Triumphs and Turbulence

by Chris Boardman

  On the first evening of her stay Sally enquired about meals at her hotel and was told, ‘We aren’t doing food today, maybe not this week.’ The receptionist delivered this message as if it was standard hotel practice. ‘Where can I get some?’ Sally asked. ‘Nowhere, no restaurants in Catania are open,’ was the reply, followed by a shrug and a single word: ‘Mafia’. Taking pity on her, the hotel staff provided bread, cheese and tomatoes, a diet she lived on for the next two days until everything opened again.

  Dotted around were other clues to the invisible forces at work on the island. There were the armed sentries in their bulletproof shelters posted at each corner of the judge’s house behind the hotel. Then there were the wreaths along the roadside that I naively thought marked the sites of traffic accidents.

  Hot and rough, in every sense, looked like it was going to be the overriding theme of the championships. But after Lyon, the heat at least was tolerable and the rutted Sicilian track was like riding on silk. Now that the exhaustion had faded, I was beginning to feel the benefit of all the hard work I’d done at the Tour. Everything was going to plan, which wasn’t the case for poor Graeme Obree.

  He had been preparing for the defence of his pursuit title in Ayrshire, where it had been a balmy 16 degrees. But the weather wasn’t his biggest problem. It seemed the UCI had come to a decision about Graeme’s unorthodox tucked position on the bike. They didn’t like it and had decided that it wasn’t to be allowed. In the days leading up to the pursuit competition, small groups of officials kept gathering by the GB pen at the track while we were training, huddling next to Graeme’s bike and muttering. What happened next has been well documented – there’s even been a film made about it all – and as I was utterly wrapped up in myself at the time, I learned a lot of what happened retrospectively.

  In essence, cycling’s world governing body spent the week crafting new rules to produce the result they were after: Graeme’s capitulation or his expulsion. The trouble was that every time they tightened the regulations in one area they created gaps elsewhere, gaps that he was very good at spotting. But they were determined. In the end, Graeme gave up trying to win what was an unwinnable war and rode the bike he’d used to take the world title the year before. He was duly disqualified.

  Meanwhile, I dispatched my old Olympic rival Jens Lehmann to reach the final where I faced my new professional teammate, Francis Moreau. Francis, who exemplified the GAN team’s philosophy of ‘just smash it’, had a reputation for going out hard and blowing spectacularly, a strategy he stuck to for the final, allowing me to take my first world pursuit title.

  Part one of the Italian job was complete. The next morning our attention switched to the time trial, although we stayed on the track for our training sessions. The state of the road course was so bad that the GB coaches decided to delay the three-hour journey to Catania. When we did finally arrive to recce the route it was everything that we’d been led to believe: undulating, lots of turns and poor surfaces pretty much all the way. Hot and rough.

  Graeme had added complications. He’d had a matter of days in which to completely reinvent his riding position and try to get used to the heat. We gave him a set of conventional handlebars which he proceeded to modify and fix to his track bike. He intended to use a single-speed, fixed-wheel machine for the hilly, twisting event.

  My modifications were simpler but no less important. Although the race would only last around 50 minutes, I’d be sweating so much that I wanted to take a water bottle. On a normal bike that wouldn’t have been a problem, but the Lotus 110 wasn’t a normal bike. Back in the UK, I’d designed a simple, T-shaped bar that could be fixed to the underside of the saddle with a bottle cage bolted to it, although the angles meant that the cage had to be upside down. Terry Dolan made one for me and it worked well – until I tested it out on the course. The roads were so bumpy that the bottle had a tendency to bounce out. The solution we devised was to hold it in place with a cut-off toe strap that I could reach back and flip off. There was no way to reattach it, though, so I’d only get one drink. In an attempt to keep the contents cold, we put the filled bottle in the hotel freezer overnight, transferring it to a cool box on the day of the race and fitting it to the bike just moments before the start. We reasoned that enough of the contents would thaw by the time I needed to take a drink – about halfway through.

