A few laps later, I entered the straight to see Lehmann disappearing around the far banking in front of me. I stopped looking at Pete’s boards and started focusing on my opponent. That I might catch him and end the race early was a prospect that hadn’t occurred to me – it had never been done in an Olympic final – but in that instant all I knew was that I had a visual target.
We’d studied Lehmann’s performances and he never went faster towards the end of a race, always fading. I was going to win. ‘No you’re not,’ said a voice in my head, ‘that’s what sports stars do, you’re just a bloke from Hoylake.’ But common sense began to drown the voice out. The proof was in front of me, I was catching him. A minute later I eased past Lehmann’s back wheel: the gun fired, the race was over. I had won the Olympic 4000 m individual pursuit title.
I’d daydreamed about this moment many times. It would be like Rocky II when he finally triumphed over Apollo Creed: there’d be lots of jumping up and down, crying and general elation. It did feel unreal but not in the way I’d imagined. I punched the air and that kind of thing as I’d seen it done on the telly, but inside I couldn’t come to terms with the fact it was over – and I’d won. Years of work, focusing only on the next step and the next, then in an instant it was all done: someone was pushing me forward and there was a medal being placed around my neck. Standing on the podium holding my flowers in the air, I felt relieved, stunned, shocked. The other thing I did that you see in sports coverage was try to find my wife in the crowd – that was as close to Rocky as I got.
Sally wasn’t even supposed to be in Barcelona. The plan was for her to be at home looking after Edward and Harriet, but after seeing the qualifying session on TV, she had decided she didn’t like that strategy and made an executive decision to fly to Spain the next day. In the classified section of one of her grandmother’s magazines, she found an advert for reasonably priced accommodation in Barcelona. Sally phoned up and explained her rather curious circumstances. The deal was still available – not surprising, as it turned out to be a mattress on the floor of someone’s spare room. Having secured somewhere to stay, she set about finding a flight. The only tickets available for the following day were business class – or so she still maintains. She drew our savings out of the bank and booked.
Once she got to Barcelona, Sally realised she had no way of actually getting into the stadium, so she caught a bus to the venue and haggled with a tout. Inside, the strangeness continued as she found herself sitting next to the parents of another GB rider, Glen Sword, who had also travelled out from Merseyside. The newspapers made quite a meal of all this: ‘First GB Gold Medallist’s Wife Forced To Buy Ticket From Tout.’ The British Olympic Association were highly embarrassed by the situation, which had not really been of their making. As a working class family living on the breadline, it hadn’t occurred to us to ask for help or expect special treatment. It was all well beyond the borders of our little world.
As I stepped off the plane from Barcelona three days later, I began to wonder whether our world still existed. It seemed to have been replaced by a wholly different and frankly daunting one. The press were out in force at Manchester Airport: everyone wanted shots of me, Sally and the kids holding the medal. Harriet wasn’t old enough to understand what all the commotion was about while Ed seemed bemused by the fuss but happy enough. Their father was less comfortable than either of them, but I knew I was just an hour or so away from home and normality. Outside the terminal, there was a shiny Lotus Carlton waiting to whisk us back to our tiny house where we could close the door and watch the telly.
As we drove into Hoylake, it dawned on me that things weren’t going to be quite that simple. I’d been holed up inside the athletes’ village for three weeks. Apart from the press scrums at the velodrome and the airport, I’d been totally protected from the real world and had no concept of how the whole event had been perceived. Driving down what should have been the familiar streets of our small village came as a shock. Virtually every shop window was festooned with some form of Olympic display: balloons, flags and hand-knitted cycling effigies. Of me. As we turned into Walker Street the celebratory atmosphere intensified. There was bunting hanging from windows and the entire road was rammed with crowds: people waiting to give me cards, home-baked cycling-themed cakes and baskets of muffins, everyone wanting photographs and signatures.
