At the famous moment I was sitting next to my co-commentator Dan Lloyd, and at first I couldn’t work out what was going on. I could see him pulling to the side of the road and getting off the bike and I said, ‘He’s got a problem.’ He took off his helmet and then the top came off, the leader’s jersey, and I still had no idea what he was doing. Dan Lloyd, who has some experience of this kind of thing himself, being a former racer, blurted out, ‘Oh no! Oh no! Not that!’ Dan understood as soon as the helmet came off. You have to take the helmet off to get the jersey off. And the jersey has to come off to get the shorts down, which are normally held in place by looped braces under the jersey.
‘Not what?’ I asked as the whole process began to unfold. Dan silently mouthed the word shit at me before imploring the cameras to leave Tom alone. The camera operator hadn’t realised either. Thank heavens the director did; so most blushes were saved. As the shorts came down we cut to another shot – though for a split second or two we got to see more of Tom Dumoulin than even his mother has seen in recent years.
Tom took all the resulting jibes with a smile and a sense of humour. Pictures appeared on the internet of bikes with loos attached to the saddle. Spectators spent the next few days waving bog rolls as he rode past. I’m still surprised that the eventual Giro winner never got offered a sponsorship deal with a toilet roll company.
Tom wasn’t the first rider – and certainly won’t be the last – to find himself with this kind of problem. It’s a wonder that the French team FDJ used to insist on making their riders wear white shorts, which hide nothing. You’d think they would learn after a junior ended up on a lone breakaway that was completely unexpected. He had a dicky tummy but there were no team helpers to clean him up at the finish, so he ended up on the podium with badly stained shorts. The presentation team on the podium gave him a very wide berth.
Then Arnaud Démare (also riding for FDJ – is it something to do with the French diet?) pulled over by a camper van on a mountain stage of the Tour de France. He practically tore the door off its hinges and pushed his way past the owner, demanding to use the toilet.
Sean Kelly remarked to me, off air, ‘Ah yes, he’s got a dose of the scutters.’
‘The scutters?’
‘Yes. The scutters.’
Back live on air I said casually, ‘Well, it seems that Arnaud Démare has had a dose of the, um… er… scutters.’
Sean’s reaction seemed to me extreme: he mouthed a silent but dramatic NOOOO! and began shaking his head and waving his hands around. I carried on until the next ad break, when I turned back to Sean and asked, ‘What is the scutters?’
It turns out that, as Sean put it, ‘It’s one of the worst fecking things you can say in Ireland!’
He explained that scutters means the shits, but it’s more that that. It is simply the coarsest description of the worst possible trouser movement you can imagine. It’s only the Irish who fully understand the dark meaning of it.
Back in Ireland, all the viewers were howling with laughter at the fact that ‘that eejit Kirby just said the word scutters on live TV. Bet it was Sean put him up to it.’
Sometimes, of course, it is the facilities themselves that fail. On the women’s Tour of Qatar back in 2013, the organisers had provided precisely one, yes one, solitary portable toilet cabin. For the entire field. Naturally, down the road, riders began to stop to relieve themselves. Somebody important went ballistic.
There are police everywhere, but in the Middle East there are also the Religious Police. Nobody, even the regular police, messes with the Religious Police. They carry big sticks and a big attitude. Someone high up was very upset at word of women relieving themselves outdoors, albeit due to poor planning. Next day there was an edict on the noticeboard. ‘All competitors in need of taking a natural break must do so with modesty and out of sight. Riders will seek a place of privacy or face expulsion.’
Expulsion? That’s out of the country, not just out of the race! This was patently ridiculous. Qatar is flat. Pancakes look mountainous in comparison. To find a ‘place of privacy’, riders would have to ride off-road towards the horizon, which would take 20 minutes to be ‘out of sight’. There are no bushes to crouch behind.
It’s not just riders that have come a cropper due to official toilet placement, either. At one remote, mountaintop village finish during the 2014 Giro, it was a hell of a business squeezing all the production vehicles into the tiny square. Anyway, we were all finally sorted – with not a spare centimetre left after the trucks and other facilities were installed either side of the finish line. Then we were informed that ‘somebody local’ wanted to park his car.
Apparently, this somebody was someone who was not the sort of person to take no for an answer. Not, at any rate, in southern Italy.
After much consternation, it was deemed that the only place Mr Somebody could park his car was where two Portaloos had been stationed: right next to the transmission truck. Clearly Mr Somebody wasn’t going to walk anywhere, maybe due to fear of assassination or perhaps just because he couldn’t be arsed. Fearing recriminations, the logistics guys set about making it possible.
The only thing they could move were the Portaloos. A cherry picker pitched up and set about lifting them up.
