If my job made the condition worse, it made treatment pretty much impossible. Testosterone is a controlled substance in sport. To use it and still race I’d need a TUE, a Therapeutic Use Exemption. Unsure exactly what to do, I approached the UCI – there were no armies of team personnel then to do this stuff for you – and explained my diagnosis. I also forwarded copies of my bone scans.
The initial response was encouraging. I was advised to organise treatment while the TUE was arranged. Soon afterwards, though, I received a call from the UCI telling me, in embarrassed tones, that there would be no exemption. They weren’t disputing my condition – it’s hard to fake a bone scan – or that I needed the remedy prescribed, but it wasn’t something that could be sanctioned. All this had happened at the wrong time: French police were still arresting people connected to the Festina affair, and despite the consequences for my career I couldn’t bring myself to disagree with the UCI’s stance.
I thought seriously about whether to pack it all in there and then. I met with my UK doctor to see if there was a legal interim intervention that might at least manage my condition if I did decide to keep on riding. There was: regular infusions of a calcium-binding agent that required me to be hooked up to a drip for four hours every other month. Logistically, the most efficient time to do it was in the run-up to competition when I’d be backing off training anyway, so I scheduled the first treatment for late March, just before flying out to France for a race. That was how I found out that the medication destroyed performance. From then on, sessions were carefully timed to coincide with my return home from racing.
With only six minor time trial wins, 1999 was a pretty thin season for results. Despite what I’d thought was an excellent build up to the Tour de France, I was only able to finish fifth in the prologue behind the eventual race winner, Lance Armstrong. I completed that year’s Tour in 119th place, two and three quarter hours behind the American. There was no celebration: getting round wasn’t what I was being paid for. The atmosphere in the team was almost hostile.
CHAPTER 14
The Final Hour
To usher in the new century we hired a local restaurant, The Green Room in West Kirby, and a one-man acoustic band. The poor bloke didn’t realise he’d be providing a karaoke service, but when he failed to prise the microphone and his tambourine from Sally’s grip he gave in with good grace and resigned himself to the role of backing singer. Sally worked her way through the bulk of Dolly Parton’s back catalogue and the kids fell asleep under the table. It was a nice night.
The party marked not only the end of a century but the start of my final season and the countdown to retirement. I was looking forward to it. Sally, though, had a wider view and could see the shock I was in for when I stopped racing, so she had devised a strategy. She knew I wanted to continue exercising regularly and that I was, at least for now, utterly sick of cycling. The alternative was running: a pursuit with the added bonus of having no historical benchmarks for me to fail to live up to. She reasoned that this simple activity might give me the transitional structure I needed to adjust to civilian life. And what better way to encourage such a regime to take root than to have a regular running partner depending on me? It was a great plan. It was also doomed from the outset.
That August my birthday present was a lead and a collar. It was the first I knew of Project Beagle. Sally had visited Maccombs pet shop in Hoylake with a list of canine requirements: the dog needed to be a manageable size and cope well with car travel, it had to be good with children, obedient, a non-moulting breed and, of course, it had to like running. ‘Easy,’ said Jan Foster, the owner. ‘What you need is a Beagle.’
Just how wrong on how many counts this advice was would only become clear once it was too late but Sally, knowing little about dogs, thanked Jan for the guidance and duly placed an order with a recommended breeder near Preston. A few months after my birthday we shoehorned ourselves into my tiny orange Lotus and headed off to pick up our new charge.
In the kennel was a large mass of brown and white fur that on hearing the door open dissolved into eight fluffy tennis-balls of energy. I say eight, in fact there were seven boisterous puppies and one snoring lump left in the corner. It had runt written all over it and naturally this was the one Sally had bought. She was undeniably a very cute dog. No larger than my hand, with huge sad eyes and floppy ears bigger than her body, her appearance gave no indication of the pathologically stubborn engine of destruction that lurked inside. In the car, as she nestled between Sally’s feet, we tried to think of a name. The 90-minute drive home failed to produce anything suitable so we simply adopted her mother’s kennel name: Cookie.
