As the pace shot up, the air filled with the sound of screeching brakes and the smell of burning rubber as riders played chicken with each other, fighting over every scrap of shelter, desperately trying to make sure they weren’t the ones left behind. Despite the 60 kph speeds, some cavalier individuals were even bunny-hopping up kerbs to extend the echelon one place wider than the road surface would allow. The more experienced riders cut their losses early and swung out, encouraging others to go with them and form secondary lines – temporary alliances to share the burden of trying to keep pace with the leaders. The fighting, braking, skidding and sprinting to catch up was relentless and 20 minutes into the stage there were diagonal lines of riders as far as the eye could see. I had a great view of them all because I was at the back. It was a baptism of wind. For a rider with only UK road racing under his belt, and whose forte was riding alone against the clock on dual carriageways, it was also terrifying. An all out punch-up would have been preferable as far as I was concerned, and possibly less dangerous.
The next morning, having lost both time and a little skin on the road to Lattes, I started stage two filled with dread at the prospect of another day of the same. Comfort arrived in the figure of Robert Millar. When I was 16 I’d had a poster of him on my bedroom wall: the Scottish legend in his Tour de France polka dot King of the Mountains jersey. Now we were in the same race, although to this point I’d only caught glimpses of him. Seeing me riding along stiff-armed and terrified, he pulled alongside to offer some support.
‘It’s not like this all the time,’ he told me. ‘It’s just first-race syndrome. Lots of new pros not used to the big bunches and desperate to prove themselves. It’ll calm down soon.’ It hadn’t occurred to me that this wasn’t the norm and that others might be wetting themselves too. I found his words immensely reassuring.
Robert was right: as the general classification became established, the race settled into a rhythm and I even managed to slip into a breakaway on the final stage. At the start of the week, I’d been convinced my peloton partners were all crazy, willing to risk their lives to get into a move or be in the first 20 around an important corner. Then I realised the more depressing truth. They weren’t mad – the relatively small number of crashes amid all the mayhem was testament to that – they were simply much, much better at this than I was.
After the race had finished, we travelled inland to the mountainous Var region, the team’s base for the next few weeks of racing. With almost no flat or straight roads, the area is peppered with sleepy hamlets, each dominated by its arrangement of gnarled olive trees standing watch over boules-playing pensioners. I would return to the same family hotel in the ancient village of Seillans several times during my career, always in February; late enough for the mimosa to have begun to flower but retaining enough of a chill to ensure the evening air was streaked with wood smoke, the smell of which will always remind me of the place.
Our tranquil sojourn in the low mountains was broken up by regular sorties to single day races, both in France and just over the border in Italy. The last of these was the toughest of the year-long French Cup series, the Tour de Haut Var. In the few races I’d ridden so far, I’d had neither the skill nor the courage to hold my place in the peloton and had been near the back every time things got serious. If the pressure stayed on I was usually able to claw my way forward just in time to see the move of the day slip away. This looked like being the pattern for the Tour de Haut Var too.
At half distance, a vicious assault on the climb up to the hilltop city of Mende strung out the field and from that point on the race never slowed. Over the next couple of hours I passed body after suffering body, yet whenever I looked behind I seemed still to be among the last few. As we passed through Draguignan to complete our final hilly lap before the finish, I became fully aware of how hard the event had been – and not just for me. There were now only 20 of us left in what had become the lead group, not because of any attacking move but through simple attrition. Alongside me was former world champion Gianni Bugno. Maybe I wasn’t doing too badly.
I eventually crossed the line an exhausted sixteenth and with mixed emotions. Up until this race I had been out of my element; linguistically isolated, frequently scared to death and taking a daily battering on the bike. Now here I was feeling happy with having clung on for a top 20 finish. Is this what I’d been reduced to? For someone used to winning it had been a tough opening month. I’d got through it, but I still couldn’t see how I was going to survive long-term in the world of European road racing, or even whether I wanted to.
The performance plan we’d agreed upon the previous winter had the opening time trial of Paris–Nice as my first real objective of the year. But when the route came out there was no opening time trial. Clearly the race organisers hadn’t been aware of my carefully worked out schedule, or my need for a morale-boosting early-season win. Based on my performances so far, Roger decided I’d be best served by going to the Vuelta a Murcia instead, news he delivered in apologetic tones. Not being an aficionado of pro cycling, it took me a while to work out why.
Murcia, I discovered from asking around, was the poor relation of Paris–Nice: a second division bike race stocked with a ragtag mix of riders, some of them heading for retirement, others coming back from injury or starting their seasons late. But it did have a prologue: at 6.7 km, flat and non-technical, it was practically a pursuit – as close to home territory as I was ever going to get. I edged out the Dutch time trial specialist Erik Breukink to win the stage and with it the first leader’s jersey of my professional career.
Wearing yellow turns even a lowly neo-pro into temporary peloton royalty. Instead of having to fight to hang on to the back of the lead group, I was escorted to the front, or at least my jersey was. With the mountains looming, I didn’t think the experience would last long, but for the moment I was able to ride unmolested up at the head of the field.