I didn’t like it. This was my home, my village, and these were the people I’d known all my life. I didn’t want to be on a pedestal, have people staring when I walked past. I wanted to be anonymous, normal. It was hours before it all died down, and when it did I stepped out into the now quiet street to celebrate with an age-old tradition. I went to the Dolphin.
A converted corner terraced house, the Dolphin had been a chip shop for as long as I could remember and was run by the Choi family – lovely people who had no idea what portion control meant. That night it was the owner Ming on duty. Very shy, he just grinned as he handed over the wrapped bundle and with no eye contact gave a small wave refusing payment. Free chips. That’s when I knew I’d really arrived.
This only happened the once, though. I think Ming’s rule was one medal, one portion of chips. They had high standards at the Dolphin.
CHAPTER 4
The First Hour: Build Up
For all the Olympic success, I was still unemployed. In the run-up to the games, I hadn’t been available for work because training had been a full-time job. Now, dealing with the aftermath was.
As soon as we got back from Barcelona, the flood of phone calls and letters began. Many of them were offers of money in return for doing not much more than simply being that bloke who’d won the Olympic gold medal (‘Oh, and could you please bring it with you when you come?’). For a couple who had been scratching around to pay the mortgage and feed the kids, the idea that I could suddenly nip out for the afternoon and come back with three thousand pounds’ worth of Asda vouchers took some comprehending.
One company offered me a thousand pounds to turn up for half an hour at one their leisure complexes. A THOUSAND POUNDS, just to TURN UP! I was so stunned, I forgot to ask what kind of leisure complex it was, so it was with a bit of a jolt one afternoon the following week that I pulled into the car park of a bingo hall. I was the surprise celebrity bingo caller. Smuggled in through the stage door, I found myself in a smoke-filled room, the occupants of which wouldn’t have recognised me if they could have seen me. Completely out of my element, I decided to make the most of it and try to inject some humour into the situation.
‘Legs …’ Pause ‘… 42!’ I cried.
Great joke, Del Boy-like, I thought. Silence. Before I’d reached my punchline, 150 women had deftly scored out the number 11 on their cards, invalidating them. I wasn’t asked back.
A run of TV appearances followed. I got my Blue Peter badge, although only after some hurried taping-over of the manufacturer’s logo on the bike they’d supplied for me to make my studio entrance on. I managed to survive Noel’s House Party without meeting Mr Blobby. The fees were very welcome, but it didn’t really add up to a career.
I wasn’t entirely sure what would. We’d spent years focused on a dream and, not wanting to tempt fate, hadn’t dared to give any thought to what we’d do if it came true. Now Sally and I were overloaded with new experiences, bombarded with them on an almost hourly basis. All these unfamiliar and very public activities created a media incarnation far bigger and more intimidating than the real me, which would have been fine if I’d been able to clock off at five every evening and head home to my normal life.
Before Barcelona I used to enjoy going shopping, the simple pleasure of wandering around the supermarket filling the trolley. Now people said hello with brittle, nervous smiles. Someone even asked Sally ‘Why are you in Sainsbury’s?’, incredulous that we’d be doing something so mundane. Worst of all, friends and family had been infected. A subtle awkwardness had appeared. It seemed they didn’t quite know what to say, perhaps thinking the usual
topics of conversation were now not big enough, not worthy of discussion with the guy off the TV. I was stuck between two worlds and didn’t feel as if I belonged in either.
Sally and I knew nothing about managers and agents, including what the difference was between them, so for the first few weeks Sally was dealing with it all. We had no computer or mobile phone – not that unusual in the early nineties – just a landline and an old fax machine. As the various activities were taking us out of the house so much, staying on top of everything was becoming impossible. The children spent lots of time with their grandparents and at the new nursery that had opened at the bottom of our road. In between, Ed learned to pose for the papers, a series of almost identical shots of him on his little bike, gold medal around his neck and hands in the air. Harriet was usually spared on account of her age.
