On the Road Bike (15 page)

His teammate Roman Hermann, (who went on to become the Minister of Sport in Liechtenstein) told Maurice how Schütz used to motivate himself by playing recordings of Hitler's Nuremburg Rallies.

‘I think if he saw me now . . . poor guy. Last I heard he was selling brushes and eggs and things door to door, you know.' There's sympathy in his voice when Maurice tells me this, but there is the merest trace of schadenfreude, too.

Then there was the matter of the nickname they gave to Maurice. Another German, the handsomely named Albert Fritz, one of the greatest Six-Day riders that country ever produced, came up with it and for a while it stuck.

‘At one point there was a nickname, yeah.'

It takes Maurice a while to tell me what it was. ‘I didn't like the name very much, you know. I don't know why they called me that.'

I have to push him a bit.

‘It was Bimbo. I don't know why.'

I am stunned to hear this. And Maurice, as if aware of my surprise, looks painfully embarrassed. There is no art to this nickname. No veneer of subtlety, nothing clever at all.

It is a word that has no direct English equivalent, but its nastiness lies somewhere on a scale between ‘Sambo' and ‘Wog'. That's how it would have sounded to their ears, and that's how they would have introduced ‘Bimbo' over the tannoy.

‘Ned, it's a hard world out there. It's a hard world.'

‘You remember. You were with me. We saw him go past and he sort of stopped and I think he realised.'

It's my last visit to Maurice's shop. We're talking about his trip to the Champs-Elysées. It was true: Bradley Wiggins, having strolled past Maurice, who'd been calling his name, temporarily checked his stride. He didn't come to a halt, but he did register something. Even by looking at the back of his head, as he walked away, you could tell.

I wonder what it meant to Maurice Burton, this moment in time. I wonder which bit of him was touched by the spectacle, why he'd gone out of his way to be there: the flag-waving Brit? The Jamaican? The itinerant cyclist from no-man's-land? The father to a cycling son?

Perhaps it was just that it was Bradley Wiggins. Had it been any other rider, Maurice might not have made the trip. Born in Belgium, raised in cycling, never quite conforming. Another outsider?

Wiggins turned and came back towards Maurice. He was being flanked by TV camera crews, recording the moment. Security dogged his every step. Mia fumbled excitedly with her iPad (and to her eternal regret, completely failed to press record). There was a brief smile, as he neared.

The two men embraced over the barriers of the Tour de France. Not much, if anything at all, was said. Only later could Maurice put it into words, back in the chaotic calm of his office. ‘It was a wonderful experience. It's a part of history. It's a circle, it's a full circle to me. I saw him when he was a little baby to winner of the Tour de France. To some degree I feel that I am part of that family now. More than I did. More than I did when I was younger.'

‘Have you changed, Mo?' I ask.

‘I haven't changed at all. The country has changed.'

There's one final pause. ‘What else do you want to know, Ned?'

I tell him that I think I've got enough.

IN 2011, THE
Tour of Britain ended with a split stage. Mick Bennett and the race organisation had pulled a surprisingly wonderful rabbit out of the hat. There was a time trial in the morning, followed by an afternoon race around a spectacular route along Whitehall and the Embankment in Central London.

Huge crowds packed the start/finish line, and spread out along the length of the five-and-a-half-mile course. Heavy showers were forecast for later, and would indeed materialise at precisely the moment that Mark Cavendish sprinted for the line to win the final stage of the Tour in a wet and windy London parody of his greatest Champs-
Elysées
triumphs. But for now, at least, as the riders rested between the two races, a warm sun beat down and the rain clouds bided their time over the horizon.

To entertain the spectators during the two-hour hiatus between events, some sponsors had the idea of putting on a ‘celebrity' time-trial competition, ambitiously called a ‘Hot Lap'. This being cycling, and cycling still being a minority sport, the calibre of celebrities they were able to sign up was modest at best (Dermot Murnaghan, for example, had promised to turn up but didn't show on the day, depriving the race of perhaps its biggest star) and at worst, it was laughable. They asked me to take part.

