On the Road Bike (7 page)

While ‘le Tour' came into being in 1903, its British counterpart stumbled into existence many, many years later. The late forties witnessed the regular running of an amateur race from Brighton to Glasgow, which sufficed for a time, but it wasn't until 1951, when the
Daily Express
bunged the race organisers a decent amount of money (and a great deal of free publicity), that a proper Tour of Britain was up and running. Astonishingly, and ingloriously, one of the riders that year was Jimmy Savile. He didn't win it.

Eight years later, the Milk Marketing Board got involved, and their eponymous, mostly amateur, race became a fixture in the calendar. The Milk Race then briefly coexisted with the professional Kellogg's Tour in the 1980s, creating a perfect fusion of the two primary requirements for a nutritious start to the day. Breakfast, at least for those Britons who followed bike racing, was sorted.

But by 1993 the milk had run dry, and, a year later, the cereal box emptied too. Four years of Tourlessness then followed, before the Pru-Tour (sponsored by Prudential) sputtered into life in 1998. Just one year later that particular insurance-based party was over, presumably because we'd fallen behind on our premiums.

After a five-year abstinence, in which the British cycling scene licked its wounds and decided what to do next, the modern Tour of Britain was born. And that's where, for the purposes of simplicity, we join the story.

Learning about the Tour of Britain, and the army of people who make up the wonderful, bizarre sitcom of the race, was a challenge and delight. I was first introduced to it when ITV signed a contract to televise it. Without wishing to resort to hyperbole, I would go so far as to say that in the spring of 2008, my life took a new, entirely unexpected and seriously pleasing twist, when I was called to a meeting room high up in ITV's glass and steel headquarters on the Grays Inn Road in London. Tea was served, and there was a clutch of chocolate Hobnobs on a plate, as there often is when there is momentous news to impart.

It wasn't without its awkwardnesses.

‘Hello. My name's Ned Boulting.'

I was talking, as periodically I am forced to, to that particular type of efficiency-exuding lady that sits behind reception desks at major institutions. I wither visibly in the face of such authority. Hers are the laminated visitors' badges. Hers, as a consequence, is the power to withhold or impart both the prospect of happiness and the prospect of future happiness, my children's prospects, and those of their children, too.

‘I'm here to see Mark Sharman.'

Mark Sharman was the Head of ITV Sport. My livelihood depended almost entirely on his munificence. I thought about the word ‘munificence' as I watched her tucking in the plastic folds of my visitor badge and handing it over.

‘Thank you,' I said, my voice a little too high.

And soon I was following her lead, walking through open plan offices and down corridors, trundling towards a minor junction point in my life, a rumbling and grinding of wheels over railway points, a slight diversion, or at least the arrival at a different platform from anticipated. I walked through the door.

‘Ah Ned, I've got a special project for you,' said the Boss when I was finally admitted into his glass and steel tomb. He looked like a man who had special projects up his sleeve. He had a way of doing things like that, which marked him out as boss material, that and the grey suit, with sleeves that were specially tailored to conceal the special projects they had hidden up them.

‘Oh yes?' I sat forward on his leatherette couch, in a style loosely based on James Bond, but at the same time managing to knock my bike helmet from the couch onto the ground, in the style of Rowan Atkinson.

I glanced down at it. And so did he. We locked eyes briefly over the upturned shell of the offending headgear. He shot his cuffs, and resettled himself on his couch, in the style of Alan Sugar.

‘Ned, do you ever turn up to meetings looking smart?'

‘I rode here. On my bicycle.' I threw my head slightly back and slightly sideways, a nod to where my bike stood locked up on the busy London street outside. ‘Sorry.'

Mark Sharman, the poker-faced, crisply suited TV executive that he was, sighed, in precisely his style. It wasn't a generalised sigh. He actually sighed
at
me, but then momentarily appeared to have lost his thread. A slight cloud passed over his reptilian executive gaze. Let's call it nostalgia.

‘I used to time trial when I was a kid. Around Derby.'

‘Did you?' An image of a teenaged Mark Sharman, dressed in a suit and tie, on a Raleigh, flashed past me. ‘Really?'

