TONY
MARTIN
words David Sharp
photographs Timm Kölln
ROULEUR
I
n an unassuming hotel conference
room on the Swiss-lying shoreline
of Lake Constance an unassuming
world champion cyclist stands
on a makeshift gurney in a state of
partial undress. With unfailing patience
he submits himself, like an artist’s life
model, to a series of contortions for the
Rouleur photo-shoot.
The pale morning sunlight that flits
across the surface of the shimmering
water outside illuminates the room and
plays on the scars that fleck Tony Martin’s
legs and arms giving each an evanescent
lustre that is swiftly extinguished as
clouds roll past overhead. Glassy welt
marks, nicks and lacerations pepper his
skin; the professional cyclist’s badges of
combat. Fresher wounds, barely healed,
are reminders of a past season lived
dangerously. Old and new scars combine
to create a body map of bad luck.
A few hours earlier Martin had strolled
into the foyer of our rendezvous, the TwinPeaks-style Seehotel Schiff in the sleepy
hamlet of Mannenbach, dressed casually
in a hooded top, jeans and Converse, fresh
off the plane from China after successfully
112
defending his Tour of Beijing title, amid
outbreaks of Tony-mania.
“I’m famous over there,” he says. “People
wait for me in the hall of the hotel to give
me gifts and tell me I’m great!”
A boyish-looking 27-year-old he is
instantly friendly and engaging but with
a shy, gentle demeanour. As we talk
he rarely makes eye contact and often
delivers answers with a fragile, deadpan
expression reminiscent of a young Buster
Keaton. It seems entirely apposite that
his forte as a cyclist is the time trial, the
‘race of truth’, since he is nothing but
honest and thoughtful, in conversation
and also in his everyday life. “I want to
be effective and do things the best, most
efficient way I can,” he says.
Our conversation veers from the
outrageous misfortune that befell Martin
in his debut season with Omega Pharma –
Quick-Step to his preference for training
alone (“It’s a waste of time for me to
just sit in someone’s slipstream in a
group talking”), including a borderlineRain Man obsession with planning his
own training routes (“Yes, I’m a control
freak!”); why he won’t ride in the Spring
Classics (“It’s too dangerous and I hate
cobbles!”) and how during big stage races
he has a penchant for watching DVD
box-sets of fast-paced TV thriller 24 in his
hotel room, to switch his mind off from
cycling and escape into another world.
On the titanic hoo-ha surrounding the
Lance Armstrong scandal, he offers: “It’s
good that all this stuff came out and now
hopefully the doping rumours will end
and we can move on with a clean sport.”
Trust is a word that crops up frequently.
Trust and a sense of constancy become
something of a recurring theme. Intensely
private – it is notable that we meet a
stone’s throw from his Mannenbach
abode – Martin thrives on cosy familiarity
and is averse to change.
It’s the reason he’s kept the same closeknit group of people around him since he
was a kid; an inner circle consisting of his
girlfriend Katharina, his family, and old
friends from his time at sports college in
Erfurt. These are the people he can rely
on, who have always been there for him,
not just since he’s become a success.
TONY MARTIN
“It’s hard for other people to get into this
circle,” he tells me. “I can trust these guys
and be myself with them.”
It’s also the reason why, when
Bob Stapleton gathered his Team
HTC-Highroad squad together in August
2011 to confirm rumours that they’d
failed to find a new sponsor and would
fold at the end of the season, Martin says
it felt “like there had been a death in the
family.” He’d spent his entire fledgling
pro career with the various incarnations
of the American entrepreneur’s hugely
successful team, formed from the dying
embers of T-Mobile’s dope-ridden demise.
“For four years I had the same people
around me, people I could trust,” he
says, that word popping up again.
“I’m the kind of guy who gets used to
having the same thing. I want it, I need it.
It is a comfort for me.”
Following Martin’s stellar final season
at HTC-Highroad – 12 wins, nine in
time trials, including a first Grand Tour
stage win at the Tour de France and a
majestic first World time trial title in
Copenhagen where he destroyed an
all-star field, Cancellara, Wiggins et al –
he was a highly-sought after prize, swiftly
snapped up by Patrick Lefevere for his
under-performing Belgian classics outfit,
Omega Pharma – Quick-Step.