After a heavy schedule of celebratory dinners and civic receptions, it was a relief to escape back to the track and the National Championships in Leicester, where Sally decided we needed to buy our first mobile phone. She came back from the shopping precinct with a second-hand Motorola flip model, slightly smaller than a brick, with a cracked screen and a battery that lasted a full 30 minutes as long as you didn’t use it.
Still carrying the momentum of my Olympic form, I won the national pursuit title early in the championships. A prize that a few weeks earlier would have been the biggest thing in my life now seemed almost quaint. My main focus of that championship week was an attempt to regain the world amateur 5 km record. I’d taken it from Denmark’s Hans-Henrik Ørsted in the summer of 1991 with a time of 5:47.7, only for America’s John Frey to beat that by just over two seconds a few months later in Colorado Springs. On the now famous Lotus 108 and despite the blustery conditions, I stormed round the Leicester track to stop the clock at 5:38.1, setting not just a new amateur mark but breaking Gregor Braun’s professional world record for the distance in the process.
I didn’t know it then but that would be the last time I ever rode the Lotus superbike in competition. The race also, finally, brought an end to my season. We needed a break, some space to take stock and consider our options. With our close friends Anne O’Hare and Pete Woodworth, we booked a caravan just outside Bassenthwaite in the Lake District and set off with a folder full of faxes to sift through. The weather was perfect: pouring rain. We got a lot of talking done.
One of the faxes was from Harry Middleton, a veteran of the north-west cycling scene, who’d known my parents since the early 1960s. As well as words of congratulation, he also offered me an introduction to his business connections, people he thought might be of help in my new circumstances. A trusted, worldly-wise, long-time family friend sounded like a great place to start, so in late August I arranged to meet him for a chat.
As well as owning a bike shop in Ormskirk that bore his name, Harry had an impressive business background. More importantly, he was a mild-mannered and lovely man, the kind of character people make an effort to stay in touch with. As a consequence he had quite a list of acquaintances to mobilise on my behalf. The first of these was Bill Warren, Operations Director of Kodak’s processing division in the UK. He was keen to get involved and quickly sold his colleagues on the value of linking the film giant with Olympic success and the photogenic sport of cycling. An offer of sponsorship quickly followed and with it the need to make some very big decisions.
First of all, I could have politely declined Kodak’s offer and just turned professional. That was the most logical next move for a rider in my position. But doing it properly would mean swapping the track for the road and joining a continental team. As far as I could see – apart from the fact they were both performed on bikes – European road racing and what I did were completely different sports. It looked hard, dangerous and would entail spending many months abroad. I found nothing about it attractive.
All I needed was a decent income that would allow me to stay at home and pursue my own sporting agenda. Individual sponsorship by Kodak would, on the face of it, enable me to do exactly that. In reality, Bill’s offer as it stood would have given me the worst of both worlds. Under the rules of the day, receiving any direct financial help meant that I would be classed as a professional and excluded from the Olympics. Great. Accepting the money I needed to help me defend my title would instantly disqualify me from defending my title.
There was another factor in the decision-making process that I didn’t acknowledge, perhaps even to myself. Barcelona had brought me to the outer edge of my comfort zone and I was scared to take the next step. I’d reached a level of success and notoriety I’d never dreamed of and I wasn’t keen on doing anything that might jeopardise it. What I really wanted was to have my cake and eat it: to carry on pursuing the type of challenges I enjoyed as an amateur and make some significant financial progress at the same time.
Thanks to the fine print of the Olympic charter, that’s what I was eventually able to do. I might not have wanted to be a card-carrying continental pro, but I had always enjoyed being part of a team, having other riders to travel, race and train with. Sally suggested that, rather than have them sponsor me directly, we should ask Kodak to back an amateur racing team that I could be part of. Harry talked to Bill Warren who liked the idea and so we began to hatch a plan.
