On the Road Bike Read online

  They surely must have rumbled me. My understanding of their feats was thin, as palpably inadequate as a two-line entry on Wikipedia. Something hardened in my imagination, a thought, an impulse to shine a light, for my benefit, on this mysterious subculture. I should tackle this feeling of otherness head on. Put simply: I decided that I would like to know more. I felt for the collar of my jacket that was slung across the back of my chair.

  Before I left, though, I bumped into Chris Boardman. He, at least, was a familiar face. Half-a-dozen Tours de France, on which we had worked together for ITV had seen to that. His induction into the Hall of Fame was done, and he was looking, as he often does, for a way out of the spotlight.

  ‘Ned, what are you doing here?’

  That was a very, very good question. And it had taken a man of Chris’s direct wit to pose it.

  ‘To be absolutely honest, Chris, I have no idea.’

  I pushed through the door to be greeted by a pelting of Manchester rain, and went off in search of a taxi, wishing I’d ridden a bike for a living.

  CHAPTER 2

  CB

  ‘Always believe in your soul, you’re indestructible . . .’

  THE EARLY 1990S, when Chris Boardman was in his record-breaking, medal-winning pomp, were still very primitive times for televised sports coverage.

  The notion of a ‘montage’ was very undeveloped and exciting; a daring, edgy appropriation from the brave new world of MTV. Nowadays we take for granted the highly polished, fast-cut subliminal imagery that forms the glossy packaging around major sporting events. In fact, the 2012 Olympics were so stuffed with them, we had to invent an entirely new first-world ailment: ‘montage-fatigue’.

  Not so long ago, though, this kind of thing was a very young science. In fact, by the time I first started to work in television, at Sky Sports in the late nineties, ‘music pieces’, as we rather quaintly referred to them, were still very much embryonic and, by today’s standards, almost unwatchably naïve.

  Working away in windowless edit suites at Sky’s soulless HQ as an assistant producer on football shows, I diligently matched moving images to lyrics from popular music. No literalism was beyond or beneath me. Over a shot of George Graham leaving Highbury, Abba: Though it’s hurting me, now it’s history . . . or, slightly more unusually, Newcastle United’s famous demolition of Manchester United set to XTC: One . . . Two . . . Three . . . Four . . . Five . . . Senses working overtime (and here it was very important to move on to something else before the rest of the chorus kicked in: there was no obvious match for . . . trying to tell the difference between a lemon and a lime . . .)

  Never such innocence again.

  Half a decade later, when I first got to know Chris Boardman who had joined us on the Tour de France coverage, we took a childish delight in teasing him about his gold medal from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. We were working on the fairly plausible supposition that at some point the BBC’s coverage of those games must have featured a musical montage of Sally Gunnell, Linford Christie and Chris Boardman variously crossing the line, waving the flag and kissing the medal, set to the tune of Spandau Ballet’s ‘Gold’. This amused us endlessly, and left Chris baffled. Undaunted by his lack of enjoyment of the joke, we would try to pass off lines from the song as everyday conversation.

  Thus, ordering dinner at the restaurant: ‘Are you going to have the fish, Chris? Always believe in your sole.’

  And, slightly more obscurely: ‘Come and join us over here, Chris. Sorry that the chairs are all worn.’

  You get the drift.

  At a time when Chris was actually winning gold, we were all mostly hollering the chorus in smart-arse post-modern student parties.

  If men like Graham Webb and Brian Robinson had cut somewhat marginal figures that night of their induction into the Hall of Fame, Chris Boardman, reluctantly, was right in the thick of things. I say reluctantly, because Chris doesn’t do popularity very comfortably. Small talk is not his strong suit. Ludicrous talent, boundless application and unfettered ambition? Yes, he’s quite good at all three of those.