Expectations were high but it took him
time to adjust to his new environment; the
change was anathema to him. Poor early
season form, particularly at Paris-Nice,
after a “shit winter,” was followed by a
string of bad luck, crashes, injuries and
illness. But more of all that later…
Thankfully new team-mate Tom Boonen
stepped up to the plate to wage one of
the greatest cobbled Classics campaigns
in cycling history with victory at E3,
Gent-Wevelgem, Tour of Flanders and,
most memorable of all, a swashbuckling
49km solo attack to win Paris-Roubaix.
It was a huge relief, Martin says. “It took
the pressure off me.”
“But I’m really happy I had these difficult
lessons to learn throughout all the ups
and downs,” he says. “And with the big
success at the end at least it wasn’t a
wasted year.”
After almost perfect preparation at the
Vuelta a España, he went to Valkenburg
to defend his World Championship
time trial crown in near 100 per cent
condition for the first time all season.
In the absence of Fabian Cancellara or
Bradley Wiggins, the attention was all
on the German “machine,” as Boonen
had called him after Omega-Pharma
Quick Step’s team time trial success three
days before. Martin was the outstanding
favourite to retain the title he’d won
in such devastating style a year before
in Copenhagen.
He should have been brimming with
confidence but instead he was feeling the
heat, unsure of his form with no big time
trial wins all season, a poor 11th place
on Stage 11 of the Vuelta the most recent
disappointment.
Waiting on the start ramp, he tells me,
he was fretting that it might all go
horribly wrong.
Watching on TV, as the camera closed in
on his face and he took a final sip of water
before rolling off, I remember thinking
that he seemed to be almost shaking.
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ROULEUR
“Going up the Cauberg I was sprinting
flat out and my legs were full of lactic
acid but I had to keep going. It was the
longest 1,000m of my career”
“It was such a memorable race,”
Martin says, now able to relax. “Taylor
Phinney was amazing and the finish was
fantastic, so everyone will remember it
in ten years’ time.”
He’s right. It was a vivid, gripping
denouement to a thrilling race. I can still
picture the breathtaking moment when
the German catches his two-minute man,
Alberto Contador, and slaloms past the
Spaniard as if he were some stationary
object on the road, a human-shaped
bollard on a bike, rather than the reigning
Vuelta champion. Incredibly there was
still 15km still to race.
With Contador wiped out in ignominious
fashion, Martin now only had to quash
the youthful insurgency of American
contre-la-montre prodigy Phinney, who’d
set a blistering time round the rolling
Limburg course.
When Martin swung round onto the
dreaded final 1.2km ascent of the
Cauberg, the Amstel Gold Race’s iconic
hill finish, he had seven seconds on the
22-year-old. The German would have to
empty it up the climb in less than 1:20
to snatch gold from Phinney’s grasp and
salvage a calamitous season.
Martin started talking to himself –
“Come on, only 1km to go!” – visualising
those long, lonely hours out on the road
whatever the weather, the time and
energy and effort he’d invested over the
past two months preparing for the race.
The scary training crash, the broken
wrist, all that dreadful bad luck. This is
what it’s all been for. He urged himself
116
to push harder, through the pain barrier
and beyond.
“The fact it’s the World Championships
is an enormous motivating factor alone,”
Martin says. “I couldn’t look myself
in the mirror if I knew I hadn’t given
everything.”
There followed a mad, frantic dash to
the summit with a vicious headwind
battering his face, mouth agape, gasping
for air like a landed fish, turning a
massive gear and riding as if through a
river of treacle on a concrete bike, with
legs like flaming torches.
“I was dead in the last 300m,” he says.
“You can’t imagine how far 300m can
seem after an hour of that kind of effort.
Going up the Cauberg I was sprinting flat
out and my legs were full of lactic acid
but I had to keep going. It was the longest
1,000m of my career.”
But he made it, a mere 5.37 seconds
faster than Phinney, and crossed the
line brandishing a symbolic twofingered salute: Copenhagen 2011,
now Valkenburg 2012. Two-in-a-row.
He stepped off his bike like a drunk
alighting a fairground ride and collapsed
exhausted on the tarmac.
“After a few minutes I thought, OK, time
to get up and enjoy it,” he says, smiling
now at the memory. “It was such a huge
relief after everything I’d been through in
2012, breaking my wrist at the Tour and,
of course, the training crash.”
It was a Wednesday morning training
run like any other. A soft, mist-like, April
smirr enveloped the undulating Seerücken
hills overlooking Lake Constance as
Martin wound his way down the terraced
slopes towards home after a satisfying
four-hour workout.
