On the Road Bike (30 page)

On 14 October 2012, I paid the race a visit.

That Sunday was blessed with perfect autumnal weather, the sort of bright, breezy day that you see featured in heart-warming adverts for soup or double glazing. The kind of weather for children in scarves and primary-coloured wellington boots, scuffing their happy way through mountainous piles of crisp dry leaves. It looked picture-perfect, but it was keeping its horrors hidden. The Bec Hill Climb had towered over my diary for many weeks, growing taller, darker and more imposing with each passing day, until, like a dentist appointment, I could no longer escape it, and stood gazing up at its terrifying edifice. The day had dawned.

I had been severally warned that what I was about to undertake was the most nauseating thing you could do in cycling. But I had not taken these warnings seriously and, as a result, I was on my way to take part in, to
race
no less, a hill climb.

There is an amusing Wikipedia entry relating to hill climbs, which has clearly been written by an American cyclist, as it refers to events in San Francisco and Hawaii. But it is also quick to reference the thriving British scene, which is pre-eminent:

In Great Britain there is an end of season tradition of cycling clubs promoting hill
climb time trials in October, for small cash prizes. The hills tend to be relatively short, usually taking between three and five minutes to complete, and the races attract many spectators, including locals not otherwise interested in cycling, who come to watch the pain in the faces of the competitors.

It was, you will understand, the final sentence that caught my eye. Wanting, though simultaneously fearing, to know more, I picked up a copy of
Cycling Weekly
. There was a preview of the race.

‘The atmosphere is always superb. The final metres will be lined three deep with screaming supporters driving you to the finish, just at the moment that your legs are pleading for mercy. You'll be doing well not to topple over, let alone race.'

Had I chosen the correct option when answering, ‘OK, then' to Garry Beckett's harmless sounding question? He'd simply asked me if I fancied riding ‘the Bec'.

But Garry, whose race it is, just happens to be the kind of guy you end up saying ‘Yes' to. Even when all of you means to say ‘No.'

I first met Garry at the Tour Series evening bike races. He used to hang around the pit lanes; a lugubrious presence, tall, and long-striding, he was attached to various teams, helping out. He'd drive cars, change wheels, fill bottles, shout encouragement. And swear. Garry loves to swear, investing his F-words with a fullness and a texture that make them rich and admirable.

Publically, he describes himself as a ‘big-nosed, baggy-eyed cycling nut'.

Privately, he describes himself as a ‘big-nosed, baggy-eyed, bald geezer who likes a drink'.

I have also heard him described as London cycling royalty, spoken of in terms of awe, but also with genuine affection and occasional wild amusement. He is a warm-hearted and foul-mouthed chap, who I am now lucky enough to count as a friend.

I am not the only one. He has many friends.

Bradley Wiggins and he, for example, go back years. They first met when Garry was a constant presence at the Herne Hill Velodrome, and Wiggins, pre-sideburns and celebrity, was ‘just' a prodigiously talented teenager from Kilburn. Garry has a collection of photographs of him and a young Bradley Wiggins that publishers will have been scrapping over as 2012 produced a sudden welter of Wiggomania-related literature, all needing to fill their colour plates.

They maintained their close relationship as Garry went on to work as a swanny in the GB Cycling set up. And when Wiggins signed his big money contract with Sky, he took Garry out for a posh dinner and offered him a job. So for a while in 2010 he was Bradley Wiggins's personal batman.

For various reasons that appointment didn't last a huge amount of time. But Garry's never really stuck at anything for terribly long, except for the Bec Hill Climb.

For all the time he spends on the road, swearing at foreigners (and as I write this he is currently boarding a flight to Japan, swearing at someone), he is never happier than when he comes home.

One day I pinned him down, in between international race obligations with Team Garmin, and we arranged to meet up in town.

London Bridge, the scruffy old station, cheek by jowl with the absurdly refined Borough Market, had been the spot where we'd agreed to meet. Garry was coming up from his South London suburb, and I, too, from mine. Our two railway lines would converge there, and so it seemed convenient.

