LE TOUR, DRUGS AND ROCK & ROLL

It’s 20 years since Johnny Green, late road manager of the Clash, wrote a riotous book about his time at the Tour de France. Trevor Ward hears the story from a firsthand witness, Green’s son Earl

- Trevor Ward

Johnny Green shifted nervously in the queue for official media accreditation at the Grand Départ of the 2004 Tour de France in Liège, Belgium. While the journalists around him discussed the possibility of Lance Armstrong winning a record-breaking sixth Tour, the return of the peloton’s ‘bad boy’ Mario Cipollini, the prospects of debutants Fabian Cancellara and Thomas Voeckler or the time trial up Alpe d’Huez scheduled for stage 16, Green was distracted by other matters.

His ‘press card’ had been supplied by his friend, ‘Frank the Forger’, and there was still an outstanding arrest warrant for him in Belgium. Green wasn’t a member of the press pack. He was a middle-aged punk rocker and former road manager of the Clash who, nearly 30 years earlier, had crashed into a traffic bollard while driving the band from a gig just outside Liege. He’d been “on the run” from the Belgian police ever since. When he finally received his access-all-areas laminated pass, it was the start of a three-week adventure that he would later turn into a book, Push Yourself Just a Little Bit More: Backstage at the Tour de France.

On publication in 2005, the book was hailed by the Sunday Times as “sports writing to blow your mind”. There were few, if any, English-language books about the Tour de France available at the time, let alone one written by a punk rocker in the style of Danny Dyer hot-desking with Ernest Hemingway. This is his encounter with Eddy Merckx, for example: “I’d seen Eddie [sic] around Le Village time to time. Quite often shovelling fresh cream gateaux into his gob by the plateful. The first time I realised that the Cakeman was Eddie, I nipped over and shook his hand. Then I walked back to [my son] Earl and said to him, ‘Shake the hand that shook the hand’.”