On the Road Bike (3 page)

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 than 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 managed 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.

But I was most jealous of his ability to blow snot from his nostrils.

With a subtle move to the side, and the application of a thumb to the nostril, he was able to clear his airways of prodigious amounts of mucus with a precision and vigour you could only applaud. I didn't dare expel it with such aplomb, for fear that it might backfire (literally) or, worse still, wrap itself around the shins of a former Olympic champion. Instead, I opted for discreet dabs and wipes here and there. Not, it transpired, the right policy.

‘You're covered in snot,' Chris noticed. ‘I've been watching you going about getting rid of it. It's been fascinating.'

I glanced down. It looked like I had gone to sleep overnight in a cabbage patch, and the slugs had chosen me as their observation platform.

‘My nose won't do the thing that your nose can do,' I protested, unimpressively.

I was woefully unprepared in other ways, too. ‘Did you bring any food?'

‘No.'

This was perhaps the greatest sin of all, a bit like forgetting to fill your car with petrol. Chris had a plan though. He often does. It's one of the things that make him great.

‘Did you bring any money?' Yes! Yes! I had a fiver in my pocket. ‘Right, there's a café at the top of the Horseshoe Pass (I was beginning to figure that this was the mythical ‘Shoe' he had mentioned back in Cherwell service station). We'll stop there and get a cereal bar.'

This sounded like a good plan.

First though, Chris had to get me to the top. There was a hiccup en route. Just as the road started to rise before the climb, I punctured.

‘Have you got a spare inner tube?' No. ‘Did you bring a pump?' No. ‘Tyre levers?' No.

Luckily, he'd planned for just such an occurrence.

We pulled over to the side. There was no way that I was going to fumble my way through the tyre change with Chris Boardman MBE watching over me. It wasn't even up for discussion, so rather pathetically, I simply said, ‘Can you do it, please, Chris?' I very nearly called him Dad by mistake. He did. And was ever so faintly not amused by having to do it, as well.

And then we started to climb. After a while, the road bent left into the Horseshoe itself, and, more significantly, into another, but this time howling, headwind. I gritted my teeth and put my head down, and although I was in my easiest gear, simply turning the pedals at all had become surprisingly hard. The ribbon of tarmac unwound horribly before my eyes.

At the bendy extremity of the horseshoe, the gradient ramped up significantly. It was almost more than I could bear. Chris kept chatting, although God knows what about. All I could hear was the wind, and the blood battering through my ears.

‘I may not . . . talk much . . . for a . . .bit.'

We did reach the top. There, on an exposed moorland shoulder of land, sat a sprawling white café. There were lots of motorcyclists, a few earnest-looking rambling couples and a gaggle of pensioners. But Chris and I were the only cyclists there that day. I stumbled in, fumbling for my chinstrap, dripping sweat from my nose and hunting for flapjack.

‘Shall I fill up your water bottle, Chris?'