He was just back from the Vuelta Ciclista
al Pais Vasco and a morale-boosting
display in the final stage time trial in
Oñati, a challenging mountainous course
where Martin had finished third behind
race winner Sammy Sanchez. With the
Tour de Romandie up next, where he’d
finished second overall the previous
season, he began to feel “at last some
proof that my form was better and I was
in good shape for the coming races.”
Three kilometres from Mannenbach he
swung across a main road onto a cycle path
that skirts the hemline of the lake and was
brought to a sudden, shuddering halt.
“I don’t remember anything but the
police said when the car came out of the
small side road and over the bike lane
I crashed into the side of it,” Martin
tells me. “The driver didn’t see me –
my black rain jacket didn’t help. I went
from 35km/h to zero in an instant.
And then the lights went out.”
He lost consciousness for about
15 minutes. When he came to, with
emergency services standing over
him, he thought he’d woken from a
hyper-realistic nightmare. He fought
to stand up, telling them: “No, no,
I’m okay, just let me go,” the instinct
of a pro cyclist to immediately jump
back on their bike and rejoin the race.
TONY MARTIN
When they told him it was serious,
he “stopped fighting and trusted them.”
He was taken to a local hospital and
then transferred to the University Clinic
in Zürich.
The left half of his face was badly
smashed. He’d suffered a fractured
cheekbone, jaw, shoulder blade and eye
socket in the horrific collision.
But, Martin tells me, it could have been a
whole lot worse.
“It was good that I landed on my left side
and not face first,” he says. “I’ve had so
many crashes as a pro that I automatically
curled up and prepared myself for the
crash in less than a second.”
I ask if he felt emotional in the days
following his brush with death?
“You always hear about such crashes that
happen to other people but you don’t
think it will happen to you,” he answers.
“But then it happens to you…”
“If I’d been going five kph faster, or if
I’d hit the car straight on, or if I wasn’t
wearing a helmet…” he says, trailing off,
the silent ellipsis expressing his feelings
more than words.
Miraculously, after only one week
indoors with his bike on a home trainer,
he was back doing light training on
the road.
Within three weeks Martin was fit
enough to return to racing and by the end
119
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of May had finally notched his first win
of the season in the stage four time trial
at the Tour of Belgium, propelling him to
overall victory.
But the hex returned at the Dauphiné
Libéré in June when he hit the deck on
stage three and was diagnosed with a blood
infection. He somehow recovered the next
day to run a rampant Wiggins close in the
53km time trial, but cracked on the climb
up the Joux Plane on the penultimate day
to blow a tilt at the overall.
No matter. Every race, even the
upcoming Tour de France, starting in
Belgium, served only as preparation
for Martins’s sole aim for the season,
the London Olympics.
Yes, he aimed to take the maillot jaune in
the prologue and then go for stage wins
on the two long time trials but there was
no point, he says, “trying to get into the
top five at the Tour and then be exhausted
for the Games.”
His hopes were dashed again when he
punctured before the first time check of
the 6.4km circuit of Liège, to finish a
horribly disappointing 45th.
“I thought it really can’t get any worse,”
he says.
But it did, a mere 24 hours later on the
first stage proper and just 11km out of
Liège. With the peloton ambling along
the road to Seraing, the breakaway group
of the day already gone, Robbie Hunter
hit a pothole, lost hold of his handlebars
and went flying. Martin, on the South
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African’s wheel, tumbled over the
Garmin-Sharp rider. He “immediately
knew something was badly wrong.”
Dangling off the back of the field all day
in agony he bravely limped to the finish.
A hospital X-ray confirmed the crushing
news: a fracture of the cashew-nut-sized
scaphoid bone in his left wrist. His Tour
was over. But Martin refused to go home.
“I wanted to stay until the first long
time trial,” he explains. “I also wanted
to support the team. If I’d just quit then
it would have been a disaster for team
morale. I thought we could find a way to
protect the wrist. Why not at least try?”
Martin soldiered on for another week to
Arc-et-Senans for stage nine’s time trial,
although he cut a sorry figure on the
start ramp, his wrist encased in a plastic
cast. And despite another flat tyre in the
first few kilometres he still managed an
admirable 12th place.
It was the end of one race and the
beginning of another: he had only three
weeks to get fit for the Olympic time trial.
“As a kid I remember watching the
Olympics on TV,” he says. “And I
dreamed that one day I could participate
and maybe even win a medal.”
