Demoralised, my first reaction was that it was all over. I should get a normal job. I had a badly neglected wife, two young children, a mortgage and no proper income. What the hell was I doing forcing everyone to make sacrifices so I could dedicate my life to going around in circles faster than other people? Maybe this was the time to grow up and start behaving responsibly.
I’m not sure how seriously I really wrestled with this new future, or whether I was just mentally trying it on to see how it felt. Either way – and in the face of the available evidence – the topic of winning quickly crept back into my conversations with Pete. The next day he began dropping in the odd comment about what we’d done wrong, what we could have tackled differently, and how that might have changed the outcome. I started to contribute, also identifying things we’d missed. The faint embers of belief were being rekindled and before we realised what we were doing, the past tense in which we’d been talking turned into a conversation about our next campaign.
By the time we got on the plane home a new plan was taking shape. This time the goal was to win not a world but an Olympic title, although I’m not sure that in our hearts we believed anything more than that we weren’t ready to give up.
In early 1992, before the new season started, I received a phone call from Rudy Thomann, a French test driver for Lotus cars and an enthusiastic amateur cyclist. He told me they were exploring a relationship with a man named Mike Burrows, a bike inventor who lived close to their headquarters at Hethel in Norfolk. They wanted to make the world’s fastest bike and they wanted it to be ridden by a British cyclist at the next Olympic Games. Rudy asked whether I’d be interested in going to the Motoring Institute Research Association wind tunnel outside Birmingham to help test Mike’s prototype. I was on the M6 heading south before the phone was back on the hook.
In fact, I’d already ridden this bike, or at least an earlier version of it – the strange, futuristic-looking carbon fibre and aluminium beast that I’d sneaked a go on at the World Championships in Italy in 1985. Then, it had seemed like a design dead-end. The UCI had rewritten their regulations to outlaw it, or anything like it, specifying that a bike frame couldn’t be a single continuous shell but had to be constructed of three main tubes of a certain diameter. Five years on, though, the ban on one-piece frames – monocoques – had been rescinded. It was a decision that would precipitate a renaissance in bicycle design and throw the UCI’s technical commission into turmoil for the next 20 years.
It was a cold morning in February when I arrived at the gatehouse that guarded the entrance to the MIRA Centre. Security was tight; lots of motor manufacturers tested here and they were paranoid about cameras being taken onto the site. Inside, the place was like a huge version of Q’s workshop, with men in white coats making notes on their clipboards as they wandered among low-slung vehicles masked with camouflaged bodywork.
Eventually, I arrived at an aircraft hangar on the far side of the complex where the wind tunnel was housed. I was met by Rudy Thomann, his Lotus colleague Richard Hill, and Mike Burrows. I’d never met Mike before but he had a reputation as a mad professor. I could see why. His scarecrow hair stuck out from under his bobble hat and he talked non-stop without punctuation – or, as far as I could make out, drawing breath – for the next six hours.
The objective of the session was to compare the aerodynamics of Mike’s ‘Windcheetah’ with one of the bikes the GB team was currently using. In addition, if time allowed, we’d take a look at how riding position affected things. My role in all of this was basically to sit on the bike, which was attached by wires to two force plates, metal slabs that operated like ultra-sophisticated scales, measuring in six directions rather than just vertically.
It didn’t sound like a particularly tough job for me, until it dawned on me where the wind tunnel was going to be getting its wind from: outside on a freezing February day. I’d assumed the whole set-up would be inside a heated building and the experience would be no more testing than sitting in front of an oversized hairdryer. In fact, with the winter air being sucked in at high speed the wind chill made the temperature a steady minus ten.
It quickly became apparent that half a millimetre of Lycra was inadequate thermal protection for what amounted to a six-hour ride in Antarctica. Every time I got off the bike and staggered into the control room to crouch over the tiny electric heater, the scientists frowned at me because my shivering was being picked up by the force plates and reducing the accuracy of the results. My hypothermia was an inconvenience for them.
