On the Road Bike (2 page)

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 looked 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.

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.

‘
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?