On the Road Bike (4 page)

Mine was bone dry – sucked empty by the exertion of that ghastly monochrome climb.

‘No. Still full.' Chris was checking his iPhone.

When we set off again, Chris dropped like a stone, travelling down narrow, single-track roads and round blind corners with poise and control. He wasn't even trying, he was just harnessing gravity. I saw his balanced form hurtling away from me. Way, way behind him, I teetered down the mountainside, and, when I knew that Chris was so far ahead that he wouldn't be able to hear me, I whimpered to myself. ‘Shit shit shit shit . . .'

On the first day of the 2012 Tour de France, Chris Boardman and I took the canal path to Liège for the Prologue. This ride should not have been epic, and indeed, by any realistic measure, it wasn't epic. But the tangible presence of a nagging headwind, which was aligned with great mathematical precision right in our faces all the way, made it much harder than it should have been. For me, at least. Even Chris seemed irked by it, as we approached the sapping halfway point. Apart from anything else, the rushing of air past our ears made for very difficult conversation.

‘There's a simple remedy to riding into a headwind.' He glanced across at me, as I grimaced my way forward, leaning into it at an unusually ungainly angle.

‘What's that, then?' I asked. Chris had spent years of his life conducting research in wind tunnels and looking in minute detail at airflow diagrams. He was about to tell me how to tame nature itself.

‘Go a bit slower.' That was his answer. I obliged.

Then we hit town, and somehow managed to blag our way onto the race route itself, joining it for the final two kilometres. All around us, riders out on their morning reconnaissance were effortlessly overtaking us. It must have been very strange for Chris Boardman, three times winner of the Tour de France Prologue, to be stuck with me, at my humble pace, on the actual route of the actual race. Perhaps that was why he suggested that I sped up.

‘Go on. Race it.' I heard from behind.

I stepped on it, in as much as I could. There was already a sizeable crowd gathering for the start of the race itself in a few hours. They watched on in bafflement. I wondered if any of them recognised Chris. I did my best, hugging the barriers where I thought I should, trying to make my gear changes as smooth as possible, and listening all the time to Chris's instructions from behind me.

‘Easy . . . easy . . . now turn in . . . and go . . . over to middle, tuck in . . . and maximum effort . . . now!'

It was exhilarating. I abandoned all embarrassment and relished every second of it. I must have looked like an idiot, but I felt like a champion, having been steered home by a man who redefined the art of Prologue riding. I crossed the line, and came sliding to a halt.

Chris pulled up alongside. He was smiling. He'd enjoyed it.

‘That's the first time I've done that since I stopped racing.' He pulled out his media accreditation, and we both pushed our bikes in the direction of the TV trucks. ‘I actually feel a bit emotional.'

And for a second, I almost believed him.

We were nearly done. The sun poked out from behind white clumps of springtime clouds. Now we had a tailwind. Gradually I regained my voice. I wanted to tell Chris how wonderful it felt to be zipping along, with so little effort, blown by the wind at our backs. But I felt that this would make me sound naïve and childlike.

‘It feels great with this wind at your back, doesn't it? You feel like you're flying along.' It was the last thing I was expecting Chris to say. I glanced at him to see if he was taking the piss. But he looked earnest enough. I acknowledged once again that it is hard to know people well. Especially Chris Boardman.

We climbed again, this time up a steep, wooded road to a place known mysteriously as ‘World's End' (which in fact appeared to be nothing much more than a lay-by next to a cattle grid). At one point, halfway up the slopes, the road switched back sharply, and at the apex of the corner, there was a ford. Water streamed over the surface of the tarmac. As we both turned to ride across it, I noticed that Chris took a very wide line, and I just had time to hear him ask, ‘Ever ridden over a ford before?' when my back wheel flipped out from behind me, and I fell instantly and very painfully onto my side, as if I had been shot by a sniper hiding in the World's End lay-by.

‘Ah. That's what you should never do when riding over a ford.' Now he tells me! ‘I was going to tell you not to turn the wheel, but I didn't want to patronise you.'

‘Oh, please patronise me, Chris. Please do.' I was scrambling up from the water, my left half, from arse to ankle, soaking wet.

We made it back to the car park, not without getting temporarily lost, and having to ride up two or three impossibly steep little ramps in and out of Welsh villages.

We had only been riding for three hours, if that. But I shook Chris warmly by the hand, thanked him for his time, and just collapsed into the driver's seat of my car, declining Chris's invitation to lunch at a nearby pub.

‘You look like a man who just wants to get driving,' said Chris. ‘Actually, you look like a man who doesn't want to get driving.'

I smiled weakly at him. Four hours later I was home. I can recall nothing of the journey other than running into Corley services to buy some grapes, without which I might have suffered from complete systemic shutdown and buried my Renault Scenic into the central reservation.

At home, I fell into the bath, only just managing to peel off the layers of Lycra, which had dried to my skin over the length of the M6.

It was only as I lay there soaking in the tub, that I realised I had forgotten to ask Chris anything that would get me closer to the heart of the matter: the mad impulse which makes people like me ride up ‘the Shoe', and the even madder impulse which makes people like him want to
race
up it. To make a career of such masochism!

