Triumphs and Turbulence

by Chris Boardman

  Sick of people saying it was the Lotus bike that had got me my gold in Barcelona, I’d been stubbornly determined not to ride one in Atlanta. I designed a frame of my own, constructed from teardrop-shaped steel tubing, with all the cables routed internally. It looked fantastic. It also flexed like a diving board. Terry had warned me this would happen the moment I showed him my sketches. Arrogantly thinking I knew better than someone who’d designed frames for decades, I failed to listen. Feeling his job was done – Terry never once tried to force his opinion on me – he set about building the frame and letting me learn my own lessons. The bike bent out of line so much on the climbs of the Atlanta circuit that it had actually changed gear of its own accord.

  I was curious to see what Terry would make of this radical track bike Pete and I were planning. A couple of weeks after sending him the measurements, I got a call to say that the first prototype was ready for inspection. It was an ugly beast and looked to have more in common with a barnyard gate than a world-beating bicycle. On closer inspection, I noticed the down tube was slightly oval rather than the specified circular cross-section. I delicately brought to his attention the fact that this rendered his creation obsolete before we’d even begun. He stared at the frame for some seconds, desperately trying to find a rationale that would render the frame usable.

  ‘Well … it’s roundish.’

  I left poor Terry to redo the frame while Pete Keen and I turned our attention to the other component that we could influence within our self-imposed guidelines, the engine.

  Pete had been looking into simulated altitude training. Through his contacts we obtained some equipment that filtered oxygen out of the atmosphere to create a hypoxic environment. We tried one of the company’s prototype portable hypoxic chambers in my home office. It was a perspex cube so large that, once assembled, it filled the space completely making it impossible for anyone to open the door to enter or leave the room. We needed a more practical solution, one which was eventually provided by six-year-old George Boardman. Or more specifically, his bedroom.

  Most of George’s possessions were removed, along with George himself who had to share a room with Oscar for the duration of the exercise. I fitted seals around the door and drilled large holes in the window frame for three plastic tubes, which led down to the garage where the filtration systems were housed. Over the course of a day they slowly changed the atmosphere in George’s bedroom until the tiny space mimicked the oxygen availability at nine thousand feet. I trained, slept and watched TV in this rarefied atmosphere for up to 12 hours a day over a period of more than eight weeks. Regular physiology testing in the run-up to the record attempt told us that this innovative training technique enhanced my eventual performance by absolutely sod all.

  In May, after completing the final stage of the PruTour in Edinburgh, we loaded the car up with kids and Jens for the drive south. He was staying over for a week’s training and change of scene from his base in Toulouse. Why he thought Merseyside would be more interesting than the south of France I don’t know, but he was never one for choosing the easy option. While he was with us I introduced him to the beautifully quaint world of British time trialling.

  During the spring and summer months, Thursday was the Chester road club’s ten-mile time trial night, so for a quality workout we headed across the Wirral peninsula. It was a curious clash of worlds: Jens, famous German professional, lining up on the grass verge on Rake Lane with half a dozen local amateurs to put 50p in an old biscuit tin in return for a number. Being true Brits, none of the participants batted an eyelid at his presence. Never mind this namby-pamby Tour de France rubbish, if he wanted respect around here he had to get under 20 minutes for ten miles (he did).

  That summer was packed with unusual episodes – unusual for me, at least. Sally relinquished domestic power and let me take over the refurbishment of the bathroom in our little flat in Chester. Oscar and I went on some rides with his tag-along bike attached to the back of mine and I tried my hand in the kitchen using my newly acquired copy of Delia Smith’s How To Cook. Naturally, I didn’t start with the boiling an egg page but the twice-baked soufflés. The whole summer felt like a series of day release sessions as I was gently groomed for reintroduction to society.

  On Friday 27 October, I woke up knowing that by the end of the day I would no longer be a professional bike rider. I was excited. I spent the morning drinking coffee with friends before heading to the velodrome. The attempt had been slotted into a free afternoon session in the World Championship schedule, so I was guaranteed a packed house.

  The hour before the record attempt was spent in a breeze-block physiotherapy room underneath the velodrome. I’d been in many such spaces during my career, convenient pre-race holding pens of a hundred different shapes and sizes: village halls, camping cars, hotel bedrooms and mechanics’ areas. But this time was different, this time, when I walked out I would never need a space to warm up or mentally prepare for an impending battle again. I’d already sworn that there would never be another number on my back, that I would never carry a pulse monitor again or measure my power output. Whatever the result, when I left that velodrome, the bicycle would become something very different to me. I didn’t know what and at that moment I didn’t care. I was just glad it was about to be over.

  Warm-up complete, Pete sprayed me with the same ethyl alcohol and water mix we’d used in 1993 to help cool me down for the first few minutes of the ride. We shook hands and headed for the track centre. I’d done this twice before and on the second occasion I’d been at my absolute physical best. After my nasal infection and a summer spent diving more than racing, I was far from my prime for attempt number three, but I was still hoping for a similar experience to 1996.