‘Yes.' There was another one of the awkward pauses, which occasionally characterise meetings with Mark. He picked up a Hobnob, and then put it down, distractedly. I couldn't help noticing that there was still no mention of the special project.

‘What gear set have you got on your bike?'

This was not a question I was expecting. ‘Campagnolo.'

I hoped that I had pronounced it correctly. It was a word I had only ever read in glossy black-and-white literature about bikes (well,
Rouleur
magazine, to be precise), or glimpsed on the ‘mech' as I tried to untangle the mess of chain and cogs, which resulted whenever I tried to change the tyre on my rear wheel.

‘Good God. Are they still going? And Shimano?' His face lit up.

‘I think so, Mark.' And then, simply to fill the empty noise that whistled in to fill the gap in this sparing conversation, ‘They make gears.'

He looked disappointed at me, not for the first time that day. Then, suddenly, he was down to business. ‘Tour of Britain.'

This was neither a question, nor a proposition, nor a threat. It was cut and pasted straight from some niche cycling website into our actual conversation. It sounded a bit like the Tour de France, only over here. But beyond that, I couldn't have told you much.

‘O . . . K . . .' I said, with some hesitation.

I thought about a map of the UK (excluding, for the sake of practicality, Northern Ireland) and imagined animated routes wriggling all across it. I had an image of a rain-soaked finish line, and clutches of people in kagouls standing by the side of the road eating fried chicken from oily red boxes. For some reason, I had a fleeting mental image of Northampton, the county town of Northamptonshire.

‘Great,' I said, massively unconvinced.

That meeting was five years ago.

The first edition of the Tour of Britain that I presented was in September 2008. It started in bright sunshine on the Victoria Embankment in Westminster.

The chimes of Big Ben set the tone for a race richly bathed in post-Olympic euphoria. The British Cycling team had taken the Beijing velodrome by storm, and catapulted Victoria Pendleton and Chris Hoy onto the back of cereal packets, from where they now beamed down at bowls full of sugary milk. That was partly why ITV got involved, I'm sure. Suddenly, cycling was as mainstream and wholesome as Bran Flakes.

That year I had as my wingman/pundit the newly retired, marvellously phlegmatic West-Midlander Paul Manning. He had been part of the quartet of riders (along with Ed Clancy, Geraint Thomas and Bradley Wiggins) who had won the gold medal in the Team Pursuit at the Olympic Games.

Before the Tour of Britain got underway, and because I had hardly heard of any of the teams or the riders on the race, I paid Paul a visit at his terraced home in Stockport. It was to be a research trip, and a chance to get to know Paul, with whom I had only ever spoken on the phone. We sat in his tidy, tight front room (barely big enough to fit a bike in), drank tea, and spoke about the race.

Although he had devoted his career to riding the Team Pursuit on the track, Paul had also ridden a fair amount on the road, by no means an automatic choice for riders of his generation and pedigree. In fact, as we sat slurping from giant mugs while the rain rattled against his front window, he informed me that he himself had won a stage on the Tour of Britain, a solo breakaway into Glasgow in 2007.

‘It was good, that. I enjoyed it.' Paul cracked a huge smile.

Then, feeling like a fan and not a hard-headed journalist, I plucked up the courage to ask him if I could see his gold medal. I had not often met gold medallists before, and had certainly never seen a medal face to face.

No sooner had I popped the question, than he bounded upstairs, his long legs leaping the steps three at a time. I could hear him scrabbling around under his bed, which I thought would be the first place I'd keep a gold medal too, but probably the last place any burglar would expect to find one. I liked Paul for putting his medal under his bed. He returned with a box.

‘Can I take it out?'

‘Sure, go ahead.' Paul looked down at it, as if he too were seeing it for the first time. Gingerly I prised it out of its cloth berth. It was as big as a small saucer, and half an inch thick. It was magnificent. I told Paul I thought it was magnificent.

As awestruck as we have been by our Olympians, there is often a homeliness at the heart of their character that sits at odds with the grandeur of their achievements. It's a phenomenon best witnessed every four years, where the nation, through the BBC, watches a procession of British athletes crossing over the track to talk to their reporters. Seconds earlier, they've been flowing gracefully down the finishing straight, chin purposefully set and eyes menacingly vacant. Now, in the glare of the camera, they melt into hyper-normality.

