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the handshake of congratulations, the smile. The winning ride, again and again. It had begun in Cap Fréhel, it continued with Châteauroux, where I had to break the news to him that Bradley Wiggins had crashed out on the road behind him. It came as a genuine shock. ‘Oh shit,’ he said, daring Ofcom to get involved, and forcing Gary Imlach into a pre-emptive apology. He doubled up, then trebled up on these wins by taking the stages into Lavaur and Montpellier, and then dropped in another ‘shit’ during a post-race chat in Pinerolo, apropos of not much at all.
    And on the Galibier, he put me in my place.
    It wasn’t a judo throw of an answer, swinging me over his back, and crashing me onto the floor with little birds tweeting around my unconscious head. But it was pretty smart, and it reminded me of how far I still have to travel before I understand the race without recourse to explanation.
    He’d ridden up the mountain in the grupetto, the large clump of sprinters and assorted others who’d been detached from the head of the race, and whose sole ambition was to make the cut-off time. They failed. In fact, they failed by some margin. But the group was so large, that the Tour regulations allowed for them to continue in the race.
    Shivering in the freezing winds of the Galibier, and without any means of contacting the rest of our production team stranded miles away in the TV compound halfway down the mountain, I was unaware that, although he had escaped elimination, he had been handed another penalty. So it came as news to me when he said, ‘Obviously, I’ve been docked twenty points in the green jersey competition, which makes that a bit closer.’ His nearest rival, José Rojas had comfortably made the cut.
    How did he know this? Was he sure? ‘So, just to confirm, you have been informed that you will lose those twenty points. Is that certain?’ I wanted to make sure of what I had just heard.
    ‘Anyone who knows bike racing knows that those are the rules.’ He looked squarely at me, and allowed a little pause for the effect of the words to sink in. A hit, a very palpable hit.
    When I got back to base, yomping miles back down the Galibier having missed the shuttle bus, I was relieved to find that Cavendish’s answer had caught pretty much everyone on the hop, and had resulted in a frantic fluttering of the pages of the Race Regulations Manual. The gap in my understanding felt less yawning when I realised that Chris Boardman had had to double-check it too. But I was still chastened by the ease with which he had put me away. I wondered how many more years I would have to cover the event, before those gaps eventually silted up with knowledge. Decades more, I suspected.
    * * *

    The last time I sat down to write about Thomas Voeckler, a confession jumped spontaneously onto the page, rather catching me by surprise in the process. In July 2005 I had asked Thomas for his autograph. I just wanted it, because I was in awe of him. Because he was brilliant.
    Asking for autographs, or rather, being asked by people to ask for autographs, is an occupational hazard for the sports hack. I still have bag full of football shirts from a chronically under-funded kids’ team in south-east London, which I promised to get Frank Lampard to sign four years ago. I still haven’t done it. I just can’t bring myself to ask sportsmen to sign things as it instantly places you in the debit column: fan, and therefore not qualified as a journalist. Not a price worth paying.
    So it was with another inner gasp of surprise, that I found myself shouting ‘Thomas! Thomas!’ across the cobbles of the Champs-Elysées. The 2011 Tour was done. My work was finished for the month. My family were alongside me. And yet I felt fit to descend spontaneously to the level of a whooping pre-teen
X-Factor
fan at the sight of the legendary French rider parading through Paris with his teammates.
    ‘Thomas!’ I trilled.
    He caught my eye. I showed him the