Tony Martin was born on 23 April 1985
in Cottbus, a small university city 130km
south east of Berlin, close to the border
with Poland, the middle son of three
boys to Bettina and Karsten, a doctor and
local government worker in the former
German Democratic Republic.
The Berlin Wall still stood, proud and ugly,
dividing east from west. But by Tony’s
fourth birthday rumblings of discontent
over the oppressive Communist system
could already be heard across eastern
Europe, in Poland, the Baltic States and
Hungary. Mikhail Gorbachev’s principles
of Glasnost and Perestroika had captured
the popular imagination. The first heady
whiffs of revolution were in the air.
On 2 May, 1989 the Hungarian
government astonished the world by
beginning to dismantle their hitherto
fortified border with Austria. The results
of their actions were sensational: by July
more than 25,000 East Germans who
had decided to ‘vacation’ in Hungary,
somehow ended up in Austria.
Dramatically, the Martin family were
among the exodus.
“My parents really wanted to get out
of the system,” Tony says. “They were
individuals, with their own thoughts
and ideas about life, similar to the way
I am now, but that wasn’t possible in the
old GDR.”
In that heady summer of 1989, Martin’s
father obtained a family travel visa and
from June into July, Tony, his older brother
Gerrit, younger brother Paul, mum and
dad, took off in the family Trabant on
a spurious grape-picking holiday in the
vineyards of Hungary. Packing only what
they needed for the ‘vacation’, Karsten
and Bettina left behind their entire life
possessions in Cottbus to seek “a new,
better life for themselves and their family
in the west.”
“I don’t know if I would have had the
same career in cycling if I’d started
earlier. Perhaps the doping scandals at
T-Mobile would have put me off”
122
They made it to West Germany, via
Hungary and Austria, and spent their
first few months of freedom in special
refugee camps before settling in the
Frankfurt area where, with the help of
generous locals, his parents soon found
jobs and a new family home.
“The whole operation was pretty
dangerous,” Martin admits. “But my
parents had such a strong will, they were
single-minded people and wanted to
make their own way in the world.”
It’s clear he has inherited many of the
same traits which led his parents to
embark on their perilous journey all
those years ago.
“Being told what to do is against my
nature,” he tells me. This wilful, singular
approach to his life and career has helped
him not only survive but flourish in the
rough and tumble world of professional
cycling. He is a chip off the old block, his
father’s son.
As a talented young cyclist Karsten Martin
had fallen foul of the East German sports
system, his son explains, because he
had a maverick streak. The authorities
didn’t appreciate outsiders with Adidas
sports bags, a West German brand.
“He was fed up with the system so quit
cycling but he passed on his love of the
sport to me,” Martin says.
The pair watched the Tour de France
together on TV. A young German rider,
Jan Ullrich, had exploded onto the
scene, finishing second at the 1996 Tour,
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TONY MARTIN
then winning it the following year at the
tender age of 23. Germany, and Martin,
had a new hero.
Although a talented youth footballer,
by 14 Martin realised he didn’t have
“the kind of technique needed to make it
as a pro” so he switched sports to cycling.
The old-fashioned GDR training methods
his father had rebelled against now
proved invaluable as he became his son’s
coach and training partner. Karsten’s
philosophy, Martin remembers now,
was distinctly archaic but nevertheless
effective: go out and ride every day, come
rain, hail or shine.
Unable to juggle an increasingly busy
weekend junior racing schedule with
regular school work, Martin took up a
sports scholarship at a specialist college
in Erfurt, ironically a city in the former
eastern part of Germany.
“It was the best decision of my life.
Everything was better organised, I had
more time for cycling and I also found my
people,” he says, referring to the gang of
friends he bonded with in Erfurt.
After dazzling at junior level – by 2003
he was German national U19 time
trial champion and finished eighth at
the junior World Championships in
Hamilton, Canada – he soon progressed
to the under-23 ranks with the Thüringer
Energie Team.
His Erfurt neighbour Sebastian Lang
secured the 20-year-old Martin a stagiaire
contract with Gerolsteiner and he made
a huge splash at the 2005 Regio Tour,
his first professional race, winning the
individual time trial.
“It was the surprise of the season,”
he says. “Suddenly everyone was looking
at me as the new Jan Ullrich.” –
Contract offers rolled in from
Gerolsteiner and the perennial giants of
German cycling, T-Mobile.