My pupils dilated instantly at the prospect. When else would I ever be cheered off a proper start ramp with a man counting down the seconds, and a proper machine going ‘beep, beep, beeeeeeep'? When else would I be allowed to ride as fast as I could along the Thames, sometimes on the wrong side of the closed roads and straight through red lights?

I had my misgivings, of course, since the only other time I had ridden in a ‘race' (a Brompton folding-bike thing), I had tumbled backwards through the field almost instantly, and was forced to dig so deep, just to avoid the ignominy of finishing stone last, that I felt faint for hours afterwards. The exertion and the humiliation had made me want to throw up. Racing bikes, I had established after just one outing, was an unutterably horrible experience.

Nonetheless, the fragile ego of the very minor TV presenter left me very little choice. It dictated that I accept the prestigious offer to ride the Hot Lap.

We were assigned teams, each of us joining three other riders who had bid extravagantly for the right to ride with us. The fact that the bidding was extravagant (or so we were led to believe) was not only embarrassing, but also demographically limiting. It meant that the winning teams were almost entirely composed of investment bankers.

My team was called Schroders. They presented me with a rather smart blue racing jersey, with their company's name emblazoned all over it. But my identification with the team went even further because, over the previous ten years, most of my pension contributions had disappeared down a black hole expensively administered by Schroders. I had a very real stake in the team, a fact that I took some pleasure in pointing out to my team captain who failed to see the funny side. Much like I did every month.

As my allotted time grew near, my nerves increased commensurately. We milled around, waiting for the off. I bantered briefly with Graham Bell, the ex-downhill skier turned TV action man. He was dressed head to toe in Team Sky clothing. There was Denise Lewis, the heptathlete, Amy Williams the snowy medal-winning Brit. There was Dean Macey, the former decathlete. He was my ‘thirty-second man', which meant that he was the last guy to set off before I took to the start ramp.

My knees actually started knocking against the frame of my bike as I sat on the saddle, held by a complete stranger, confronted by a sea of faces. I had no idea that knees actually ‘knocked' when under duress, except in the
Beano
.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beeeeep. I remember thinking, rather abstractly, about the composition of the strange ungainly cast of the Bash Street Kids as I slipped unconvincingly off the ramp, and started to pedal in the direction of Trafalgar Square. And that was the last thought I had that wasn't filled with the furious imperative to stop the pain from happening to me. By Northumberland Avenue, no more than about four hundred metres from the start, I was already at the limit. Underneath Waterloo Bridge, some five hundred metres further, I was perfectly poised on the edge of total collapse. To complete the next five miles at that speed seemed unthinkable.

I recalled to mind, through the disorder of my distress, Chris Boardman's scientifically perfect measure for determining effort in a time trial: you should ask yourself, ‘Can I sustain this to the end?' If the answer is ‘No', then you're going too fast. If the answer is ‘Yes', then you're going too slow. But if the answer is ‘Maybe', then you're judging the pace just right.

In my case the answer was ‘UUUrgghnngh.'

I contemplated easing up, and allowing the remaining riders all to coast past me. I could showboat my way to the end, I thought, blowing kisses at the crowd, taking the piss, being shameless and losing all my dignity. Or I could continue to blow snot from both nostrils, groan involuntarily, suffer self-evidently, get soundly beaten and lose all my dignity.

It was during these agonised deliberations that I caught sight of the athletic backside of Dean Macey. Yes, the former World Championship silver medallist, the heir apparent to the great Daley Thompson, a man of imposing physique and eight years my junior, was coming back towards me! I was closing in on him! I was catching a proper athlete! If my heart had been capable of skipping a beat, which by now it wasn't, then it would have done.

By Tower Hill, where the course turned around a hairpin bend and started to head for home, I was just a second or two behind him. It took me an age to close out that final tiny gap, but by Old Billingsgate Market, I had unmistakably, and at the full extent of my capacity, drawn level with him. Surprised by my sudden presence at his side, he glanced across. ‘Christ,' he said, ‘I must be really shit.'

At that precise moment, a third rider appeared on the scene, hurtling from behind me, and ripping past us both on the outside.

It was Gary Kemp, from Spandau Ballet.