A few months later, after all the oohing and aahing over how cute she was had subsided, Cookie’s true nature started to emerge. Despite its solid walls and high fences she made a series of escapes from the garden. None of these breakouts were witnessed, she was simply found on the wrong side of a boundary that logic said she couldn’t breach. Unable to work out how it was happening, we called in a fencing expert to escape-proof the garden. When he arrived it seemed telling that he had his own Beagle in tow, presumably to quality-check his work.
Cookie was no less trouble indoors. Her ability to feign sleep, complete with loud snoring, became legendary. This ploy was used on many occasions to lull us into thinking she could be safely left unattended in a room, usually one in which food was stored. The moment she found herself alone, she set to work, often moving furniture to access worktops and tables.
Over the course of a year she ate a box of Weetabix, several pounds of cheese (blue preferred), three square metres of wallpaper, a chocolate cake, a kilo of butter, several books and a box of Thornton’s toffee.
As Jan had promised, Cookie had no problems with car travel. In fact she loved to be with the family – her pack – at all times. It was the indignity of being left in the car, even for a few seconds, that Cookie objected to. In retaliation, she ate the seat belts, which cost £600 to replace, and projectile-moulted, an ability I still maintain she was consciously in control of. She wasn’t left in the car again. It was our first obedience lesson.
*
Our inaugural run – supposedly the dog’s raison d’être – was a leisurely jog in light rain along the Hoylake seafront. Sensing the consistent nature of the activity, she rebelled after 90 seconds and simply stopped. Every time I moved back towards her, making encouraging noises and enthusiastically slapping my thigh, she ran a few metres in the other direction, always staying just out of reach until we got home. Obedience lesson number two: she must have been pleased with my progress.
Determined not to be bested by a hound, I devised a new strategy. I’d start the run and get to my turnaround point before letting her off the lead. Then when she started her break for home it would be at a time of my choosing in the direction I wanted her to go. Cookie cottoned on to my plan immediately and simply sat down, refusing to move. No fuss, barking or biting, just passive-aggressive resolve. Gandhi would have been proud. As I yanked on the lead, she made choking noises, her claws rasping noisily across the pavement. Passers-by scowled at me for the cruelty I was displaying towards this poor beast with the big brown eyes and floppy ears. After two weeks I gave in. The dog stayed at home and ate the soft furnishings while I did the running around.
It wasn’t that Cookie didn’t like exercise, just that it had to be on her terms. She loved walks across the sandbanks of the Dee Estuary, following the many scents, straining to get off the lead, but I knew that letting her loose at the wrong moment could turn a short, peaceful stroll into an open-ended episode of ‘seagull frenzy’. Once, I chased her around the sandy expanse shouting myself hoarse until the evening slid into dusk and the tide started coming in. As we ran back and forth – for considerably longer than any of the runs the dog had refused to take part in – a crowd gathered at the railings along the promenade. When Cookie finally decided she’d had enough and trotted over, ears drooping, eyes full of (false) remorse,
I got a round of applause. At least I like to think it was for me.
Another advantage of living by a beach, for Cookie at least, was the number of people who liked to barbecue in good weather. One late summer evening, Sally and I were walking along the coastal track that ran from our house past the sand dunes separating the Royal Liverpool Golf Course from the estuary. Cookie, who had disappeared into the dunes some minutes earlier, exploded into view running at full pelt, ears flapping in time with the large steak protruding from either side of her mouth. We carried on walking in silence and pretended it wasn’t our dog.
In the end, the only requirements on Sally’s original list that the dog actually fulfilled were not getting car sick and not biting. Or licking for that matter. In fact, Cookie generally ignored people altogether unless they had food. She became the family eccentric – or at least the most eccentric – and the older and more crotchety she got the more we loved her.
