On the Road Bike
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Ned Boulting
List of Illustrations
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Afterthought
Chapter 1: Depart
Chapter 2: CB
Chapter 3: Nobody Would Go With Me
Chapter 4: Mick’s Grand Tour
Chapter 5: Something to Make You Change Your Mind
Chapter 6: The Six-Day Eventist
Chapter 7: Romantics in Britain
Chapter 8: Gillots and the Thirty-Four Nomads
Chapter 9: The Mayor Who Hated Cycling
Chapter 10: The Meek and the Mighty
Chapter 11: Sniffing the Shoe
Chapter 12: Two Tommy Godwins
Chapter 13: The Longwick Ten
Chapter 14: Beckett of the Bec
Chapter 15: Devon is a Place on Earth
Chapter 16: The Lords of Life
Forethought
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
Ned Boulting has noticed something. It’s to do with bikes. They’re everywhere. And so are their riders. Some of these riders seem to be sporting sideburns and a few of them are winning things. Big things. Now Ned wants to know how on earth it came to this. And what, exactly is ‘this’.
In On the Road Bike, Ned Boulting asks how Britain became so obsessed with cycling. Ned’s search puts him in contact with some of the wonderful and wonderfully idiosyncratic people who have contributed to this nation’s two-wheeled history. It’s a journey that takes him from the velodrome at Herne Hill to the Tour of Britain at Stoke-on-Trent via Bradley Wiggins, Chris Boardman, David Millar (and David’s mum), Ken Livingstone, both Tommy Godwins, Gary Kemp (yes, him from Spandau Ballet) and many, many more. The result is an amusing and personal exploration of the austere, nutty soul of British cycling.
About the Author
Ned Boulting started his broadcasting career at Sky in 1997, working as a reporter alongside Jeff Stelling on the now legendary show Soccer Saturday. In 2006 he was given the Royal Television Society’s Sports Reporter of the Year Award. He presents the Tour of Britain for ITV, as well as the inaugural Tour Series, and contributes features and live reports to coverage of the Tour de France. His first book was the much-loved How I Won the Yellow Jumper.
Also by Ned Boulting
How I Won the Yellow Jumper
How Cav Won the Green Jersey
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1 Chris Boardman at Horseshoe Pass
2 Graham Webb in his house, 2012
3 Framed photo of Graham Webb in his World Champion’s jersey, 1967
4 Maurice Burton, 2012
5 Germain Burton, 2012
6 Ron Keeble (left) at the 2012 Tour of Britain
7 Two cyclists
8 Tommy Godwin 1, endurance record holder (courtesy of Barbara Ford)
9 Tommy Godwin 2 with his medals at the Herne Hill velodrome, 2012
10 Toastmaster General Garry Beckett at the Bec Cycling Club’s annual lunch
11 Germain and Maurice Burton with me at that Bec Hill Climb, 2012
12 Dying on the Bec Hill Climb, 2012 (courtesy of Simon Bromley)
13 Lone MAMIL in Devon, 2012
14 Tony Hewson with the most gigantic laurel wreath (courtesy of Tony Hewson)
To Everyone at Number 100
I just explained to the police what I was doing and told them that things like that were normal on the Continent, and they said they were happy and that they’d try to help.
Percy Stallard
AFTERTHOUGHT
THE HEAT HAD blown in from the south, sweeping the race along with it. It had been cooked up over the Pyrenees, piling isobars high into the air, over the heads of the circling eagles keeping watch on the riders toiling up the mountains.
The hot air rushed on, spreading out across France, further north, through the Tarn valley, skirting the Haute-Vienne, swallowing Châteauroux and Chartres whole before its assault on Paris.
Here it slowed its pace and held steady. Warmth engulfed the city, turning the stone of the old capital white. The golden tip of the towering obelisk in the Place de la Concorde burnt so keenly you could hardly look at it without squinting. Far below, in the oily fetid dark of the subterranean car park, a thousand official Tour de France vehicles stood in long rows, their engines ticking as they cooled. The race had roared into Paris. It was done.