  In my hour ride the year before, humidity had been the big problem. Here, the heat was dry and that made all the difference. It was unpleasant, but I was able to cope. Graeme suffered from heat stress and had to abandon. The sun was so ferocious that by the time I flicked the strap off my bottle the water was not only melted but already lukewarm. It was enough: a warm Tour de France followed by a hot weather training camp had conditioned my body to cope with the extreme conditions.

  The GB team management had agreed to let Roger drive the car behind me and the regular time checks he gave me let me know that I was building a comfortable and growing lead. I turned into the kilometre-long finishing straight knowing I’d won, able to celebrate even before the line.

  The victory in Catania took my year one professional tally to two world titles and a stage win in the Tour de France. The first few struggling months when I had genuinely thought I wouldn’t make it as a pro seemed like ancient history. Sally and I flew home the day after the race – my birthday – stopping in London for dinner with Alan Dunn in what had become our favourite haunt: Sticky Fingers. The owner, Bill Wyman, and his wife Suzanne joined us. This kind of thing was starting to feel normal.

  In early September I asked my dad, who’d never been abroad to watch me race, to bring Ed out to the Grand Prix Eddy Merckx in Brussels. I knew he wouldn’t have come if I’d asked him on his own. I wanted to show off, let him see his son in action on the world stage amongst some of the sport’s giants. It didn’t turn out to be quite the take-your-dad-to-work experience I was hoping for.

  The long season was taking its toll and I struggled through the race, battling with that year’s Vuelta winner, Tony Rominger. We were neck and neck until 15 km to go when I blew, running out of energy so dramatically that I lost four minutes and as many places over the final few kilometres. In the following car, Ed had fallen asleep in the passenger footwell and woken up crying with a cricked neck. My dad, convinced that he’d jinxed the result, never came to another continental race.

  Both form and passion were waning fast. There were just a few races left to ride, the last of them a made-for-TV track special: Boardman vs Obree at the Bercy Arena in Paris. The timing of this exhibition pursuit match was dictated down to the second by the live television coverage, so it was a bit of a blow to the schedule when the countdown hit zero and a chunk of Graeme’s bike fell off.

  While officials ran around trying to work out what to do, the director cut to a close-up of the damage. Graeme’s bike was still in the start gate but his cranks were lying on the track. Also visible, although unconnected to the race-ending catastrophic failure, was a spanner that he was using as a spar to stop his saddle slipping down. The name given to his machine, Old Faithful, suddenly seemed rather ironic. I’m not sure what French television filled the rest of the time slot with, but the battle of the track titans was never restaged.

  With the season out of the way, it was time for the long-awaited house move from Hoylake to Meols. Seventy-two Bertram Drive was a five-bedroom Victorian semi-detached and as far removed from our terraced house in Walker Street as it was possible to be: a true family home complete with fruit trees and a resident squirrel, Harvey, who would come into the kitchen to see if there was anything on offer.

  There was even, briefly, a heron. It left after a few days having eaten every living thing in the garden pond. For a couple who’d grown up in houses with back yards that would fit into the pond, it was magical. We watched contentedly through our kitchen window as Ed explored his new habitat, laughing heartily as he rolled over and over on the grass, straight into the icy fish-free water.

 
We finished the year with our second family holiday abroad. Alan Dunn had invited us to Miami where the Rolling Stones would be playing over Thanksgiving on their Voodoo Lounge Tour. Accompanying us on the trip was our part-time nanny, Moira Gillespie. We first met ‘Moi’ in September 1992 when she came down from her hometown of Dunoon to work in the new nursery at the end of our road. She started coming to us at weekends and gradually became part of the family.

  Her first job had been looking after the children of American service personnel at the US naval base at Holy Loch. It was there that she acquired the phrase ‘Love you bunches’, which she mischievously used with our young and impressionable kids. It stuck, got shortened to ‘bunchies’, and is still in use today. It will probably be passed down through generations of Boardmans to come, a legacy of which I’m sure Moira would be very proud.