If the 1999 season had been thin, then my final term as a professional was a disaster. In fact, it was so depressing I can barely bring myself to write about it. It was the only season of my career in which I didn’t win a single race: second in the prologue of Paris–Nice was the best I could manage. The team management knew about my health problems but they didn’t seem to make any allowances for them, and the less valued I felt the less I wanted to be there.Even the combined high spirits of Jens and Eros couldn’t get me to see cycling as anything other than a daily, weekly, monthly grind. So I did what everyone does when they aren’t happy at work: I clocked off and looked outside for enjoyment. It arrived from an unexpected source.
Anne O’Hare seldom gave her friends and family actual, physical presents. She preferred experiences. Either something she would enjoy doing herself or, more often, something she wanted to see you do for her amusement. At Christmas 1999 she handed us a plain white envelope. I winced inwardly. Was it singing lessons? A bungee jump from a balloon? Maybe a session as a stand-up comedian? Grin fixed in place, I tore it open to find the best present I had ever received: scuba-diving lessons. Sadly for Sally, who was also included in the deal, it was possibly the worst present that she had ever received. This seemed to please Anne just as much as my elation.
On the night of Sunday 16 January, I went to Europa Pools in Birkenhead and breathed underwater for the first time since I was 13 years old. In a single breath my love for the life aquatic rushed back into me and I became fanatical about it all over again. It was a child’s excitement and the immersion was almost total. Diving lessons became the focus of my life with my career fitted in around them.
Sally persevered with the course out of sheer stubbornness, hating every moment of it. She didn’t mind the theory, sitting in a classroom was fine, it was just the bit that involved water she detested. After a few weeks our highly competent and patient instructor, Paul Chapman, took us to Astbury Water Park just outside Congleton. It was a rather grandiose title for some rotting wooden buildings the size of a couple of shipping containers sitting on the side of an old sand quarry.
The murky green water was a frigid five degrees. Despite the drysuit and several layers of clothing, the first time we submerged ourselves was a shocking experience, even for me. I can’t believe Sally stuck with it. Part of the first lesson involved taking off our masks and replacing them while sitting on the bottom. When Paul indicated to Sally that she should perform this manoeuvre she fixed him with one of her stares and slowly shook her head. Over the course of three days we completed the required tasks and became qualified scuba divers. We were now allowed to experience the full wonders of Astbury. We saw a dead frog. I think it had committed suicide.
Having met the challenge and passed her tests, Sally has never dived since. I signed up straight away for more tuition. By May I was on to Advanced Diver training, the search and rescue part of which was performed in Liverpool’s Salthouse Dock. From the course I got both a certification card and a virulent nasal infection that severely hampered my ability to train. Already in the team’s bad books for my lack of results, I did not make the selection for the 2000 Tour. I had mixed feelings about this, partly wistful that my last shot at a stage victory had been taken away, partly relieved not to have the responsibility. I already felt like an outsider.
In late June I was out training in the Cheshire lanes when I stopped to take a call from Roger. He’d been thinking about my final season and wanted to make sure I went out on a high note.
While I stood at the side of the road with my bike in the warm afternoon sunshine, cars whizzing past, he reminded me of an account I’d given him of our Bordeaux hour record preparation. What had stuck in his mind was my description of a small side exercise that we’d done out of curiosity – mostly Pete Keen’s.
Along with all our high-tech gear we had taken a normal track bike, a silk jersey and an old-fashioned ‘hairnet’ crash helmet to gauge how hard it would be to break Eddy Merckx’s 1972 record using the same kind of equipment. I hadn’t given any thought to it in seven years, but the tale of our experiment had inspired Roger. He proposed that the final act of my career should be an attempt to better the 49.431 km mark set in Mexico City by the world’s greatest ever cyclist.
By this time it had become a record worth breaking again. Since my second hour ride in 1996, the UCI had not only clamped down heavily on bike design, they’d rewritten history. They ruled that every record holder after Merckx, from Francesco Moser though to me, had tinkered to some degree with what they saw as standard cycling equipment. So they split the hour into two categories. My 1996 record of 56.375 km had been designated Best Human Effort, while the traditional hour record or ‘Athlete’s Hour’ had reverted to Merckx.
