How I Won the Yellow Jumper Read Online Free Page B

unacceptable amounts of fumbling around and lapses into linguistic disarray. These are the bits that, generally speaking, have to go when you’re a TV presenter, even though they are often the bits that make you most human. Over the years I have tried to allow these back into my delivery, like letting weeds take seed in lawn to lend it a more natural look. But you don’t want to overdo it.
    Likewise, the ‘real’ Gary Imlach might be tempted to close the show by simply, bluntly speaking his mind, rather than using the wonderfully spiked baroque constructions that are his trademark.
    There’s a subtle difference. This is Gary Imlach being ‘Gary Imlach’. And frankly, no one will ever do it better: eloquence,precision and, most importantly, humour. As Gary grips the microphone, he does so with the archetypal iron fist in a velvet glove.

    When I was preparing for my second Tour, I spent two days locked in a little broom cupboard just off Piccadilly Circus, surrounded by boxes of tapes from twenty years of Tour de France coverage. Most of them stretched back to the years when it was Channel 4 who broadcast the highlights show. In those days, Gary did my job, with Phil Liggett fronting up the coverage.
    It was an education watching Gary’s contributions. Two features stick in my memory. In one he was riding a bamboo bike around some Dutch town. The act itself broke a long-standing personal vow never to allow himself to be filmed on a bike. It was delivered in Gary’s inimitable dry deadpan, and it dripped with irony.
    In another little film, he had stopped at some remote rural location, which was on the route of the Tour the next day.There, by whatever means, he found himself steering a pedalo out into the middle of the lake to help the mayor of a virtually non-existent hamlet attach a huge floating sign depicting the name of the village to a mooring. The sight of Gary sitting in a white plastic boat pedalling out into a murky lake set a benchmark for strangeness to which I still aspire.
    On the 2010 Tour, Gary was presented with a trophy from the Tour for twenty years’ service. Christian Prudhomme, the Tour director, appeared to have no idea who Gary was, since he’s not a very visible presence outside the confines of our truck. But it was a fine moment, rendered all the more amusing by witnessing Gary’s almost total discomfort with the proceedings.

    Gary eshews cliché. He has a style that is all his own. He stands wilfully apart. But the Tour provides a big enough canvas for his highly individual space to exist and still leave some blank room for others. With time, I realised that it was possible for Gary’s fine brushstrokes to sit alongside my Jackson Pollocks and have understood that our contrasting approaches may have nudged the entirety of the production in a new direction.
    You might argue that on my first few Tours I was trying too hard. What now seems self-explanatory to me, at first seemed deeply mysterious. My efforts often fell short ofclarity. I shudder to recall some of them.
    My quest for ground-breaking TV once had me sitting outside a café somewhere in one of those hard-to-define areas in France’s vast interior, lining up nine sugar cubes into a paceline, and rotating them across the table so that each cube took its fair pull at the front. I was bringing the team time trial to sugary life. My enthusiasm for metaphor didn’t stop there. I had them in an echelon, too. Diagonally stretching out across the tablecloth, from saucer to ashtray, sheltering the other cubes from a notional sidewind.
    Stretching the conceit to a point way beyond the viewer’s patience, I discarded cubes one by one, as they were ‘dropped’ by their sugary teammates, succumbed to punctures or snapped forks. Then, with a brilliant flourish, I rounded off the epic by deliberately tipping the contents of my coffee cup over them all, soaking the white tablecloth