been stationed in the pouring rain somewhere on the cobblestones of the square in Arras where the race finished. My task was to get an interview with Robbie, who had just conceded his precious maillot jaune in the most bleak of settings. After his team finished, it took a while for him to appear. Eventually he turned up and pushed his way through the crowd, a regular team jersey over his yellow skinsuit to try and keep warm.

To add insult to indignity, a member of the public tried to nick his bidon as he rode past, clumsily yanking at it, and in the process damaging his bottle cage. Robbie was not impressed. We were standing by the side if the road, filming what happened next.

This is why, of all the 21 stages in 2004 that I could have written about, I remember this one most vividly. Please sit back and enjoy a few seconds of vintage Robbie McEwen.