He chose the latter because they allowed
him to defer making his pro debut until
he’d completed the final two years of his
sports scholarship. Although desperate
to turn pro (“What if it was my only
chance? What if I got injured?”), Martin
followed sage family advice to finish his
studies – which also included training
to be a policeman as a back-up if he
didn’t make it as a professional cyclist –
and stay with the under-23’s for another
couple of seasons.
Ironically, but for Martin’s dedication
to his police education, 2006 would
have been his rookie season among
the cycling elite, a bleak year for the
sport, with Operación Puerto rearing
its ugly head. Childhood idol Ullrich,
implicated in the scandal, barred from
that year’s Tour and subsequently
sacked by T-Mobile, would have been
one of Martin’s new team-mates.
The eager young police academy
graduate would have found himself in the
middle of a doping shit-storm.
After further doping revelations from
several T-Mobile riders, most notably
Erik Zabel and Bjarne Riis, the sport’s
reputation in Martin’s homeland was in
tatters. Something had to give.
German TV withdrew coverage of the
2007 Tour and later that year T-Mobile
pulled the plug on their long-running
125
TONY MARTIN
sponsorship deal. The following season,
amid more scandal, the Deutschland
Tour was scrapped and Gerolsteiner
dissolved after they couldn’t find a
new sponsor.
“I don’t know if I would have had the
same career in cycling if I’d started a few
seasons earlier,” Martin muses. “Perhaps
the doping scandals at T-Mobile would
have put me off.”
Despite T-Mobile’s collapse Martin’s
original contract still stood, even though
the man who had defined its terms, Olaf
Ludwig, left the team at the end of 2006.
“It was still a team,” he says, “just with
no sponsor.”
When T-Mobile morphed into Stapleton’s
Team High Road for Martin’s debut
2008 season, it was the beginning for him
of a “beautiful four-year relationship.”
“It was a hard time for cycling. No-one
knew how we could continue or even if we
would continue,” he says. “We were just
fighting for success, survival, sponsors.”
“But it was also great timing for me to
come to cycling after all the doping shit.
I arrived just in time – I was a new, young,
clean rider.”
On his debut Tour de France in 2009,
Martin made the first giant leap of his
pro career in a ding-dong battle with
Juan Manuel Gárate on the lunar slopes
of Mont Ventoux. The fresh-faced
24-year-old had donned the maillot
blanc as best young rider for the first two
weeks. Now here he was, supposedly a
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time trial specialist, mixing it up on one
of the Tour’s fabled peaks with an old
Spanish mountain goat. Gárate surged
past Martin on the final bend of the
iconic climb to claim the stage but it
was the young German who took the
plaudits.
Everyone assumed he was Germany’s next
Grand Tour winner, a new-generation
Ullrich, but crucially, for the future of
German cycling, clean.
“I think we’re asking a little bit too much
of him to save German cycling,” Martin’s
directeur sportif Rolf Aldag said at the
end of the opening week of that Tour.
Nearly four years on, does he still feel
that weight of expectation?
“Everybody knows about the situation in
Germany where everyone is very down on
cycling,” he begins. “I think it’s getting
better every year but it’s not where it
should be.
“I hope I can inspire people, from both
generations: the older ones who were
watching when Ullrich was fighting for the
128
Tour title and also the younger ones who
are looking for motivation for the future.”
And does he still harbour ambitions to go
for the GC at a Grand Tours?
“Yes, it is still a goal for the future,”
he says. “But I tried and the best result
I had was the first year, when I was young
and there was no pressure. Then I tried
again in 2010 and 2011 and it was really
disappointing.”
It depends on the parcours since, by his
own admission, he still struggles on long,
steep climbs. For now he prefers to rack
up time trial wins, establish himself as
the pre-eminent rider of his generation
against the clock and aim for smaller,
one-week stage race wins. There will
come a time to establish new goals,
perhaps in his 30s.
“The time trial is my discipline,” he
begins, agreeing it suits his lone-wolf
personality. “I love it because you’re
alone on the road with your bike. There’s
no slipstream, no tactics, it’s not about
who has the smartest strategy. It’s just
you, your bike and your head, fighting
against the pain.”
Outside, a frozen mist hovers over Lake
Constance like dry ice on a nightclub
dance floor. The sun is low in the sky,
even at noon, hanging over the hills
southwest towards St Gallen, casting
our little conference room once more
in shadow.
