On the Road Bike
Authors: Ned Boulting
CONTENTS
Chapter 3: Nobody Would Go With Me
Chapter 5: Something to Make You Change Your Mind
Chapter 6: The Six-Day Eventist
Chapter 7: Romantics in Britain
Chapter 8: Gillots and the Thirty-Four Nomads
Chapter 9: The Mayor Who Hated Cycling
Chapter 10: The Meek and the Mighty
Chapter 14: Beckett of the Bec
Chapter 15: Devon is a Place on Earth
Ned Boulting has noticed something. It's to do with bikes. They're everywhere. And so are their riders. Some of these riders seem to be sporting sideburns and a few of them are winning things. Big things. Now Ned wants to know how on earth it came to this. And what, exactly is âthis'.
In
On the Road Bike
, Ned Boulting asks how Britain became so obsessed with cycling. Ned's search puts him in contact with some of the wonderful and wonderfully idiosyncratic people who have contributed to this nation's two-wheeled history. It's a journey that takes him from the velodrome at Herne Hill to the Tour of Britain at Stoke-on-Trent via Bradley Wiggins, Chris Boardman, David Millar (and David's mum), Ken Livingstone, both Tommy Godwins, Gary Kemp (yes, him from Spandau Ballet) and many, many more. The result is an amusing and personal exploration of the austere, nutty soul of British cycling.
Ned Boulting started his broadcasting career at Sky in 1997, working as a reporter alongside Jeff Stelling on the now legendary show Soccer Saturday. In 2006 he was given the Royal Television Society's Sports Reporter of the Year Award. He presents the Tour of Britain for ITV, as well as the inaugural Tour Series, and contributes features and live reports to coverage of the Tour de France. His first book was the much-loved
How I Won the Yellow Jumper
.
How I Won the Yellow Jumper
How Cav Won the Green Jersey
1
Chris Boardman at Horseshoe Pass
2
Graham Webb in his house, 2012
3
Framed photo of Graham Webb in his World Champion's jersey, 1967
4
Maurice Burton, 2012
5
Germain Burton, 2012
6
Ron Keeble (left) at the 2012 Tour of Britain
7
Two cyclists
8
Tommy Godwin 1, endurance record holder (courtesy of Barbara Ford)
9
Tommy Godwin 2 with his medals at the Herne Hill velodrome, 2012
10
Toastmaster General Garry Beckett at the Bec Cycling Club's annual lunch
11
Germain and Maurice Burton with me at that Bec Hill Climb, 2012
12
Dying on the Bec Hill Climb, 2012 (courtesy of Simon Bromley)
13
Lone MAMIL in Devon, 2012
14
Tony Hewson with the most gigantic laurel wreath (courtesy of Tony Hewson)
To Everyone at Number 100
I just explained to the police what I was doing and told them that things like that were normal on the Continent, and they said they were happy and that they'd try to help.
Percy Stallard
THE HEAT HAD
blown in from the south, sweeping the race along with it. It had been cooked up over the Pyrenees, piling isobars high into the air, over the heads of the circling eagles keeping watch on the riders toiling up the mountains.
The hot air rushed on, spreading out across France, further north, through the Tarn valley, skirting the Haute-Vienne, swallowing Châteauroux and Chartres whole before its assault on Paris.
Here it slowed its pace and held steady. Warmth engulfed the city, turning the stone of the old capital white. The golden tip of the towering obelisk in the Place de la Concorde burnt so keenly you could hardly look at it without squinting. Far below, in the oily fetid dark of the subterranean car park, a thousand official Tour de France vehicles stood in long rows, their engines ticking as they cooled. The race had roared into Paris. It was done.
At street level, the dust and grime baked, despite the shade of a hundred mathematically manicured plane trees whose precise rows marked the edges of the road.
Gendarmes
on overtime, freighted in from outlying provinces, stood cheerlessly guarding every side street. The people who had come to see the spectacle fanned themselves with whatever merchandising tat had been flung their way by the passing publicity caravan. They were held back from the road by not one, but two sets of barriers.
Over their heads huge French tricolour flags had been unfurled to catch an absent breeze, but were adrift in the doldrums. The Tour was going nowhere today. Paris, its painterly sky alive with the criss-crossing of helicopters, was falling deeply in love with itself. Just as its residents, bored by the annual invasion of this astonishing race, profess a world-weary indifference, so the rest of us non-Parisians are subject to our own Pavlovian responses to its beauty. What a city!
This was the place: the Champs-Elysées on 22 July 2012. The Tour de France in its ninety-ninth incarnation.
And in the middle of it, on a huge podium, stood a gangly bloke from Kilburn with an unlikely name: Bradley Wiggins.
His hair had grown over the month he had been away, and brightened at the fringes in the sun. His sideburns, uncared for during three weeks on a bike, had thickened and spread. This was quaint enough, but he was also spectacularly thin. As a result, he looked like a character from a Victorian children's cautionary story. There he stood, saluting the crowd, a half-smile decorating his cautious face.
