TAKING THEIR BREATH AWAY

The Swiss enjoyed the greatest season of his career in 2010.In the first of a new series, Chris Marshall-Bell looks back at how he dominated cycling then

- Chris Marshall-Bell

The sky was a palette of greys, the clouds concocting fierce, horizontal winds that whipped up and hammered the persistent hard rain into the windows incessantly. The thermometer registered three degrees.

Workers, parents and children all left their houses wrapped in their most protective winter coats, wondering when March would relent and offer some respite.

Inside the walls of a Belgian hotel in Kortrijk, an animated Fabian Cancellara opened the blinds, smiled. “He could not lie in his bed,” his teammate Matti Breschel laughs. “He was an energy bomb.”

The Danish Saxo Bank team were staying in the Flandrian town for four weeks as part of the 2010 northern Classics races and Cancellara was tipped as one of the favourites.

In his own unassuming, shruggingof-the-shoulders manner, he waved it all off. “He was dealing with the pressure and nervousness in his own way,” Breschel remembers. “He never isolated himself and was very social. He was fun to be around.”

Talk on the outside was a reflection of talk on the inside. “I think people maybe underestimated him a bit because you couldn’t really see if he was concentrated,” Breschel explains. “But the more he spoke about himself, the more confidence he got. And he was speaking about himself constantly, in the third person, practising this and that. In his charming way, he was a bit of a prima donna, but with a glint in his eye. I thought, ‘OK, man, this guy is onto something special.’”

Breschel’s assumptions would prove to be correct. In the following weeks, Cancellara would go on to win the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix, becoming just the 10th rider to do so in the same season. Months later, he would lead the Tour de France for six days, and then wrap up a season of eight wins by becoming time trial world champion for the fourth consecutive time.