How I Won the Yellow Jumper Read Online Free Page A

the DJ quietly restraining his urge to snigger or resign, or both.
    â€˜And I was riding along Tavistock Street yesterday, and I hit a pothole, and I nearly fell off.’
    â€˜OK, Ned. So you think the state of the roads is terrible, do you?’
    â€˜Yes. I do. Really dangerous.’
    â€˜Because of the potholes? Are they a real problem for you on your bike?’
    â€˜Yes. I think something should be done.’
    â€˜Right.’
    Pause.
    â€˜OK, that’s Ned from Bedford, who thinks something should be done about the potholes. Next up, it’s Supertramp, and “Breakfast in America”.’
    That episode should have put me off any notion that I might one day make a living from talking on air about cycling, in any form. But, quite incomprehensibly, here I am, doing justthat.
    One summer, I think it was in 2004, Kath, my partner, delighted in showing me a TV review in which I was described as the ‘Monty Don’ of cycling: determined to ‘dumb everything down’. This was a bizarre piece of criticism, given that I really don’t think I look much like the wizened gardener, and would also consider him to be an expert in his field (literally). But it made her laugh wickedly and with just a hint of scorn, which you wouldn’t normally expect from a supportive family member.
    Prior to this engagement, I had worked almost exclusively on football programmes, with a brief foray into the extraordinarily forgettable world of women’s golf. (Not forgettable, I hasten to add, because it’s played by women, but because it’s golf. The 2002 Oslo Open is a week that will endure in almost no one’s memory.)
    Football, though, was a game I had learnt how to read and write. Phrases such as ‘overlapping wing-backs’ and ‘playing off the shoulder of the last defender’ formed part of a language I could not only understand, but also express with cliché-strewn abandon. I could talk a passable football, even if I still couldn’t play it.
    But initially in this shrill, garish, bullet of a race, I couldn’t move without a grammar book, a primer, a dictionary and a babelfish stuck in each ear. For a long time the language of cycling remained stubbornly foreign to me.
    As the dust settled on my first Tour, I had vowed never to return to cover the race. I reflected in a lengthy debrief with our producers that the work I had produced over the month of July 2003 had been the worst of my career. I would still stand by that assertion. What made that admission still worse was that they agreed.
    By the end of the first week, when the Tour had delivered us up to the very top of the Alps, I was sick of the sound ofmy voice. The problem was a collapse in my self-belief, the illusory arm bands that keep the TV reporter afloat. Quite when, or how, I started to learn to swim, I am still not sure. And even after eight years, I have the odd moment where the old sinking feeling returns.
    Talking to the camera is a strange business. What you see on the screen only tangentially relates to reality. Even though it may be our words and our mouths that articulate them, at the same time there is a confidence trick being played by presenters. It may be our faces that we stick in front of the lens, but we are just pretending to be us. It’s like being a ventriloquist’s dummy who looks strikingly like the ventriloquist; a clone almost, manipulated by the original from which it was cloned. Less Rod Hull and Emu. More Rod Hull and Rod Hill. All presenters have to create a fictional persona, which is close enough to the truth for them to feel comfortable, and yet different enough for them to be able to carry out the functions required of them without being shambolic. The end product that pops up on the telly is a fairly true-to-life version of the person whose name appears in the caption below.
    A ‘real’ report, from a ‘real’ me, would be peppered with