‘It was, like, just amazing? I mean it was awesome? I just knew when I hit the home straight that it would be, like incredible . . .?' On and on they gush, grinning, twinkling, loving the moment. If you or I gave a post-race interview, that's exactly how we would sound, too: uncomposed, raw, wonderful.

Many hundreds of Britons (across the breadth of the summer games) have come, won medals and gone. Some have won a solitary bronze medal. Walk down the street, and there'll be no golden post box to mark their location. They're remembered by a select few, their achievements painted in gold ink on wooden boards, or up there on home-made websites, maintained by enthusiasts. But beyond that, there's not much, save for a medal wrapped in velvet, locked up in a safe or placed carefully under a bed. A lifetime, cast in metal.

Everywhere we went on the Tour of Britain, Paul took his medal. People were always asking to see it, and he would always oblige. They didn't always know who he was, or what he'd won a medal for. In fact, sometimes, they didn't even know there was a bike race on. ‘Why've they bloody shut the bloody high street, then?'

But at the sight of a gold medal, encased in red velvet, its ribbon neatly folded above it, all opposition to the high street being temporarily out of bounds would swiftly fade away.

‘That's bloody brilliant, that. Here, Keith! Come and have look at this bloody medal. It's real gold, that.' And Paul's expression would reflect their awe, as he gazed at it for the thousandth time. ‘What was your name again, mate?'

‘Paul Manning.'

‘Bloody well done, Paul.'

It worried him, carrying it from hotel to hotel, from Gateshead to Taunton. He was terrified he would lose it, or it would be stolen. Nothing bad happened, though.

The race finished in Liverpool where I met up with Chris Boardman, a man whose isolated, splendid gold medal in 1992 had set the tone for all these things to come.

‘The class of 2008 have stolen a bit of your thunder, haven't they, Chris?'

‘Just a bit, Ned. Blown out of the water.'

We sat down by the Liver Building with the race closing in on us. Despite the late summer sun, a wind picked up, and the Mersey winked its agreement. Things were indeed moving on. And that included the Tour of Britain.

To the casual observer, the Tour of Britain looks a bit like a value-brand Tour de France. It is not three weeks long, but eight days. The teams are not nine men strong, but six. It is not ridden in the blazing heat of a Provençale July, but in the mellow sunshine, and occasional torrential storms of an Atlantic September. In 2009, when ‘Le Tour' started in Monte Carlo, ‘The Tour' started in Scunthorpe. Twice in two years, the stage into Blackpool has been accompanied by a cyclone. Once it had to be cancelled.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

And yet, over the course of the five years in which I have presented ITV's coverage of the event, I have fallen a little in love with it. So too have many of the riders who pop their heads above its mossy dry-stone wall, and go on to forge greater careers elsewhere: Mark Cavendish, Edvald Boassen Hagen, Michael Albasini, Thomas de Gendt. I love the Tour for the crowds who brave often atrocious conditions to stand at the side of a windswept moor and watch the race go past. The tens of thousands of primary school children who, under instruction from their class teachers, clutch homely crayon-based exhortations to encourage some spuriously adopted local team (‘Go Node 4-Giordana!'). The hyperactive stewards. The RAF crews who volunteer to help out for the week. The policemen on their motorbikes who close the roads. The motorists who sit at T-junctions and wait patiently for the insanity to pass. All this, I love.

We always go to Stoke-on-Trent. It's an unwritten rule. It's a hard city, battered by macro- and microeconomics, ruined by successive generations of town planners. At its heart is Hanley, perched on top of a hill, with a richly carved Victorian town hall gazing out in dismay at the messily composed dog's dinner of concrete precincts and tower blocks that surround it. Those who know Stoke well are appropriately fond of it, with its canals and hills and pound shops and kebab joints. Those who see it with an outsider's eye, like the Dutch rider Lars Boom did in 2011, can feel humbled by its obvious plight. ‘I want to win here,' he told the race organisers. ‘I want to put on a show for the people who live here. I think they don't have it so easy.'

He did, and then he went on to win the overall race.