  Being a private person I need a lot of space. We never have house guests and I’m not comfortable having anyone other than our kids in our home. Moi, with her dry sense of humour and roll-your-sleeves-up attitude to life, was – and still is – the one exception to this rule.

  We were met at Miami airport by Alan and some of the Stones’ security team. Momentarily distracted by handshakes and the setting down of suitcases, I turned around to usher Ed forward and he wasn’t there. I scanned the arrivals hall, able to see for 100 metres in all directions. Nothing. No way could a five-year-old wander that far in the seconds he’d been out of my sight. Not unless he’d been taken. Like many parents before me, I instantly assumed the worst and raised the alarm. Burly security guys started the search while I, to my horror and shame, became a useless jelly. A minute later, Ed was located. He’d lost us in the crowd, headed immediately for a check-in desk, given them his name and been whisked behind the counter. The whole thing only lasted about two minutes but scares me to this day.

  Our suite of rooms at the Ritz Carlton was the plushest we’d ever seen, an impressive setting for the news that Sally delivered after I found an unexpected item in our baggage. She was pregnant. It was my fourth go at this, another chance to be the supportive husband, make up for being such a self-centred individual in every other area. I had a little hissy fit.

  We didn’t see much of the band, although we had access to the floor of the hotel they’d taken over. I did bump into Keith Richards at breakfast one morning and expressed my surprise to Alan that he was up so early. Not early, late – he was still going from the day before.

  We took the kids to the concert at Joe Robbie Stadium, watched Ronnie Wood perform an impromptu set by the pool and visited Disney World. It was a great trip, a different universe from the one I usually inhabited. Not that I really felt part of the sporting fraternity either. Back at home that winter I made my second appearance on A Question of Sport. The frozen smile on the face of my team captain Bill Beaumont as I entered the green room, and the sniggers from his opposite number Ian Botham, told me that they remembered my first.

  On that post-Olympic debut I’d been asked to identify a football club from a picture of the stadium. I’d said the first thing that came into my head, which since I could see a supermarket in the shot next to the ground was ‘Sainsbury’s’. This time the questions were tailored to my (lack of) knowledge.

  ‘Who was the only rider to win the world individual pursuit title on four occasions?’ asked David Coleman.

  ‘Hans-Henrik Ørsted,’ I replied, rather proud of myself. It was Hugh Porter, who I don’t think has ever forgiven me.

  CHAPTER 10

  Crash

  Crashes usually come in one of two flavours: ‘Oh, shit, here it comes’ or ‘Why am I in hospital?’

  To the outside world my 1994 season looked like a great start to a professional career. It looked that way to me, too. But it was also my fourth straight year of pushing too hard, not touching the brakes, always looking beyond the next bend. From trackside at the Maebashi Stadium in Japan in 1990, when I’d first realised that becoming world champion might be possible, through to standing on the podium in Sicily, I’d been dangerously driven: yearly goals, training targets, maximum sustainable power. Never relaxed, always outside my comfort zone, terrified I’d taken on more than I could deliver. Then, when I did deliver, breathing no more than a sigh of relief that I hadn’t let everyone down before fixing my eyes on the next target.

  I was heading for a huge fall. If only it had been clear at the time.

  In October 1994 I met up with the two Petes for our annual review: a detailed debrief on the season just gone, followed by a look at what opportunities were available in the one to come. From there we built our next performance plan to present to Roger. The main focus of the 1994 season had been to win the Tour prologue. For 1995, it was a bend I was already looking beyond. We pencilled in a repeat victory in July and focused our serious attention on the defence of my world titles. The 1995 World Championships would be the last edition in which track and road were held together, this time in Colombia; Bogotá for the track events and Duitama for the road. We saw the high-altitude locations as a distinct advantage, a challenge that required physiological understanding and targeted research: Pete Keen’s specialist subjects. The plan we devised to repeat 1994’s Tour/Worlds success was a masterpiece of strategic thinking.