They were, I imagined, all terribly familiar to him: long, long hours spent, often alone, on autumnal roads, made slippery by fallen leaves and the mud from tractor tyres, dank and remote and shrouded in a mist, into which your breath disappears as you huff and puff along. The life of a British pro was so far away from the glistening come-hither of the Mediterranean. What
was
the appeal?

All those unanswered questions, about his background in cycling, his relationship with the public and the institutions of British cycling, the phenomenal success of his bike brand. All the substance, which had made me set up the meeting in the first place: clean forgotten in the unending hurt of keeping pace with him.

Later that night I received one more text:

It was a lovely ride. You really are much stronger on a bike than you realise.

CB

I slept very well that night, with my phone and its precious message under my pillow. But I was none the wiser, really.

THERE CAME A
time when I needed to take my dinner jacket to the dry cleaners. Patting the pockets for debris, I found a replica cigarette card that I had been given on the night of that gala dinner for British cycling. It bore a photo of a little-remembered champion, in touched-up Technicolor and sporting a reluctant smile. I flipped it over, to see the name and email details neatly written out in biro: Graham Webb.

I placed the card next to my laptop.

Graham and I had spoken a little as the dinner had broken up, over his half-eaten dessert bowl (his neck bows forward at an uncomfortable angle, perhaps from those long years spent hunched over handlebars). He had told me some things about his life, which I had found fascinating, and had left me wanting to know more. He had been the 1967 Amateur World Road Race champion, three years after the great Eddy Merckx had won the same title before the Belgian's unique talent was unleashed on the world. But like a sizeable number of amateur world champions, Webb's professional career never really took off.

He had retired young, frustrated, in Flanders. And he had never come home.

I looked again at the card. Then I dropped him a line, just to say hello. He responded almost immediately with good wishes, and beautiful grammar. And then, through neglect on my part, our contact went cold.

Many months later, I finally got round to writing to him again. The reason for the delay had been my conscience. I had long been ignoring a nagging guilt. At the dinner, I had promised Graham that I would use contacts in the TV industry to get hold of as much footage as I could of his World Championship win. Pathé owned the clip, that much I had found out. But they were being decidedly unhelpful, even when I told them that I was trying to procure it for the man himself (‘He won the race. Can't you do him a favour?').

Despite all the string-pulling, I could not get any more than a heavily pixelated, downloaded thirty-second clip of the race, worse indeed than the stuff you could watch for free on YouTube. And even that had cost me a small fortune to buy. The old tape still exists, in some vault somewhere, but they simply wouldn't get it out for me. I felt bad for Graham, having promised him more.

Still, I kept returning to Graham Webb, in curiosity. No rider in my experience had ever spoken to me with such startling intensity. Something about his clarity of expression, his deep-set, frowning eyes, disarming in their glare, and something of what he said, made we want to get his story down.

When I did contact him again, his reply came with a warning. This was his email:

Hi Ned,

Glad you liked the story and I hope that I'll live long enough to tell more, I'm not being morbid but my health has never been up to much and after this last lot I have to be very careful. Please check with me before you plan to come to Belgium because of the above.

I've found you on FB (I think).

Greetings,

Graham

I liked the way that a man of his generation and general serious demeanour could so casually reveal himself to be a Facebook user. That little detail only piqued my interest further.

The next correspondence revealed that he had suffered a massive heart attack in 2005. His aorta had split as he was out riding his bike with a friend. But he had struggled home before collapsing. A year later, it had split again. This time he had had to undergo a terribly dangerous operation to repair the damage. He only just survived.

He wrote about his time in hospital on a Belgian Internet forum, to which he sent me the link:

After a seven-hour op and long coma I awoke in the intensive care unit, this time with severe pneumonia from the under cooling. Because of all the water on my lungs they had to shove a tube down my nose and suck all the water out, this several times a day. Sucking the water out also sucked all the air out of my lungs; it was like being strangled to death. Because I fought against this ‘murder attempt' they had to tie me down, hand and foot. I was fighting for my life.

It was time I got over to Belgium.

The first thing I noticed about Graham Webb, when we finally sat opposite each other in his modern bungalow in Wachtebeke near Ghent, was his silence.

It was a dark day outside, and the half-occluded windows were shrouded on either side by heavy brown drapes, swallowing most of what remained of the light and the sound from the room. Every surface in his ornate front room groaned with pictures and knick-knacks; grandchildren, medals, crystal ashtrays, all shining softly.

Behind a door, just next to where we sat in their living room, Graham's wife Marie-Rose lay, confined to bed by a bout of illness. I may have been jumping to conclusions, but I guessed that she was the homemaker, not Graham. I never got to meet her, although I was there for most of the day. Occasionally a cough or a sigh would filter through the fabric of the wall. Otherwise, when we weren't talking, the silence would rush back in to fill the space.

Time, according to Graham's own internal sense of foreboding, was running out. But it also felt like it was in abundant supply, over-represented. It saturated the airless room. I imagined the wordless minutes Graham might have spent waiting for the sound of my car to pull up outside (there had been an exchange of emails about my exact time of arrival).