I was amazed at just how much easier it was in this part of the peloton, and for the first time I could really understand why it had been so hard just 100 metres in arrears. Those at the front decided when life would be made hard. The result of their actions – slowing down or speeding up – took a few seconds to ripple backwards through the peloton and that lag had a profound effect. While the leading riders eased and recovered between efforts, those behind were still working hard to catch up. By the time the chasers were able to freewheel, the front runners were ready to go again. The rear half of the peloton was constantly reacting, never quite in sync with those dictating the pace, and the result was a never-ending fight just to stand still.
With the help of our makeshift team I held on to the jersey through stage one, but the following day I was unable to go with the lead riders on the final climb. For the rest of the race, even without the jersey, I still benefited from an enhanced reputation, a subtle respect that saw others think twice before trying to push me out of line when the going got hard. The last stage was another short time trial, which I won from the overall race victor, Melchor Mauri of Banesto. In the final rankings I was well down the field in an event contested by the peloton’s weak and injured. Even so, the Vuelta a Murcia was where my personal fortunes started to turn. I headed home happy.
In fact, being able to head home was an important part of the deal I’d struck with Roger. For most British riders, signing with a continental team meant moving to France, Spain or Italy. But then most riders would be following a familiar pattern: work hard, gain results, turn pro, win races, earn money, get married, have kids. For a very select few, that career arc might culminate in an attempt on the world hour record. I had the marriage, the kids and the hour record already. My home life was well established and so were my working methods. Yes, a move to France would have meant nicer weather, better roads, a ready supply of training partners and easier travel to races. But it wouldn’t have been home. I had no desire to move to Europe, I was happy to commute and keep the two sides of my life separate.
The cy
cling portion of it – considered, planned, structured – couldn’t have contrasted more with our domestic situation. In the Boardman household, circumstances were and still are allowed to evolve organically. Whatever develops is then expertly managed by Sally. I’m aware that this description makes my wife sound like either a saint or a hippie, but the reality of Mrs B is much more complex. Sally has no time for: cleaning, U2, people who agree with her, wasabi, Halloween, magicians, being told what to do, sports, pre-planned social arrangements, writing, large plates of food or clowns. She likes: cinnamon, renovating old houses, pub quizzes, mountains, QI, non-smoky whisky, karaoke, Bonfire Night, Disneyland, Flying Saucers (the sweets, not the spaceships), factual books, fabrics, snow, babies and tasting other people’s dinners.
While I was immersed in the very narrow world of performance cycling, an activity she only ever had a peripheral interest in, Sally looked after a baby, two toddlers, paid the bills, did the tax returns and generally presided over the important parts of our life. In 1994, in her role as head of Boardman UK, she decided it was time for us to leave our little terraced house in Walker Street and find a ‘proper’ family home. After scouring the listings in the local estate agents and several visits to properties with potential, she narrowed it down to a shortlist of one. It was her favourite number of choices to present me with when marital etiquette dictated a joint decision.
Our move was scheduled for the end of the season, so I tackled my first pro campaign using the system we’d developed to cope with our cramped living quarters. My bikes, tools and other equipment were all kept in a shed in my parents’ small back garden. My Kingcycle rig, the sophisticated home-trainer we used for physiology testing, was stored at Pete Woodworth’s place. Pounding away on stationary bikes in kitchens and mopping up the sweat afterwards might look laughable from the lottery-funded heights of today’s training programmes. But anyone peering through the steamed-up windows would actually have been watching cutting-edge science in action. Each workout was a custom Pete Keen creation, with training loads measured to the watt. Every exercise was logged, the results meticulously analysed, discussed and then used to adjust the design of the next session. We were a learning machine.
My two stage wins in Murcia had been good enough for Roger to include me in the line-up for the prestigious Criterium du Dauphiné Libéré, a race that featured a prologue, a longer time trial and two big climbing days – all the elements of a Tour de France telescoped into eight high-pressure stages. Usually held in early June, it was a race the Tour favourites often used to sharpen their form. For everyone else it was a test, a chance to prove to their managers that they were also worth a place on the team for the world’s greatest race.
With an eye towards the long and often mountainous days, most riders prepared by seeking out hilly terrain and pushing their volume of training ever higher. I went the other way, focusing almost entirely on short power efforts. The Dauphiné prologue was 6.7 km long, half a kilometre shorter than the one coming up in the Tour five weeks later, and it was the only stage I was interested in. There’d be no raised hand or amused smile from Roger if I could win impressively here, just a Gallic shrug of acceptance that some riders were meant to go to the big race in their first pro-season.
The route of the 1994 Dauphiné opener drew a triangle around the Alpine spa town of Évian-les-Bains. Starting on the shores of Lac Leman, it quickly turned inland, up a two kilometre climb before plunging back to the lake shore for a one kilometre dash along the Rue de Lac to the finish. It was much hillier than the Tour’s Lille circuit would be in July but it was close enough for my purposes. I recced the course to work out my strategy and decided on a steady rather than an explosive start, similar to the way I’d tackled UK hill climbs as an amateur. The danger here was going out too hard and blowing up on the ascent. I asked the team mechanics for an extra large gear on my TT machine, so that I would be able to pedal instead of just freewheel on the three kilometre downhill section back to the lake shore.