  Roger, now a big fan of performance planning, agreed both to the proposed schedule and to act as scout-cum-logistics director. Pete Keen and I thought that Colorado, which we both knew from the 1986 World Championships, would be the perfect place to prepare. Roger flew out and began organising everything we would need for our pre-Colombia training camp. He booked a hotel at altitude in the Rockies and secured use of the Colorado Springs velodrome for training, something the GB team had failed to manage. He even recced the local roads for suitable training routes. Everything was in place well in advance, ready for a smooth post-Tour transfer.

  Since my big targets were all in the second half of the year, we had decided on a late start, with the Dauphiné Libéré in June signalling the effective opening of my campaign. No point in piling on the pressure for early-season victories and risk burning out later on, we thought. A psychologist might have advised us otherwise. With no victories to boost my morale and settle my nerves, I entered the summer as highly strung as ever. The way I saw it, my salary now effectively depended on eight minutes in July.

  My Tour warm-up went well, with another prologue win in the Dauphiné. On the mountainous final weekend I even hung in with the climbers – for the one and only time in my career – to finish second overall, prompting press questions about my being a potential future Tour winner. The result should have helped my nerves, but I knew the week-long race wasn’t the Tour. Worse, my second place was the biggest result the team had managed all year. Since Greg LeMond’s retirement, GAN’s commitment as sponsor was looking shaky. The management’s desire, even desperation, for some success was almost palpable, and by July I could feel them willing me to do something to secure the team’s future. Everyone had quietly sneaked their eggs into my basket and it was heavy. By the time I arrived in Saint-Brieuc four days before the Tour start to familiarise myself with the tricky prologue course, I was wound up like a spring.

  With multiple bends, cobbles, a fast run down to the Gouët river and a climb to the finish, the 7.3 km circuit had a bit of everything. I rode it several times, memorising every dip, drag and bend, keen to ensure that I had the right gear selection for the different aspects of the course. Not unusually, our training runs were done during the day, but to satisfy the demands of French TV for a prime time Tour opener, the prologue was scheduled for the first time ever to start after six in the evening. That seemed to be roughly the time every day that the heavens opened over the Brittany coast.

  Race day: 1 July 1995. Weather forecast: thunderstorms expected by early evening. The forecasters were right, clouds bubbled up throughout the afternoon and before I’d even left the hotel for the start there was a downpour underway. Rather than being disappointed I was relieved, which in
itself should have told me something was wrong. On such a twisty, technical course, there was clearly nothing I could do now. I had been absolved of the responsibility to deliver the team’s results by an act of God. The victory would go to one of the small number of riders who’d been lucky enough to complete the circuit in the dry. I arrived at the start area happy and relaxed.

  As I sat in the camping car, listening to the rain on the roof, my teammate Didier Rous pulled himself, dripping, through the door and made a beeline for me: ‘I was only about 30 seconds away from Durand!’

  Jacky Durand, not noted as a time trialist, had been one of the early starters, finishing before the rain began. His time of nine minutes exactly had stood for over an hour, as rider after rider either failed to master the conditions or didn’t try. Didier, though, was buzzing with belief on my behalf: ‘If I was that close, you can still do it, definitely!’

  It was a view enthusiastically supported by everyone in the camping car and greedily I let myself be carried along with it. I desperately wanted to wear the yellow jersey again and heard what I wanted to hear. I switched back into race mode. I asked Cyril, the mechanic, for wheels with road tyres on, fatter and with more grip than my usual TT slicks. But the team only had a couple of complete pairs and they were out on the course. He could offer me a front wheel, but no rear disc. My choice at the back was either to stick with an 18 mm slick, or sacrifice the aerodynamic advantage of a disc and fit a road wheel. I chose the disc.