At street level, the dust and grime baked, despite the shade of a hundred mathematically manicured plane trees whose precise rows marked the edges of the road. Gendarmes on overtime, freighted in from outlying provinces, stood cheerlessly guarding every side street. The people who had come to see the spectacle fanned themselves with whatever merchandising tat had been flung their way by the passing publicity caravan. They were held back from the road by not one, but two sets of barriers.
Over their heads huge French tricolour flags had been unfurled to catch an absent breeze, but were adrift in the doldrums. The Tour was going nowhere today. Paris, its painterly sky alive with the criss-crossing of helicopters, was falling deeply in love with itself. Just as its residents, bored by the annual invasion of this astonishing race, profess a world-weary indifference, so the rest of us non-Parisians are subject to our own Pavlovian responses to its beauty. What a city!
This was the place: the Champs-Elysées on 22 July 2012. The Tour de France in its ninety-ninth incarnation.
And in the middle of it, on a huge podium, stood a gangly bloke from Kilburn with an unlikely name: Bradley Wiggins.
His hair had grown over the month he had been away, and brightened at the fringes in the sun. His sideburns, uncared for during three weeks on a bike, had thickened and spread. This was quaint enough, but he was also spectacularly thin. As a result, he looked like a character from a Victorian children’s cautionary story. There he stood, saluting the crowd, a half-smile decorating his cautious face.
From this point, facing east, he would have seen, at the end of the avenue the wrought-iron gates of the Jardin des Tuileries and behind that the Louvre. He would have gazed back at the temporary stands filled with the great and good of the corporate world, sitting in cushioned rows in the Tribune Présidentielle, the Tribune Marigny and Tribune Concorde. And in front of him, held back by a rope that spread across the whole width of the boulevard, hundreds of lenses, catching the late-afternoon sun and winking at him.
I was familiar with this pageant. Ten times, each year since 2003 when I first started to follow the Tour, I had stood to the side of the podium watching on as Armstrong, Landis, Sastre, Contador and Evans had all thrown their arms aloft in victory. Wiggins would have watched it, too, sometimes in the flesh a little further down that cobbled road, half dismounted from his bike, ignored by everyone: a finisher, not a winner.
I had seen the moment repeated, when from nowhere a microphone appears, thrust at the champion by one of the Tour’s army of green-shirted roadies. I had seen each different winner right himself, pause, and level some carefully scripted words in the general direction of the Tour de France, France Itself, The World and History.
‘Mesdames et Messieurs . . .’ or ‘Ladies and Gentlemen. It is a great honour . . .’ or ‘I am highly honoured to be standing here . . .’
‘Merci au Tour de France . . .’ Applause.
Except on this day that’s not what happened. Firstly, there was some confusion over the order of events. Instead of going straight to the speech, the French nation were first treated to a surprisingly unpleasant rendition of ‘God Save The Queen’ by a middle-aged lady clad in a sparkly red blouse and a floor-
length, Union-Jack wrap/skirt so puzzlingly awful that it left most of us frowning at our iPhones and conducting a Google Images search on Lesley Garrett, just to check this lady wasn’t an imposter.
Then, when she’d finally relented, Wiggins was handed his microphone, even though he was already juggling a glass vase, a bouquet and a cuddly toy, like a serial winner of the Generation Game. He first had to deposit all of these items at his feet without them falling off the podium, then he cleared his throat, and smartly turned his back on France.
Now he faced west, looking down the length of the avenue towards the Arc de Triomphe. Here, the British had gathered in huge numbers. Manx flags with their Masonic-looking three-legged star, poking up like tall poppies in a field of Union Jacks. The ferries from Dover had been booked up for days. They stood ten deep, from the Avenue de Marigny right up the length of the boulevard.
It was to these people that Wiggins turned. From their patient, sweaty ranks, a great cheer went up. And without so much as a nod to his hosts, who were now treated only to a view of his yellow-clad bony spine, he delivered the most exquisitely judged line I have ever heard.