  Although I have known him for many years now as an ITV colleague, a man of the telly, a pundit, it is only when he is set in his proper context, among folk who were vanquished and/or inspired by him, that I am reminded of the overwhelming importance of his contribution to the sport. It is on nights like that dinner, when people will come up to him, saucer-eyed and very nearly kneel at his feet, that his iconic status is laid bare. It’s not just the public who recognise his genius. There’s barely a British rider of the modern era who won’t reference him as a touchstone for progress, Wiggins foremost among them. Chris’s discomfort at all this attention is as palpable as it is amusing.

  His role in changing the face of British cycling, in leading the way out of a patchy past and into a holistic future, could hardly have been greater, even if it was born of little more than his prodigious will to win. A career that straddled the eighties and the nineties, as well as straddling both the track and the road, was driven by the application of inventive thinking. Simply doing things a certain way, because ‘that’s the way that we’ve always done it’ meant nothing to him. To borrow a phrase from Blackadder, he tweaked the nose of tradition and poked a stick in the eye of convention. And he won. World Records, Olympic Gold Medals (the first Briton to do that for seventy-two years), and Yellow Jerseys on the Tour de France.

  I had been meaning for some time to meet up with Chris. He was a friend, but also, I guessed, a decent starting point. If anyone could guide me through the curiosities of the British cycling scene, its stuffiness and inspiration, then surely he could help me understand how it changed from something cast iron into something carbon fibre, from woolly jumpers to sweat-wicking Lycra. It wasn’t just because his achievements on a bike had helped to kick-start the whole reinvention of the sport from happy amateurism to ruthless professionalism. He had also, through his bike business, correctly identified and ridden the new wave of enthusiasm for participation, being smart enough to do an exclusive deal with Halfords at a time when bike snobbery prevented most serious brands from that association. Tens of thousands of new punters, armed with unprecedented levels of cash, suddenly wanted to splurge it on a new bike. And where would they go to spend their money? The same place they went as kids: Halfords.

  Bike purists can shiver all they like. But that’s the truth. And that was the genius of it.

  In that sense, he was a revolutionary. And in another, slightly far-fetched sense, if GB Cycling supremo Dave Brailsford is Stalin, then that must make Boardman Lenin. Without the mausoleum, obviously.

  Although there is a burger bar named after him at the Manchester Velodrome.

  Of all the people I wanted to consult, Chris was not only one of the most obvious, but also one of the easiest to contact. Never without his iPhone, and more often than not juggling his iPad and MacBook for good measure, he is always within reach. So much so, that we have never quite settled on our preferred method of communication. Emails and tweets are interchangeable with text messages, always signed off with a neat, digital, ‘CB’. Why waste characters?

  Either way, I discovered that I would be up in Liverpool one Sunday night. I wondered whether he might fancy going for a ride the following day, perhaps near his home on the Wirral.

  Good idea.

  CB

  That was our arrangement.

  Then, an extraordinary thing happened. It was the day before the ride and I was driving north on the M40. Just as I was pulling into Cherwell Service Station to grab a coffee, my phone pinged with an incoming, and paranormal text.

  I parked up, and read the message.

  If you are travelling up the M40 let me know. I’ve just woken up in a Travelodge near Oxford. Will meet you for a coffee en route.

  CB

  I looked up. I had parked in front of the exact Travelodge from which Chris had just texted me. I could have been no more than fifteen yards away from him. This was a GPS with more th
an a hint of divinity, as if He Himself had programmed the sat nav. It was very Chris Boardman to be that precise, however accidentally.

  Five minutes later, over a coffee, we made plans for the following day.

  ‘What kind of ride do you want to do tomorrow?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know. Hills? I quite fancy a climb.’

  I thought this would stand me in better stead than simply gasping for air behind his relentless back wheel along some flat windswept stretch of the Wirral Peninsula. I had some experience of riding long straight lines with him, or rather behind him, and knew the casual pain he could inflict without even realising it. I remember once, having lost contact with his rear wheel, and fallen back by some fifty yards, looking up to see him raise his right finger in the air, and then move it backwards and downwards, so that it pointed quite unambiguously at the piece of flying road just behind his bike. I think he meant well, but there was no doubt I was being ordered to heel. He was like a giant cradling a butterfly, unaware of his power to hurt.