The primary role of the MIRA tunnel, what it had originally been designed for, was to measure the aerodynamics of trucks. Using it to measure the aerodynamic performance of a bike was about as accurate as weighing individual peas on a set of bathroom scales. But the lack of precision didn’t matter and neither did my trembling – the magnitude of the differences between the machines we were testing was plain to see. From the very first run it was clear the Lotus project could offer us an advantage. When we started to look at riding position things got even more interesting.
The man leading the session was Lotus aerodynamicist Richard Hill, a bearded academic in his thirties. My main impression of him at the time was that he was a little arrogant, condescending. Only much later did I appreciate that he possessed the perfect mix of expertise and ignorance that can bring about giant leaps of innovation. Richard, who knew a lot about aerodynamics but less than nothing about cycling, asked me to assume several very different positions: stretching my arms out, elbows together, fists up in the air, fists down. His sole focus was reducing drag, bending me into a shape to make the air flow as smoothly over me as possible. He neither knew nor really cared about what might be comfortable or biomechanically efficient.
All through the process Rudy was whispering to him, ‘You can’t ask him to do that!’ and ‘He won’t be able to ride in that position!’ Rudy knew this because he knew cycling. ‘Why not?’ asked Richard. Rudy had no specific answer other than that this wasn’t what cyclists did. I agreed with Rudy: it certainly wasn’t stuff that cyclists normally did, but since I wasn’t signing a contract to replicate what we did here in the real world and I was curious to see what the differences would be, I was happy to play along. With the aid of cardboard and gaffer tape to simulate changed bar shapes and helmet visors – Richard thought my polystyrene helmet could be vastly improved on – we continued to experiment. By the end of the day we had settled on a position that was both rideable and a massive 20 per cent more efficient than the one I’d come in with. Coupled with the revolutionary bike design, the gains were extraordinary. I left both very excited and without feeling in my extremities.
Over the next few months I trained hard to adapt to this lower, stretched-out riding position. Pete devised some special training exercises and my time trial bike was changed to accommodate the new dimensions. All serious work was done in this orientation. During the spring we tested two more prototypes: one based on Mike’s design, the other Lotus’s own. The trials were conducted on the outdoor track at Kirkby. These were the most advanced and expensive bikes the world had ever seen; Olympic success might rest on the outcome of the tests. But before we could try them out we had to chase off the local kids and clear all the bricks out of the way. The Lotus guys were a long way from MIRA.
Mike’s second-generation design was sleeker than his 1985 original. Finished in black and adorned with Lotus stickers it looked even better. But Lotus’s own take on the concept was something else again. Its heritage was clear to see, but in the few months since the first wind tunnel test the frame had clearly been on a computer-aided crash diet, revealing a whole new set of curves. The Lotus Type 108, as it was called, was a thing of beauty.
It wasn’t just the body that had received an overhaul. To create the exquisitely aerodynamic one-piece handlebar and fork blade, many layers of carbon cloth had been bonded and compressed to make a solid, T-shaped block. Hundreds of man-hours had then gone into filing every millimetr
e to shape. Even the axle was an integral part of the structure, so that the front wheel simply slid onto it. At either end of the cross-member – it hardly warranted the name handlebar – were two bullet shapes for me to grip when starting. They were so small I could just about wrap three fingers around them. The whole set-up looked incredibly slender and didn’t appear strong enough to support a starting effort. Looking down to see the front wheel held only on one side made it doubly disconcerting. In truth, it no longer looked like a bike.
A little worried about the possible reaction of the UCI to this latest radical design, British Cycling sent another national squad rider, Bryan Steel, to an early season world cup race in order to set a precedent for the bike’s use in competition. It attracted a lot of attention, but since Bryan finished outside the top four it didn’t ring any alarm bells at the world governing body. Mission accomplished, it was legal.