‘Right. We’re just going to draw the raffle numbers . . .’
Paris shivered, as if someone had just tapped it on the back. He’d just turned the Champs-Elysées into a village hall. It was perfect.
CHAPTER 1
DEPART
IT WAS AN embossed card with my name on it: an invitation to a posh dinner. This, I wasn’t expecting.
In February 2010 British Cycling was celebrating fifty years. They were to hold a gala dinner in Manchester, at which they intended to ‘induct’ (a curious word, that) fifty British cycling legends into their Hall of Fame, one for every year of their existence. Would I like to attend as their guest?
I very much would. I replied post-haste (or at least by email) that I would be delighted to accept their kind invitation.
I did not know, as I hit send and wrote the date in the diary, that the dinner I was about to attend would set in motion a chain of events, chance encounters, visits and inquiries that would become something of a preoccupation, and at times even, an obsession, for the following two years. This simple email was the harmless-looking digital key to a hitherto hidden world. At least it had been hidden to me. It would prove to be a world peopled by fulsome characters, quiet fanatics, feuds, pettiness, injury and ambition and as it slowly revealed itself to me, so my curiosity grew.
But buffing my black schoolish shoes and fiddling with an iron in a Manchester hotel room on the evening of the big event, I was, not unreasonably, filled with doubt.
There would, I anticipated, be hundreds of people there, all of whom would have played a significant role in the history of this sport in our country; people who had achieved greatness, coached greatness, fostered greatness or simply dedicated their lives to the furthering of the cause of the bicycle.
And then there would be me: a bloke vaguely from off the telly.
I felt fraudulent, and a little nervous. After all, I had needed fully seven years to acclimatise to the demands of covering a three-week stage race in France. It had taken me a long time to begin to understand Le Tour, its associated cast list of characters, and the intricate web of ritual and tradition woven around the race.
And with the Tour my cycling knowledge stopped. For those other eleven months of the year, it pretty much went on without me, while my day job as a reporter for ITV Sport kept me busy with football matches. As far as the history of cycling was concerned, I was still a bit stunted. For me, the Tour began in 2003, not in 1903.
I’d been learning in a microwave, trying to acquire a sense for the nuances of a very particular sport, in a very particular country as quickly as I could. But the intuitive understanding which normally takes a lifetime to develop, this was still beyond me. However much I grabbed at its coat-tails, all I came away with were torn fragments as it slipped through my fingers.
From time to time, my work had brought me to races in the UK. I had flirted sporadically with domestic affairs, but my heart still lay overseas. The Tour de France seemed a very long way from that cold winter evening in the north-west of England.
No matter. My shoes were polished to the best of my ability, and I had wedged my oversized cardboard invitation into my jacket pocket. The wheels were in motion.
When I got to the venue in the middle of Manchester (a vast impersonal aircraft hangar of a hall) I realised, to my horror, that my suspicions had been well founded. There were indeed hundreds of people there, all of whom had absolutely played a significant role in the history of the sport in our country. The invitation hadn’t extended as far as my partner, Kath, so there was no one whose greater ignorance I could occasionally exploit, no one who knew less about cycling in the room, whom I could now and then refer to as ‘only a nurse’. I was quite alone, it seemed.
I walked in and, fearful of being engaged in conversation, headed for the information board. Finally spotting my name amid the vast matrix of the seating plan, I identified the round table at which I was to be seated. I paid scant attention to the other names clustered around mine, before snaking my way through the slalom course of chair backs and tablecloths to where my dinner was to be served.
Only then did I realise that this was no normal table, and these no normal guests.
To my left, already seated, and waiting for the others to arrive, were a well-turned out couple in their late sixties. They looked for all the world as if they had just stepped in to the venue from some exclusive dinner dance in Mayfair. She greeted me with a regally outstretched hand, dusted a little with silver and diamonds, and he, with a white bow tie and perfectly manicured hair, smiled at me and introduced himself.
‘Barry Hoban. Pleased to meet you.’