  ‘OK. We’ll do the Shoe.’

  I nodded, sagely. What, I thought to myself with dread, was ‘the Shoe’?

  I tried to steer the conversation round to other things, to start to tap his considerable brains. But, for some reason, I kept losing my thread. All I could think of was ‘the Shoe’.

  At some point a fan sitting at the table next to ours, who had kept his counsel up till then, came over to greet Chris. He shook both our hands enthusiastically.

  ‘Two cycling legends!’ He beamed. I looked down at my coffee. He went on to tell Chris how great he was. Then we all went our separate ways.

  Later on that afternoon, I received another, this time very clever message, the likes of which I have never been able to master on smartphones. When I opened it, it automatically fired up the map function on my phone, and dropped a pin near a place called Llangollen. It looked remote. It looked like there were mountains all over the place. It sounded Welsh. This was to be our meeting spot.

  At 10 o’clock the next day, we pulled up virtually at the same time in a dusty car park on the side of a hill. I, in my filthy ten-year-old Renault with my bike wobbling around on the roof rack; Chris, in a squat, immaculate Audi sports car.

  I frowned at him as he climbed out of the driver’s seat. ‘Where’s your bike? Have you forgotten your bike?’ I could see no evidence of it.

  He grinned and popped open the boot. There it was, wheels off, not a millimetre to spare. Within seconds, it was out and assembled while I still struggled awkwardly to free my bike from the rack.

  All around us, mountain bikers were fiddling with their huge, clunky-looking contraptions and padding up with body armour. Then, they would set off uphill, infinitely slowly, but in the tiniest gears that made their legs spin laughably fast. I watched them go.

  It fascinated me to see how little notice they took of Chris. He could hardly have been more conspicuous. His bike displayed his name, his helmet bore his name, and his bright yellow and white jersey had ‘cboardman’ written across his chest. His face looked, for all the world, like Chris Boardman’s face. The mountain bike variety of enthusiast either had no idea that they were in the presence of greatness or cared not a jot. Chris told me he often came to ride out here. Perhaps that had something to do with it.

  Chris makes a great play of being a sociopath. ‘I don’t really do people’ is one of his mantras. And certainly, I have seen him negotiate early exit strategies to extract himself from encounters that he considers a waste of time. On one occasion at a function we both attended, another guest came up to where Chris and I were standing and mistakenly addressed me as Chris Boardman, something which happens fairly often but not usually when I am actually standing next to the real Chris Boardman. I grinned sheepishly, and Chris just sidled off into the distance, leaving the lamentably misguided individual to tell me all about how great an achievement my Hour Record was.

  But, for all that, he is a determinedly chatty presence on a bike, keeping up a flow of conversation, which is often ‘tech’ related (and when this happens, the only sensible course of action is to agree with everything). Not only that, but he greets everyone on the route: riders, ramblers, farmers. They all get the same matter-of-fact ‘Morning.’ He doesn’t expect a reply, and he doesn’t always get one. Not even from sheep.

  Once, back in his racing days, a sheep had darted out in front of him on a vicious descent somewhere in Yorkshire riding the Pru-Tour. He’d hit it, catapulted off his bike, slid across the tarmac and had come to a rest, only to hear the screams of some poor American rider who’d been chasing him downhill and who had no alternative than to smack into the prone figure of Boardman and his bike and execute his own somersault dismount.

  It had been a narrow escape. ‘If I’d hit a stone wall there, I’d have been smashed to jelly.’ But because the incident involved a sheep, his teammate, the legendary German rider Jens Voigt, still recalls the incident with undue hilarity. His funster teammates stuffed wool in Boardman’s spokes as a practical joke the next day. Every summer on the Tour de France, when Jens sees Chris, the story gets revisited. I guess he must believe it to be the archetypal British racing incident: Chris Boardman, the Benny Hill of the Chute. Just too funny.

