“Brian, I need you to do me a favor. I need you to call Unibet.”
Brian was Brian Holm, my Columbia Sportswear team’s Danish directeur
sportif, and Unibet was an online betting company. Brian knew
what I meant. I could tell from the way he was smirking; but sitting next
to him, my other directeur, Rolf Aldag, thought he’d either misheard or
that I’d gone insane. He leaned over Brian in the passenger seat to get a
clearer view and asked me to repeat what I’d just said.
“I need you to call Unibet and put a grand on Mark Cavendish to win
today’s stage. Got it?” Now Rolf was laughing. . . .

A hundred kilometers to go. A hundred kilometers and not much more
than two hours until the most important ten seconds of my life. Hopefully.
I spotted the huge bundle of varicose veins that belongs to my
teammate George Hincapie, and I kicked through a little window of
daylight between the bodies and on to his shoulder. “Hey, George, I just
went back to the car and told them I needed them to call Unibet for
me. . . .” By the time I’d finished the story, he was laughing so much he
nearly fell off his bike.

Ninety kilometers, 80, 70, 60 to go. It was hot—the first really warm
day of the Tour, and the sun happened to have showed up on a day when
there was precious little shelter, just endless wheat fields acting like
giant solar panels. Drink, Cav, gotta keep drinking. Four riders were still
off the front, but now wasn’t the time to start fretting. Not yet. At the
50-kilometers-to-go mark, I’d start picking my way through the maze and
into the top twenty or thirty positions, close to my teammates and as far
as possible from danger. My teammates might not see me, but they’d see
my long white socks—the socks I wore deliberately so they could pick me
out in the melee—I’d drift on to a wheel, maybe George’s, maybe Bernie’s,
maybe Kosta’s, then the thinking, the planning, the wondering would all
stop and the focusing would start. Nothing would count except the next
turn of the pedals, the next shift of the gear lever, the next tweak of the
handlebars, the next inch of tarmac.