Away from the Lotus workshop, the year was going well. I was winning races and posting personal best numbers in Pete’s physiology tests. With six weeks to go until the Olympics I entered my last road event, the Circuit des Mines in Northern France. After that, I’d be switching almost exclusively to track work.
I didn’t do much road racing and certainly not abroad, so it was a great feeling to win the opening time trial and take the first international yellow leader’s jersey of my career. It was followed the next day by my first crash in an international yellow leader’s jersey. With strong crosswinds stringing the race out into one long line, I overlapped the wheel of the rider in front and went down heavily, fracturing my collarbone. In denial, I rode the remaining 60 miles of the stage with my right arm resting on the handlebar. On crossing the finish line, I was put in an ambulance and taken to hospital where I spent the night breathing in the antiseptic smell, listening to the clock, staring at the wall and believing my Olympic chances were over.
Although it was by accident rather than design, I was actually giving my medal chances a major boost. The crash prevented me repeating the mistake of the previous year and overtraining. So when I arrived at the gates of the Olympic Stadium, my dream destination, I wasn’t just armed with the best technology in the world, I was fresh and in the form of my young life.
The journey to Barcelona had only been possible because of the structure Pete Keen had introduced into my life: an effective learning process, all wrapped up in a formula the intrinsic beauty of which was its sheer simplicity. It was as easily applied to long-term strategy as it was to devising a five-minute training exercise: evidence, idea, plan, execute, debrief, new idea, new plan and so on. It was the non-judgemental nature of this process that made it easy to become fascinated with improvement rather than race results, to focus on being better rather than always trying to be the best. For a fragile young man it was a fantastic way to deal with doubts, stress and failure.
But it wasn’t going to work at the Olympics. This was not a test: it was THE test. I couldn’t give a toss whether we learned anything. I had to deliver a winning performance: right here, right now. And I wasn’t dealing with this reality very well. The sheer scale of it would probably have finished me off if it hadn’t been for John Syer, a quiet individual with a gentle disposition, who gave me the tools I needed to cope.
A former volleyball player, John was a psychologist with a fascinating history. When we first met in the mid-1980s, he had a broad spectrum of business clients from Ford and Jaguar to BP and even GCHQ. His personal passion, though, remained sport and Tottenham Hotspur had been his most high-profile success. Team captain Steve Perryman credited John with turning the Spurs squad from a group of talented individuals into a motivated and communicating force, one that won two FA Cups and a UEFA Cup in a four-year spell.
After that experience, John wrote a book, Sporting Body Sporting Mind, which has become a classic sports psychology work. British Cycling’s Jim Hendry read it and invited him to work with our squad. It was a forward-thinking move in the late eighties, particularly in cycling where people still thought a psychologist was someone you went to see when you had ‘problems in the head’. Despite the general prejudice at the time, though, our little team pursuit group was open-minded and readily bought into the concept of mental training, giving every session our full effort. John was a valuable sounding board, a neutral party with no vested interests. Riders knew they could discuss any issues with him in confidence. It’s the role that psychiatrist Steve Peters would play for the GB team a decade later. If it helped us as a team it didn’t show in the race results, but on an individual level John would prove to be the right person for me. We began to work closely together, having sessions on our own as well as with the squad.
Pete Keen made sure that John was part of the team in Barcelona by engaging him to help manage the endurance team. With all meaningful training completed before we travelled, the week leading up to my first race was spent riding around the athletes’ village, doing some short efforts on the track and generally killing time. Eventually the day of qualification arrived.
Although I was highly stressed, I knew that the first round at least offered me some wiggle room; as long as I finished in the top 16 I’d be through. However, that first ride would also decide the seeding for the next – the fastest rider would be up against the slowest and so on down to eighth versus ninth – so it would still be best to qualify strongly.