I told Roger I’d have a think about it and come back to him. Still standing at the side of the road, I called Pete Keen to get his reaction. Like me, he fancied the idea – it was just the kind of project we loved – but he was quick to point out that it wouldn’t be easy. Having travelled more than six kilometres further than Merckx in 1996, I admit to silently scoffing at his warning.
*
I was seen by many as one of the riders responsible for a technological renaissance in cycling, using equipment to steal a march on the opposition. Many traditionalists viewed this application of aerodynamic knowledge as a sort of heresy, as though to rely on anything other than legs, lungs and a hearty breakfast was tantamount to cheating. So to finish my career with an exercise that eschewed almost all forms of science and focused solely on athletic ability seemed beautifully symmetrical, like tidying up before I left. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed this would be a poetic way to bow out. We booked the Manchester Velodrome for an afternoon in October, in the middle of the track world championships, and set to work.
Merckx had ridden under the regulations of the day, so his 1972 machine was state of the art – in 1972. The parameters that Pete and I devised to ensure comparability were very simple and we hoped that anybody who came after us – assuming we were successful – would adhere to them. Firstly, the bicycle had to have round tubes. Not almost round, or round to all intents and purposes with some hidden aerodynamic advantage cleverly designed in: just round. In addition, the main tubes could be no less than 25 mm in diameter. Wheels had to have traditional spokes and the rider position was to be in line with the UCI rules for mass-start road events. That was it, all the rules in one paragraph, simple boundaries that we hoped would allow a direct comparison between riders 30 years past and 30 years hence.
Within these constraints we could still experiment, which is how we found ourselves in Pete’s garage with an SRM ergometer and a full-length mirror. In his role as Performance Director of British Cycling, Pete was evaluating this piece of lab apparatus for the team. It was like an item of heavyweight gym equipment in which someone had hidden an exercise bike. The beauty of it was that it was endlessly adjustable: it could quickly mimic any rider position while precisely measuring the changes in power output produced by every tweak. With its pr
ogrammable motor-controlled drive it could also dictate the rider’s cadence, workload or any combination thereof. It was the perfect machine with which to explore.
The equipment limitations we were working under meant that I couldn’t stretch out or otherwise radically change my shape on the bike. Still, drag was going to be a key factor so we set about minimising my frontal area. To start with, we put all the measuring devices to one side, placed the ergometer in front of the mirror and simply tried moving saddle, bars and stem around until we found what looked like the smallest shape that I felt I could adapt to. Once we had what was a promisingly minimalist silhouette, Pete set the rig to demand 400 watts of power and I did a ten-minute block to test it from an ergonomic perspective. Only after confirming that I could ride hard and still hold the position did we reach for the tape measure.
The numbers were insane. Although the position looked passably conventional on the ergometer, to achieve it would require a bike that married a 54 cm seat tube with a ludicrously long 63 cm top tube and a 16 cm handlebar stem! For anyone who knows cycling, this set of measurements is bizarre: no bike would ever be constructed with such dimensions.
It was a valuable lesson that would resurface years later when I was coaching coaches. The SRM rig, which had no tubes and no recognisable frame, allowed us to experiment, unconstrained by the historical template of what a bike should and shouldn’t look like. By not measuring until the very end and using a device that gave us no visual clues as to where our experiments were taking us, we had been able to suspend judgement and focus solely on the demands of the event.
To have such an odd frame built there was only one person to go to: Terry Dolan. It would be the very last bike I ever rode as a pro, so it was fitting that the man who’d helped me from the very start would be intimately involved in creating the machine I’d use at the close. With his stream of jokes and his thick Liverpool accent, some people underestimate Terry, but he is one of the most perceptive people I’ve ever met. I’d learned the hard way not to ignore his advice in 1996 in the run-up to the Olympic Games.
Triumphs and Turbulence Page 17