From this point, facing east, he would have seen, at the end of the avenue the wrought-iron gates of the Jardin des Tuileries and behind that the Louvre. He would have gazed back at the temporary stands filled with the great and good of the corporate world, sitting in cushioned rows in the Tribune Présidentielle, the Tribune Marigny and Tribune Concorde. And in front of him, held back by a rope that spread across the whole width of the boulevard, hundreds of lenses, catching the late-afternoon sun and winking at him.
I was familiar with this pageant. Ten times, each year since 2003 when I first started to follow the Tour, I had stood to the side of the podium watching on as Armstrong, Landis, Sastre, Contador and Evans had all thrown their arms aloft in victory. Wiggins would have watched it, too, sometimes in the flesh a little further down that cobbled road, half dismounted from his bike, ignored by everyone: a finisher, not a winner.
I had seen the moment repeated, when from nowhere a microphone appears, thrust at the champion by one of the Tour's army of green-shirted roadies. I had seen each different winner right himself, pause, and level some carefully scripted words in the general direction of the Tour de France, France Itself, The World and History.
â
Mesdames et Messieurs
. . .' or âLadies and Gentlemen. It is a great honour . . .' or âI am highly honoured to be standing here . . .'
â
Merci au Tour de France
. . .' Applause.
Except on this day that's not what happened. Firstly, there was some confusion over the order of events. Instead of going straight to the speech, the French nation were first treated to a surprisingly unpleasant rendition of âGod Save The Queen' by a middle-aged lady clad in a sparkly red blouse and a floor-length, Union-Jack wrap/skirt so puzzlingly awful that it left most of us frowning at our iPhones and conducting a Google Images search on Lesley Garrett, just to check this lady wasn't an imposter.
Then, when she'd finally relented, Wiggins was handed his microphone, even though he was already juggling a glass vase, a bouquet and a cuddly toy, like a serial winner of the Generation Game. He first had to deposit all of these items at his feet without them falling off the podium, then he cleared his throat, and smartly turned his back on France.
Now he faced west, looking down the length of the avenue towards the Arc de Triomphe. Here, the British had gathered in huge numbers. Manx flags with their Masonic-looking three-legged star, poking up like tall poppies in a field of Union Jacks. The ferries from Dover had been booked up for days. They stood ten deep, from the Avenue de Marigny right up the length of the boulevard.
It was to these people that Wiggins turned. From their patient, sweaty ranks, a great cheer went up. And without so much as a nod to his hosts, who were now treated only to a view of his yellow-clad bony spine, he delivered the most exquisitely judged line I have ever heard.
âRight. We're just going to draw the raffle numbers . . .'
Paris shivered, as if someone had just tapped it on the back. He'd just turned the Champs-Elysées into a village hall. It was perfect.
DEPART
IT WAS AN
embossed card with my name on it: an invitation to a posh dinner. This, I wasn't expecting.
In February 2010 British Cycling was celebrating fifty years. They were to hold a gala dinner in Manchester, at which they intended to âinduct' (a curious word, that) fifty British cycling legends into their Hall of Fame, one for every year of their existence. Would I like to attend as their guest?
I very much would. I replied post-haste (or at least by email) that I would be delighted to accept their kind invitation.
I did not know, as I hit send and wrote the date in the diary, that the dinner I was about to attend would set in motion a chain of events, chance encounters, visits and inquiries that would become something of a preoccupation, and at times even, an obsession, for the following two years. This simple email was the harmless-looking digital key to a hitherto hidden world. At least it had been hidden to me. It would prove to be a world peopled by fulsome characters, quiet fanatics, feuds, pettiness, injury and ambition and as it slowly revealed itself to me, so my curiosity grew.
But buffing my black schoolish shoes and fiddling with an iron in a Manchester hotel room on the evening of the big event, I was, not unreasonably, filled with doubt.
There would, I anticipated, be hundreds of people there, all of whom would have played a significant role in the history of this sport in our country; people who had achieved greatness, coached greatness, fostered greatness or simply dedicated their lives to the furthering of the cause of the bicycle.
And then there would be me: a bloke vaguely from off the telly.
I felt fraudulent, and a little nervous. After all, I had needed fully seven years to acclimatise to the demands of covering a three-week stage race in France. It had taken me a long time to begin to understand Le Tour, its associated cast list of characters, and the intricate web of ritual and tradition woven around the race.
And with the Tour my cycling knowledge stopped. For those other eleven months of the year, it pretty much went on without me, while my day job as a reporter for ITV Sport kept me busy with football matches. As far as the history of cycling was concerned, I was still a bit stunted. For me, the Tour began in 2003, not in 1903.
I'd been learning in a microwave, trying to acquire a sense for the nuances of a very particular sport, in a very particular country as quickly as I could. But the intuitive understanding which normally takes a lifetime to develop, this was still beyond me. However much I grabbed at its coat-tails, all I came away with were torn fragments as it slipped through my fingers.
