How Cav Won the Green Jersey by Ned Boulting Page A

of vague medium-term obligations and projects that may or may not ever need to be accessed.
    Entering our little compound, where the studio had been unpacked, I nodded ill-tempered hellos at the sad collection of colleagues sat around in waterproof tops and trousers, their chins buried in the warmth of their chests. When would this Tour warm up again? Nobody looked up at me. It was Stage 4, after all, so what did I expect. My God, unless things perked up, this was going to be a long month.
    ‘There was some bloke here looking for you,’ I was told. ‘Some kid who said you’d invited him.’
    I paused momentarily. No, I had no idea who that might have been, and could not recall any arrangement to meet anyone. I slipped into the darkened interior of the truck and went on with my task of writing a piece about Mark Cavendish’s latest outburst.
    When I next emerged, the mood had lifted. This normally only happens when someone from outside our immediate group makes an appearance to break up the monotony of our own company. A pale, very young-looking, blond-mopped boy (there’s no other word for him) stood by our table. He was eating a madeleine cake, which I instantly recognised as emanating from the kitchen of Phillipe and Odette, our caterers, and regaling people with stories. He was wearing a pair of beige shorts, a Saur-Sojasun replica top, and was draped in a Union Jack. From head to toe, he was drenched. This was Simon Carnochan. He’d made it this far.
    It was the beginning of our occasional fostering of his extraordinary campaign. After cake and coffee, Rob Lewellyn, our phlegmatic production manager, had seen fit to lend him a VIP day pass, which got him access to pretty much every area. He nearly wept with delight, and duly set off for the finish line.
    Some time later, he was really weeping. It seems that his bizarre, and not entirely sanitary, presence alongside the great and good of the Tour in the hospitality areas close to the finish line had been cut short by an official. They had taken one look at the unwashed (and seemingly underage) hitchhiker wearing a wet flag and taking pictures of everything that moved, and had instantly removed his precious, borrowed accreditation, before kicking him out. Presumably with a cartoonish boot, and the words, ‘And don’t come back!’
    By the time I saw him in tears, he’d blagged his way back into the compound. Simon was something of a master at Blagging his Way Into Things, and occasionally Out of Them. But he felt miserable here. Rob did his best to cheer him up, putting his mind at rest and insisting that ITV could easily get the pass returned. But for a while I could see the tiredness and the strain that getting as far as Brittany had induced in his slight frame. He would pitch his tent that night, somewhere. And prepare for another evening with as much food as his €1.50 daily budget allowed him to eat, and little or no idea how he would get to the next stage finish. We posed for pictures with him on the TV studio set, shook him by the hand, stuffed some more bits and pieces into his rucksack, and sent him on his way.
    It kickstarted a sequence of sightings. He became known to us simply as ‘Carno’. The next day we spotted him jogging along towards the finish line at Cap Fréhel, looking a bit dryer, a bit blonder and a bit more British than before, perhaps in anticipation of Mark Cavendish’s maiden 2011 victory.
    ‘Carno!’ Woody had spotted him again. His hair was whitening in the increasing hours of sunshine, which had began to fall on the roads into Massif Central. Hanging over the rails at fifty metres to go. Sat on the grassy verges of a Category Two climb. There, here, everywhere was Carno, the Where’s Wally of the 2011 Tour de France.
    Every now and then, he’d drop in to see us. Chris Boardman took a particular avuncular interest in his journey, perhaps because his own eldest son was abroad as well during July, picking strawberries in Denmark,