Wafts of fragrance hung in the air of the newly gentrified quarter. Flavours competed for attention. Chorizo buns were being prepared right in front of me, the sausages griddled to perfection, and slapped in a sourdough bap with a fistful of rocket and a drizzle of lemon juice and olive oil. Beyond that stall, and into the sizzling heart of the market, I made out cheese stands, charcuteries, game butchers, fishmongers, bakers, wine merchants, and, yes, greengrocers. Crawling all over this foodies' carcass were the middle-classes, picking at their endives, sniffing at quiches, pinching a nectarine. Journalists from the nearby
Financial Times
, barristers from the inner-London courts, bankers from over the river. Tourists, clutching damp maps, gazing on in delighted mystification at this cacophonous arrangement, mentally converting from pounds to dollars, pounds to yen, pounds to euros. Three euros for a cucumber! Borough Market, a point of reference for London's health or wealth. A barometer for its aspirations. Where, if you please, was the recession?

I stood in line for my chorizo bap, fingering my £4.95 in my left hand. Unwittingly, I touched the peak of my bright pink Plowman Craven cycling cap. It was in homage to a now defunct and largely unsuccessful domestic cycling team. They'd given it to me as a present and promptly gone bust. I'd hoped the two events weren't linked. Subliminally drawn towards it, I had chosen its neon pink shape to place on my head as I left the house.

‘I know that fucking hat.' Garry, also smitten by the smell of frying chorizo and the obvious lure of the sponsor's day-glo colours, had ended up in the same queue, and was right behind me. His gruff South London voice, at least two octaves lower than is audible to most humans, was unmistakable.

It began with his dad and it returned, often, to that same touchstone.

The Good Friday Meeting at the Herne Hill Velodrome was a part of Garry Beckett's life. His father had been a towering figure at the track, a well-known judge and commissaire. On the day of the venerable old meeting in 2005, just after the racing finished, Ron Beckett, who had been there all day, collapsed very suddenly and died.

Ron Beckett had been a telephone engineer, back in the days when there was real engineering to be done in order to make and receive a phone call. He was also a considerable, prodigious bike rider, and in his son's words a ‘right skinny bastard', the result of a pauper's diet, Garry suggests. Perhaps that's why most of his peers knew him as ‘Porky'. Brits are funny like that.

For Ron, like with so many others of his post-war generation, car ownership came later. He used to go everywhere by bike, neatly integrating his working life and his passionate hobby. Sometimes, during the holidays or when childcare arrangements had broken down, young Garry would go to work with him.

‘I can remember going to a big Taylor Woodrow's [the builders'] yard somewhere out near Heathrow, and going into the exchange room, with all these machines going
clack clack clack
. A massive room. These things used to fascinate me. He'd be wiring them up, and I used to pull them all back and watch them click round. I didn't know that I was actually dialling a number.'

But it was cycling, not telephones, that his dad lived for. Ron's weekends, and often his evenings, were spent chasing round and round flat left-handed circuits in pursuit of prizes.

‘His big thing was grass-track racing. My mum's still got a drawer at home full of old left-hand pedals that were all bent from cornering at grass-track races. That's where you could make your money.'

In the 1960s this particular branch of the sport was very popular. It didn't require a velodrome, for starters, just a field, some whitewash for the lanes and a few hay bales. It goes without saying that it was strictly amateur. Although ‘strictly' was an elastic term.

‘You were only allowed to win a certain amount of money, which wasn't very much, before you were considered a pro. So at grass-track meetings they'd win all manner of products to get round that rule. It was a way for him to more than double his weekly salary.'

Keen that his son develop a passion for the sport, Ron introduced Garry at an early age to the very particular world of bicycle polo. This is an eccentric sport, which involves a lot of trying to stay still on a bike. There are few things more quixotic than this. It's like trying to walk to work on a stepladder, a bit daft.

Nonetheless, it is a sport with a surprisingly long history and, once upon a time, considerable status beyond the vague hipster modish appeal that its reborn version now enjoys in the achingly cool East End of London. It used to be, if not mainstream, then fairly common. Bicycle polo exhibition games were often staged before kick-off at football grounds, to give the crowd something to laugh at, I can only imagine. It even put in a guest appearance at the London Olympics of 1908. But then again, those games were quirky to say the least, and were mostly obsessed with firearms: ‘Army Gun' and ‘Running Deer', also featured in that particular Olympic line-up.