I remember thinking, ‘Wow! Gary Kemp, from Spandau Ballet's really fast.' I think Dean Macey was thinking the same. Either way, his athletic self-respect was affronted by the sight of a New Romantic lead guitarist and sometime backing singer trouncing him. The knock on effect was that there was no chance of him letting himself be overtaken by a minor sports presenter as well. With an imperceptible acceleration Macey started to pull away from me again in pursuit of the rapidly vanishing Kemp.

I was powerless to do anything about it, and by the time we reached the finishing straight outside Downing Street, neither man was visible.

For the record, I actually completed the time trial a little faster than Dean Macey, but somewhat slower than my Schroders teammates, one of whom was clearly in his mid-fifties (and no doubt had a substantial and well-funded pension plan to look forward to when the day came for him to retire).

But neither he, nor I, nor Dean Macey were anywhere near as fast as Kemp. I had been humbled. Later on that afternoon, I was more formally introduced. In fact, bewilderingly, he introduced himself to me, rather than the other way round. I don't think he actually said, ‘Hello, I'm Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet', but in my imagination, I rather wish he had.

This was a man who had written the songs to my adolescence, to those long nights staggering around at the back of the Chiltern Radio Roadshow, taking crafty little swigs from warm cans of Colt 45 lager instead of actually talking to girls.

Fifty-one years old, trim, fit, and dressed entirely in the trademark black and pink of Rapha's exclusive range of clothing, he looked impressively athletic and perfectly aesthetic. His eyes twinkled with the madness of an obsessive.

‘I love cycling,' he told me. ‘I just love everything about it.'

It was months later that I first heard about the New Romantics' Ride. There'd been talk, of course. Occasionally it would get an oblique mention, a hint or two, in some newspaper diary, or feature in the lifestyle column of an in-flight magazine. But I knew of no one who could verify its existence, let alone claim to have been invited to take part.

I wondered what it could be.

I had visions of a peloton of flamboyantly dressed middle-aged pop legends floating around on all manner of bikes. Penny farthings would certainly be involved, as would tricycles, tandems and choppers. Helmets would surely be eschewed in favour of fedoras, trilbies and Napoleonic headgear. Most riders would be wearing greatcoats that flowed out behind them, occasionally getting caught in their spokes. It would be a carefree, debonair pageant. It would be Romantic, with a capital R.

But, did it actually exist? Or was it an urban myth to be filed alongside the secret underground tunnels that supposedly connect Buckingham Palace with the Edwardian brothels of Whitechapel? (Actually, I just made that last one up, but you can see how easily these things start.)

So I went to the source. I managed to obtain an email address for Gary Kemp from the sponsors of the Hot Lap. I worded a request for an interview, and hit send.

Barely ten minutes later, and to my wild surprise, I got a reply.

Hi Ned,

Yes, of course.

I live in town, West End. I had a new baby this week so end of next week. We could have a spin round Regent's Park. I usually have a gentle park ride with the lads on a Friday morning for an hour. And an interview after at mine if you like?

G.

This was the closest thing I had to proof of the existence of the New Romantics Ride. I read and reread the email, studying it closely for nuances. Who were the ‘lads'? What was meant by the conflicting terms ‘spin' and ‘gentle ride'? What pace did they imply? Would I be able to keep up and, even if I did, would I be able to talk? After all, I had seen Kemp ride and had been soundly beaten by him.

Consequently, it was with great trepidation that I set off one grey Friday morning for Regent's Park. Even the clothing choice had been testing. In the end, I'd opted for the canary yellow polyester of the De Ver bike shop in Norbury (I would make Maurice Burton proud), believing that would offer the least chance of me wearing the same thing as any of the ‘lads'. I doubted very much whether they'd have been clothes shopping in south London.

In that regard at least, I was quite right. Arriving at precisely the allotted hour and at the prescribed meeting point (which for reasons of confidentially, I hope you will understand, I cannot possibly commit to print), I noticed instantly that I was not the first. An impeccably clad man in his middle years already stood on the pavement, patiently holding his Condor bicycle, wearing a cap, and scrolling his iPhone as he waited.