As I’d expected, I lost time to the climbers on the first half of the course, but being able to power my way down from the top of the hill allowed me to recover my losses. I hit the flat at top speed and took the win by one second from my teammate Jean-Philippe Dojwa. It was my second yellow jersey of the year, and this time not in the lacklustre setting of the Vuelta a Murcia but at the head of a field building up for the biggest event of the season.
Three days later I won the 38 km time trial stage. The race was now halfway through and I was still in yellow. Judging from the quizzical looks I was getting, many of the riders and team managers were bemused by my continued presence at the head of such a prestigious stage race – none of them more than I was – but they weren’t overly worried because the high mountains were still to come.
From the start Greg LeMond had been genuinely excited for me. The Dauphiné was our first race together; in fact it was the first time we’d met. Greg had been struggling with health issues that were hard to identify and even harder to shake off. Whatever they were, it was beginning to look as though his brilliant career was drawing to a close. Having won the Tour three times he was now fighting just to make the team. I’d been slightly starstruck and apprehensive about how he’d take to me. I needn’t have worried; whatever his own problems he had delighted in my success. Greg was full of warmth and had an insatiable curiosity that made it impossible not to like him instantly. And, of course, we had a love of innovation and technology in common.
Greg had famously won the 1989 Tour de France with triathlon bars fitted to his time trial bike. He’d been an early adopter of the SRM system, a sort of black-box device that precisely measured power output, pulse, speed, cadence and temperature. When he found out that I used the same German-made gadget, he plied me with question after question about my training. This level of interest in the thoughts of a neo-pro from someone who’d achieved all he had was enormously flattering. He even gave me some tips on how to move through a densely packed peloton that proved invaluable as I fought to hold on to the yellow jersey for as long as I could.
With three stages left we entered the Alps proper. At the crest of the penultimate climb, before the summit finish at Echirolles, there were just 30 riders left in the lead group and amazingly I was one of them. Never having been in this position before, I had no idea what to do. Judging by Roger’s face as he pulled alongside in the team car, it hadn’t been in his script either. We looked at each other through the open window, silently framing the same question: ‘You don’t think we could actually win this, do you?’ It was a wonderful moment and the thought lingered for almost an hour until the foot of the final climb, at which point I ran out of fuel and blew spectacularly. I rode the last 10 km alone, counting down every metre to the finish line on the computer mounted on my handlebars.
Losing the yellow jersey was more of a relief than a disappointment. The pressure was off: I’d exceeded both my own and everyone else’s expectations by an order of magnitude, and my place in GAN’s Tour de France team was secure. Now there were only two stages between me and a welcome trip home.
One of the odd habits that persist among the logistics staff on just about every pro team is booking post-race flights ridiculously close to the end of an event. Perhaps they’re running a secret competition of their own, with points awarded for the shortest time between podium and check-in. Whatever the reason, most races in my career seemed to be followed by a second race to the airport, with a crazed soigneur at the wheel breaking the speed limit and me in the backseat wondering whether I was going to die or just miss my flight.
I’m a worrier in any case, and my chief worry on the final stage of the Dauphiné was getting it over with in time to be home on the Wirral that evening. Stage seven was a 157 km loop around Chambéry, and from the moment the flag dropped it was clear that no one wanted to animate the race. The overall winner had pretty much been decided – ONCE’s Laurent Dufaux had a handy lead – and as far as stage honours went it
looked as though everyone was happy to wait for the final sprint. As we crawled along I began to get increasingly stressed about missing my plane. In an effort to speed things up I attacked and to my surprise I was allowed to slip away with half a dozen others.
That was too many for ONCE who began to work at the front to reel us in. Knowing that it was the size of the move making the team of the race leader nervous, the experienced members of the break started to attack in ones and twos to see if they’d be allowed some glory that didn’t threaten the overall result. I wasn’t interested in that: I’d had my two stage wins, I just wanted a good average speed. So rather than join in, I hung off the back, waiting until everyone had made their attempts and failed.
At the foot of a small drag, just as the last escapee was clawed back by the peloton, I made my own bid for freedom and it worked. It was my first successfully executed tactical move; I’d taken the measure of my opponents, watched for an opportunity and countered successfully. My sense of satisfaction wore off when I realised I’d committed myself to an 80 km solo ride to the line that included several hard climbs on the finishing circuit. Having mopped up the other riders, and knowing they could now control the outcome of the race, ONCE chose not to chase and left me out there. Because it had been a hard week and no one else was inclined to take it on either, I picked up my first ever road stage win.
It was common then for even major races to feature novelty prizes, something that would offer finish-line photographers an alternative to the standard podium shots. The most bizarre one I ever saw was a cow. That year’s Dauphiné was sponsored by a Swiss confectionery brand, and the winner of each stage had to sit on a huge set of scales while their body weight in chocolate was piled onto the other side. With three wins, I’d accumulated 210 kg of the stuff, which was gleefully loaded by the team staff into the camper van. I took a couple of bars with me for the kids – OK, for me – and dashed off to catch the plane.
Triumphs and Turbulence Page 10