‘I was a skinny little ten-year-old, and all the other boys were fifteen or sixteen. Like in football when you'd line up in the playground to get picked – I was the last one. And I was always stuck in goal. I was useless. I didn't enjoy that. It was always fucking cold. Wet. And when I did get onto the pitch I got knocked off in the air all the time.'

He stuck at it though. ‘Eventually I loved it, and I became good at it. When you know you're better than the others, you start floating along.'

It wasn't long before, in the reasonably small gene pool of the bicycle polo world, he achieved the highest imaginable honour. ‘I was the England captain for eight years, which sounds very grand, but in a sport where there aren't many people playing . . .'

I interrupted. ‘You were the England captain, Garry?'

This revelation seriously impressed me. Perhaps more so than it should have done. In fact, so amazed was I to find out that Garry captained his country that I failed to follow it up with the obvious question: who on earth did England play at bicycle polo?

The Beckett family, it seemed to me, had quite deliberately gone out of their way to find, and then excel at, cycling's most abstruse manifestations.

Grass-track cycling and bicycle polo were, in their different ways and to my uneducated ears, as far removed from the grandiosity of the great bike races of the world as it was possible to get, and still maintain that you were part of the same genus. I chanced my arm with Garry. ‘Was there something a bit weird about you?'

‘Absolutely. A bit of a weirdo.'

‘Is that how your mates saw you?'

‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.' Garry didn't seem to mind me calling him a weirdo, which I found a bit weird. ‘Perhaps there's something inside each and every cyclist that celebrates their inner weirdness.'

He carried on. ‘I went to a funeral last week for a guy in his seventies. I never saw him not on a bike. This guy never owned a car. Well, two hundred people turned up on bikes. And you've got to say, some of the guys who turned up, well, fuck me! They probably hadn't changed their bikes since the late fifties. Or their clothes. There was a lot of the old knit-your-own-shorts brigade, with beards with sparrows' nests hanging out of them. That's the type of person that cyclists used to be perceived as.'

But their shared family passion for sweating (or, in the case of bicycle polo, not sweating) on a bike went deeper than that. Or rather, further.

Like Garry, Ron, the popular, no-nonsense figure at the track, was also a high-ranking member of the Bec Cycling Club.

For many years the club had lacked a flagship event, the signature race that it now boasts. The rival Catford Cycling Club, also from South London, had a longer history, and a notable hill climb which to this day claims to be the ‘oldest continuing cycle race in the world', although it was not held during the war years, which knocks a bit of a hole in that claim.

Either way, the Catford Hill Climb was first held in 1886. And it was very prestigious. So the Bec needed a hill. And Ron Beckett went off looking for one.

‘My mum and dad, my uncle and my aunt went out searching for a hill on their tandems for a few weekends, and they came across that one.' It was White Lane, a 700-yard climb from the B269 to the B2024 out of Titsey in Kent. The road is single track, very steep near the top, and shrouded in a dense canopy of wild woodland.

‘They tested it on their tandems and said “This'll do.” And that was it.'

For thirty years, as Garry was doing all his growing up, the whole family would administrate the hill climb every October. Some of his earliest memories are of standing in the pelting rain, or the bitter cold, or both, with a clipboard or a sign. They'd marshal the roads, set up the finish line, help with the time keeping, and generally make sure it all went off as smoothly as it could.

Ron eventually handed over the reins to his son in 1987. It proved to be a memorable autumn, not a bad year to pass the buck, as it happens. Perhaps he'd been fixing the phones at the Met Office and had overheard someone talking about what was brewing up over the Atlantic, and heading for Britain.

‘That was the year of the Great Fall, two days before my first one. A load of fucking trees come down.' The first hill climb Garry took charge of coincided with the Great Storm, which turned nearby Sevenoaks into Oneoak, and wreaked almighty damage on the woodland around White Lane. It took hours of hard work to clear the road of the debris, but the race went ahead.