Barry Hoban! Prior to Mark Cavendish, the British rider with the most stage wins ever on the Tour de France, a contemporary, and sometime rival, of the great Eddy Merckx!
What was I doing sitting next to Barry Hoban?
‘Hello. My name’s Ned Boulting.’
Never has my name sounded quite as lame as it did then. It flopped onto the tablecloth, and lay there, uncomfortably occupying the space between us.
‘And this is my wife, Helen.’ Of course it was! Helen married Barry in 1969, two years after she was widowed. Her first husband, also a cyclist, had died on Mont Ventoux riding the 1967 Tour de France. His name was Tom Simpson.
This couple were British cycling royalty.
I took my seat, and looked around the table at the other guests, sneaking glances when I could at the name cards in front of them. Most names meant little to me, but the preponderance of grey hair at the table hinted at Achievement, with a capital A. The great Brian Robinson was at my table, the first British stage winner at the Tour de France. He was sitting on his own, fiddling with the little enamel ‘50 Years of British Cycling’ badge, which had been placed next to our knives and forks. He looked lost in thought. Perhaps he was reliving the 1957 edition of Milan–San Remo. But it was much more likely that he was just trying to figure out where he’d left his room key, and what time they might finally get round to serving the soup.
And to my right, sat a former World Champion.
His name didn’t ring a bell, at least not to me. He didn’t say much, except at one point, when, out of the blue he started to ask Helen something about Tom Simpson, and a replica Rainbow Jersey that he’d requested from the late, lamented icon. Helen, in the nicest possible way, tried to cut the conversation short.
For a moment, everyone, or maybe just I, felt a little awkward. Other than that, Graham Webb was quiet.
And so the dinner took its course. Hoban kept the table amused, a constant source of cycling-related anecdotes featuring a flood of significant names, not one of which meant anything to me. Defunct teams, oddly named races both on these shores and abroad, famous duels between forgotten men, skulduggery and comedy: this was the stuff of the evening. Brian Robinson occasionally looke
d up and smiled at some shared memory, before returning to his soup. And every now and then talk returned to the current crop of riders, their shortcomings, their talents, the money they earned. I hung on their words, amazed at my good fortune to be sitting alongside some of the greatest cyclists our country had ever produced; the real hard men of their time. Pioneers.
It was hard to square these men and their times with the sleek sport that cycling had become in this country. Their achievements were all the more remarkable given their unremarkable origins. Their self-sufficiency was a badge of honour, to be worn right next to their badges of enamel. I gazed around the room, and saw it all repeated at every table: a collision of the generations in microcosm. While some more senior guests banged flat-palmed on their tables to emphasise a point, or fiddled with the butter knife in their boredom, their younger counterparts held court in brasher tones or secretly checked their phones for messages.
They talk of British cycling’s ‘Perfect Storm’.
I’ve even used the phrase myself, often. The tornado of growth whipped up in the early twenty-first century by the three colliding winds of recession, environmentalism and health, and brought to a frenzy by the headlong rush for medals, jerseys, titles and honours. From the grass roots to tree tops, change was howling across our island. British cycling was being blown more quickly towards the future than anyone in that room could have imagined. Indeed, just over two years later, Bradley Wiggins was going to win the Tour de France.
One by one, all my dinner companions were called up to the stage for the Hall of Fame Induction. The names rang out. Some were no longer with us, such as the great Beryl Burton. Others were there in spirit only, such as Graeme Obree and Robert Millar. Finally, those who were in the hall, all posed for a picture. I sat alone at an empty table, my lack of belonging made visible.
Who were these men, really? My ephemeral status as a TV presenter had brought me to their table, where they had accepted me with grace and warmth. Their stories dripped with heritage; a culture at once rich, different, homely, ribald and largely at odds with the polished, corporate cycling world to which I had been introduced. Theirs was the history. Their collective experience and their considerable achievements had somehow got us here, to this rare altitude of success. They were the pathfinders. But how? And what had driven them on, in pursuit of such a madly marginalised career? British cyclist. It used to be an oxymoron, or a sort of silliness. Like French cricket.