When I ask Martin to choose the highlight
of his career so far he becomes suddenly
animated and blurts out immediately
“the Olympics in London.”
“The atmosphere was gigantic,” he says.
“It made the Tour de France seem like
a kindergarten. Along the entire course
the crowds were three or four deep –
it was like cycling through a tunnel
of noise.”
Reaching the start ramp at Hampton
Court on the first day of August had
always been the main focus of Martin’s
season. He was determined to fulfil his
childhood ambition and at the same time
hopefully restore some faith in German
cycling at home.
“If you win a medal at the Olympic games
you can reach a lot of people,” Martin says.
ROULEUR
“Obstacle courses in freezing rain
and mud, night time orienteering
escapades, sleeping under the stars
in bivouac shelters”
“I was aware of this opportunity and
I was hoping I could win a medal for
Germany and help bring fans back to
cycling who were gone.”
In the end he had to settle for silver
behind an indomitable Wiggins. But it
was an incredible achievement, given he
was still nursing a broken wrist and he
was lucky just to be there.
“I had to be realistic and celebrate second
place,” he says. “Wiggins was unbeatable.
So I was very happy with the silver
medal and I got a lot of positive reaction
back home.”
You could say job very well done, an
Olympic silver medal on his palmarès,
cycling back in the German public’s
consciousness for the right reasons.
But it was painful, Martin confesses, to
concede his place as cycling’s top chrono
man to the British rider. Oh well, there
was always a World Championship TT
title to defend in Valkenburg…
A few weeks later I catch up with Martin
on the phone. The off-season is getting
shorter, he grumbles. The time has flown
by. He’s been hanging out with friends in
Erfurt and family in Frankfurt, relaxing
at home with Katharina. He jogged a
little and went on a few lazy, one-hour
café rides – compatriots Bert Grabsch,
Marcus Burghardt and Andreas Klöden
all live around the lake.
After the myriad calamities of 2012, I say,
he should be spending the winter in total
hibernation, wrapped in cotton wool.
If only.
Martin joined his Belgian buddies on
an intense two-day team building trip
to a military base in the Slovakian
wilderness; obstacle courses in freezing
rain and mud, night-time orienteering
escapades, sleeping under the stars in
bivouac shelters. It wasn’t his idea of
fun. He is much happier on the balmy
Balearic island of Majorca, where they
were heading next for the annual winter
training camp.
Martin was reunited in Slovakia
with his former HTC-High Road
team-mate, Mark Cavendish, following
the Manx sprinter’s recent flit from
Team Sky. He tells me a sweet story
about how Cavendish nearly had him
in tears after gifting him a Tag Heuer
watch, a heartfelt ‘thank you’ to Martin
for his lead-out role in Cav’s first ever
Grand Tours stage win at the 2008
Giro d’Italia.
“Mark is a great guy to have around
with a big personality and one of the
best captains I have ever ridden with,”
Martin enthuses. “When you have
him in the team it inspires you to give
100 per cent because you know he’ll give
the same back.”
We chat about how the trials of 2012
have helped him mature on and off
the bike.
“I think the last year was a character
building experience and it has helped me
to be more relaxed, more realistic,” he
says. “Now I have settled in and know the
team I’m really motivated and optimistic
about the next two years.”
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At the 2013 World Championships in
Florence he will attempt to equal Michael
Rogers’ feat of winning three consecutive
world time trial titles. He’s certain to face
stiff opposition from Wiggins, Cancellara
and the young pretender Phinney.
Is he an aficionado, like Wiggins,
of cycling’s history, it’s colourful lore?
Does he read books about it?
“No, not really,” he replies. “Riders from
Ullrich onwards but not so much before.”
Does he ever think about his place in the
lineage of great champions?
“No, maybe it comes with age. I can look
back on my palmarès after I retire.”
What about the hour record?
“Maybe when I’ve won so many races
and I don’t know which one to go for
anymore,” he says, laughing. “At the
moment I have so many other goals.
“I could do it at the end of my career, for
the history books. But I’m still young.
Bradley can try first and I’ll follow him,”
Martin jokes.
In the meantime, he’ll stick with DVD
box-sets of 24 and paperback thrillers:
he’s too busy writing himself into the
history books to bother reading them.
David Sharp is a former Deputy Editor
of Procycling magazine and spent seven
years as a journalist with the BBC. He is
currently a freelance writer based in Berlin
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