Three weeks earlier during our final training camp in the south of France, we’d staged a full dress rehearsal. We practised everything I’d use on the big day, from warm-up strategy and clothing to race schedule and gearing. It was during that run-through that I’d unofficially broken the world record, so I knew my form was good. But being a natural pessimist it still came as a shock when I posted the fastest qualifying time. I progressed through the rounds in this fashion, surprised at every success, and eventually found myself in the final.
Between events I just waited, taking long showers and sleeping to pass the hours, struggling to cope with the scale of it all. At our daily team meeting on the eve of the gold medal race I asked John if he’d mind just hanging around with me in the run-up to the final, and thank God I did. An hour before the start, the pair of us were ensconced in the small, dimly lit mechanics’ room beneath the track, sheltering from the incredible heat of the open arena above us. I sat in the relative cool of that stone-tiled space, on the edge of a massage table, swinging my legs, waiting. I was in a right state, which must have been obvious to John. He did what psychologists have done since the job was invented, asking me ‘How do you feel?’
‘I feel absolutely terrible. I’d rather be anywhere than here right now, I just want it all to be over.’
John’s reply was not what I was expecting. ‘That’s alright, you have to feel like that.’
‘What?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said, a calm, earnest look on his face. ‘Elation and despair are two sides of the same coin and generally in equal and opposite proportions to each other.’
‘Hang on. You’re supposed to be making me feel better here!’
‘Oh no,’ he was unrelenting, ‘if you want the big highs, you have to risk the big lows, that’s just how it is. So rather than try to not feel like that, why don’t we talk about how to manage it instead? Tell me what it is that makes you feel so uncomfortable.’
I started to tick off all the things my mind was throwing at me: ‘What if I can’t get out of the starting gate, what if I hit one of the sandbags at the bottom of the track, what if I go out too fast and die off, what if I puncture, what if the guy on the other side of the track is faster than me …’ I went on in this vein for maybe the best part of a minute before running out of steam and mumbling, ‘Well I can only do my best.’ At this, John looked at me, gave a small smile and an almost imperceptible nod, which is the other thing all psychologists do. In that instant he had got me to form what I can only describe as an ‘anchoring thought’.
It didn’t anchor me for long. Once I’d swapped the sanctuary of the mechan
ics’ room for the start gate, and John’s calming voice had been replaced by the ticking of the little yellow clock, the stress flooded back, threatening to swamp me. Flailing about, my mind returned to that notion from our last exchange and grasped hold of it again just in time. ‘Fuck it,’ I thought. ‘I can only be the best I can be. And when I’ve crossed the line I’ll look at the scoreboard and see what it got me.’
Suddenly, I was calm. I wasn’t trying to win an Olympic gold medal any more; I was trying to do something that was completely within my control. John Syer had freed me by showing me the difference between dreams and objectives. The dream – an Olympic title – was really important, the single reason for all the hard work and sacrifice. But like a dream, it was something that I couldn’t control. John made me confront the fact that any of the what-ifs I’d listed could well happen; it was entirely possible that my opponent, Jens Lehmann of Germany, might simply be faster than me. There was nothing I could do about that. But I could choose what position to ride in, what equipment to use, how to pace my ride. Those elements were totally within my control and concentrating on them was all I could do to try and realise the dream.
As if to test my newfound outlook, when the clock struck zero the gate jammed and ruined my start. Didn’t matter. Nothing I could do about it. I rolled around for a lap, my bike was set back into the gate and I visualised a perfect restart. This time the gate sprang open on cue but I wobbled as I got underway. I barely noticed. I was focused on what was ahead of me, not what was behind.
Entering the banking of the second bend, I sat down and settled into the tucked position. I eased off the pedals slightly and waited for Pete to come into sight with the small board that would tell me whether I was up or down on the schedule we’d set: red numbers on white for down, white numbers on black for up. I saw a white 0.5: I was half a second ahead. So far so good. The next lap, another half second. I had to be careful now, there was still a long way to go.
Triumphs and Turbulence Page 5