TDF Photo Album Part One

Family photos from the greatest race in the world...

For pretty obvious reasons, I have found myself rooting around in old photo albums of my 22 (soon to be 23) years at the Tour de France. I thought it would be nice to share some with you. They all trigger memories for me, as I’m certain you can imagine. Here’s the first batch…

AFTERNOON DOZE, 2003

This is the only picture I still have from my debut at the Tour de France. Remember, this was so long ago that humanity didn’t stroll around taking billions of pictures with their phone. Back then, you used to have to actually possess a camera, and go to the lengths of using it. They were simpler times. I was 33.

It’s hard to know where the picture was taken, or who took it. It wasn’t Boardman, who is something of a keen (and annoying good) amateur photographer. I suspect it was Glenn Wilkinson, a cameraman who had been part of the old Channel Four team and with whom I worked for my first two years. Tragically, Glenn died in the spring on 2005. I would go on to write about him in How I Won The Yellow Jumper.

By the look of the background, this is not a mountain top stage. It looks to be somewhere in the middle/north of France. My best guess is that it is in Nevers, on stage 6. Alessandro Petacchi (who I now work alongside at the Giro) was about to win the third of his four stages, before climbing off.

It was a boiling hot summer, one which set records in France and killed 15,000 people, many of them elderly people in Paris. Late on in week two, I tried and failed to fry an egg on the tarmac at Cap Découverte. That was a feature that never made the highlights show.

As you can see, my nose is already sunburnt, so a few days must already have elapsed. Also, the afternoon fatigue has set in. My job (the one that Daniel Friebe now does so brilliantly) involved interviewing riders at the start, often seated at the café in the Village Départ itself, and then dashing hell for leather for the finish, grabbing some lunch, and then watching the final 50k of the race before springing back into action. Unfortunately, after around 4 stages of the race, we were all routinely so tired, that we would fall asleep and miss everything except the final couple of kilometres!

CLIMBING THE COLOMBIÈRE, 2006

In May 2006, our producers thought it would be funny/important to send me up the highest mountain pass in the Tour. On a bicycle. The bloody idiots.

I prepared for the task by riding up Canonbie Road in Forest Hill a few times. Then I set off, weirdly cocky. It didn’t take long before I realised just what I had committed to. Patrice, the moto pilot working with our cameraman, burst into laughter after about 500 metres of the endless climb. A veteran, even then, of around 20 tours, carrying cameramen and reporters through successive Tours de France, he had simply never experienced speeds as slow before.

‘Why are you laughing?’ I gasped.

‘I ‘ave never used first gear on a mountain before,’ came the reply.

Thankfully, my endless ascent was cut short by the thick snow still towards the top of the mountain and the presence of a bunch of soldiers from Bordeaux charging across the snowscape shooting guns as they completed their training before heading for deployment in Afghanistan. Never have I been happier to have been told to turn around.

PURPOSEFUL STRIDE, 2007

I mean, it’s unfortunate that I chose that moment to stick out my tongue. But nevertheless, am still secretly pretty pleased with my Martin Brundle-esque sense of mission on the Mall. It was the day of the opening Prologue.