  People do not think of Chris as being funny. But they are wrong.

  During the 2012 Tour, he received a series of emails from LOCOG. Their contents were considered so confidential, that they contained a legal threat, in the form of a NDA (non-disclosure agreement). However, this didn’t stop him from sharing them with us. I am so glad he did.

  It started simply enough.

  The first communication came from a lady working closely with Danny Boyle on the running order for the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. Plans were being finalised for the big night, and both former champions and cyclists would be significantly represented. Danny would be personally honoured if Chris would agree to make an appearance.

  Chris thought about it briefly, and although he might instinctively have held some reservations, he recognised the importance of the event. So he replied: ‘I am available and would be happy to take part.’

  That was the precise moment at which it started to go wrong. The next email, after a gushing expression of delight that Chris had agreed to participate, went on to detail what this might involve.

  It seemed that the IOC regulate the content of opening ceremonies more than you might imagine, and that there are certain compulsory elements. One of these is the use of doves, the international ceremony shorthand for peace.

  Alarm bells started to ring.

  ‘Are there costumes involved?’ wondered Chris.

  There certainly were costumes involved. It seemed that the cyclists had been earmarked for the role of the doves. Further emails revealed that they would be riding bikes and flapping wings. A peloton of ‘Dove-Bikes’. Inside Chris Boardman’s head a warning klaxon sounded, which in turn was accompanied by an air-raid siren. But that was not all. Given Chris Boardman’s status as the godfather of modern British cycling, he had been pencilled in for an even greater honour.

  Was he comfortable with heights? ‘I should perhaps warn you that there will be some aerial work.’

  The email elaborated again. From the Dove-Bike peloton, a single Dove-Bike would emerge, flying high across the stadium. This would be known as the Hero Dove-Bike, or Bike-Dove (I forget which way round it was). This would be Chris Boardman.

  ‘Oh no.’ That’s what I remember him saying. ‘Oh. No.’

  He was consumed by crisis. How could he now withdraw his cooperation? Because withdraw he most certainly had to. I do not think I have ever seen Chris so worried.

  Of course, none of this was helped by the fact that wherever he went for the next few days he found that he was followed by the gentle cooing of doves, a sound which, by the end of the week, almost everyone on our team had perfected, and probably also some of the riders on the Tour de France.

  I don’t know how he man
aged to swerve his obligations in the end. But, in my opinion Danny Boyle’s show was just a bit poorer for the non-inclusion of Chris Boardman, dangling from the roof of the Olympic Stadium in an aero helmet and skinsuit, trying to reduce his wind profile, while all the time flapping his huge feathery arms and smiling.

  We set off into a headwind for the first six or seven miles. Chris advised me to ease up a little. Unconsciously, I had been pushing myself too hard so as not to fall short of respectability in his eyes. He had warned me about this before, back in France when we first rode a little way together. That was the day he taught me the cycling phrase ‘half-wheeling’, which means forcing the pace just a little too much for comfort by riding alongside someone, but persistently half a wheel ahead. Such subliminal forcing of the pace is considered bad form, and very inadvisable for those who do not know their limits.

  I took his advice though, and eased off. Already I was breathing much harder than him, my conversational gambits punctuated by frequent pauses . . . in which I took an almighty . . . gulp of air before I could . . . continue. As if to force home his Olympian effortlessness, he was riding his own design of cyclo-cross bike with a heavy profile on its thick tyres, built for sliding around in the mud, not for barrelling along tarmac roads. It slowed him down, but not so as you’d notice. I was on a carbon-fibre bike with stupidly slick racing tyres. This bike sped me up, but, again, not so as you’d notice.

  There was so much that Chris could execute effortlessly, which I would only mimic with added clumsiness. Changing gear from the big to the small ring at the front involved me free-wheeling for a good minute, while I looked down at the chain and fumbled repeatedly with the gearshift levers, trying every combination seemingly at random before the right configuration appeared at my feet.