That an athlete could be paid unspecified ‘expenses’ to ride for a sponsored club yet not be classed as a professional was an anomaly that had been exploited for years. In the days before lottery funding it was the only way to remain competitive. I didn’t know at the time, but the artificial pro/am divide was a dilemma the International Olympic Committee was also wrestling with and by the time the Atlanta Games came around in 1996 the distinction would be dissolved.
I approached Barbara O’Brien, the secretary of my former club, North Wirral Velo, and asked if they would allow us to use the Velo as a sponsorship vehicle. There wouldn’t be a great deal in it for them beyond some free jerseys and the chance to see the club name on a few national trophies. They agreed and the NWV Kodak racing team was formed. I’d found a way to create the environment I wanted to operate in, if not the enhanced bank balance I’d have ideally liked.
The new racing section of the club ran as a separate entity and included my GB track colleagues Simon Lillistone, Paul Jennings and Matt Illingworth, alongside former Manchester Wheelers club mates Scott O’Brian and Pete Longbottom. Harry fell into the natural role of manager of this group and during 1993 the strong stable of riders we’d assembled would go on to win most major UK titles.
While all this was going on, Peter Keen and I were working on other ways to keep the Barcelona ball rolling. I needed another big target, something with the word ‘world’ in front of it. We already had a good idea what that would be.
Back in 1989, we’d identified what we believed to be an attainable target: the world amateur hour record set by Italy’s Ercole Baldini on the legendary boards of the Vigorelli Stadium in 1956. His mark of 46.394km was so astounding that more than three decades later it had still not been beaten.
We’d decided to mount our challenge at Leicester’s Saffron Lane, the only wooden track in the country. It had been a disaster. The attempt had been made during the last track race of the season, the Autumn Gold meet. Piggybacking on an existing event ensured the ready availability of officials, but it also meant that track time was scarce and the only slot we could get was late at night, after the final race of the day.
Clear skies and very light winds were forecast for the evening in question. Perfect we’d thought, but like many amateur enthusiasts before us we’d missed several fundamental factors that would have a huge impact on the outcome. We’d only considered climatic conditions in terms of wind and rain, or the lack of them, not giving any thought to either the high pressure that was creating those conditions or the evening temperature drop that would come with the lack of insulating clouds.
As we waited in the track centre for the night’s racing to finish, it began to cool from the sunny mid-twenties
we’d enjoyed during the day to low single figures. These factors combined meant that I’d need to produce at least 30 watts more power to ride at 10 p.m. than if I’d been able to start at lunchtime. It was something any aerodynamicist would have been able to tell us, if we’d known enough to ask.
So I set off in optimistic ignorance and it was like riding through cold treacle. Before half distance I’d had enough and abandoned. Assuming it was all my fault, I was very disappointed and a little embarrassed. We put the experience behind us and moved on, with only a handful of people ever knowing that the attempt had taken place.
Still, the record stayed in the back of our minds, even as we focused all our energy on the Olympics and the 4000 m pursuit. In fact, the subject cropped up again by the beach in Barcelona at one in the morning after my gold medal ride. Unable to sleep and still trying to take it all in, Pete and I had sat on the sea wall in the athletes’ village, gazing out at the darkness engulfing the Mediterranean. Our conversation moved away from what had just happened towards the future and while we were tossing around ideas Pete mentioned it.
*
Emboldened by our Olympic success, he was no longer talking about the amateur record but the 51.151 km set in Mexico in 1984 by the great Italian professional, Francesco Moser. I had been 15 years old when Moser set that record, it was the stuff of cycling legend. I remembered being with Eddie Soens and my dad as they discussed it in reverent tones. Eight years later, here I was, contemplating an attempt to better it.
Actually, to start with, it was Pete who was contemplating an attempt to better it. After Barcelona he headed back to his lab – at Brighton University now – and started to crunch the numbers. I was hard at work failing to know anything about football on A Question of Sport and agonising over my list of Desert Island Discs in anticipation of an invitation that never arrived. After a few weeks, I got the word to join Pete on the south coast to look at the results.
Triumphs and Turbulence Page 6