  As I sat on the start line I gave my pacing strategy one last mental run-through, then at 3.45 p.m. I pushed off for the final time. I hadn’t travelled more than ten laps before I realised this was not going to be the euphoric experience of four years earlier. My legs were heavy and my breathing laboured. It was going to be bad. I looked up at the stands, full of cheering people here to witness history being made. I already knew I couldn’t sustain the pace required but neither could I abandon. This was the last thing I’d ever do.

  Once environment and aerodynamics have been excluded, the governing factor in a cyclist’s performance is aerobic efficiency – how well your engine runs. But unlike a motor vehicle, the moment you start the ignition on a cycling engine, it starts to lose capacity. With every turn of the pedal, muscle fibres are damaged and go out of commission, while the power requirement to maintain a constant speed remains the same.

  In other words, I knew I was only going to slow as the hour wore on and I believed, rightly or wrongly, that if I just stuck to the even-paced schedule we’d set – 18.2 second laps – I would fail. I had to create a buffer. Over the first 20 minutes I stole a metre here, a metre there, until by half distance I had a 250 metre, or 18 second lead over Merckx. The crowd cheered, sensing success, but with 30 minutes still to ride, I already knew it was going to come down to a sprint. Timing was going to be critical and the outcome was far from certain.

  From half distance I began to suffer terribly. As my legs burned and my arms cramped I started to lose ground. With 20 minutes to go the bad news reached the crowd. The PA announcer Mike Smith had a copy of my schedule and let them know I’d lost 12 seconds in just ten minutes of riding. I was now only six seconds ahead of Merckx. The noise from the stands changed to a low rumble. They’d finally got it: they weren’t here to witness a choreographed swansong.

  I battled with the pain, my entire world now focused on Pete Keen, who was walking alongside the track to indicate how far I was ahead or behind the target speed. Over the first half he had walked away from me until he’d been a full lap ahead, showing me I was 250 metres up on the old record. Now he shuffled towards me every time he came into view. With 15 minutes to go he had unwound most of the one lap gain and was back into the home straight, just a few
strides away from the pursuit line, the place he’d started at a lifetime ago. I fought on, desperately trying to hold him in position or at least slow his pace.

  With ten minutes to go Pete stepped onto the pursuit line. I was dead level with Merckx. Two minutes later he’d walked almost to the bend, indicating I was now nearly three and a half seconds behind our target. I fleetingly wondered how many calories he’d burned with all the exercise. The crowd noise dipped again: they had shifted from thinking it was going to be close to not believing I could do it.

  But by now I was feeling the opposite. I’d had nearly two decades of time-trial training; I knew my body and what I could expect from it. For the last half an hour I had fought not to stay ahead but to stay in touch. Now, with the end in sight, I was convinced I was close enough for my last card to count. The goal was achievable as long as I timed the sprint right. I’d judged that the final push for home could start with 16 laps to go and not before. Despite appearances, I felt in control, at least I did until Sally stepped onto the side of the track.

  Sally, always indifferent to my sporting exploits, had been watching from the infield with everyone else, seeing me slide behind. Suddenly she was within touching distance and screaming at me, urging me on, something she had never done before. It was an emotional moment and nearly overwhelmed me. I started to respond, pushing up the pace, but it was too soon. Once I ventured over my aerobic threshold it would be only a matter of moments before I ground to a halt. I got myself under control, at least physically, and held back for a few critical seconds.

  With 16 laps to go, I began to accelerate again. Thirteen laps to go, I came into the home straight and saw Pete’s face. He had guessed what I was doing and now, for the first time in 30 minutes, he could see the proof on his stopwatch. He strode away from me indicating the change in trend. Ten laps to go. The crowd, who had seen Pete reverse direction and step purposefully back towards the pursuit line, exploded.

  The next few laps were a blur of noise and pain. At some point Pete had started holding up his fingers to indicate the number of laps remaining. Just five until the end of my career, but he was still 25 metres away from the line and success. Each agonising lap he edged closer but I was running out of time. I pushed harder. With three laps to go, he was less than 15 metres from the mark. Eyes full of sweat and almost unable to see, I poured everything I had left into the final effort, hardly a sprint, there was barely a change in speed, the tank was almost empty. At this point I no longer cared about the result, I just wanted it to stop. The bell rang, barely audible over the roar. I could see people jumping up and down; they looked happy. Pete Keen was beaming too, arms raised, standing ten metres the right side of the line, which was how much I’d broken the record by. I still didn’t care. Then the gun fired. It was over. All of it.

  CHAPTER 15

  Retirement

  The plan for retirement was a fairly simple one: do nothing. Taking a position as a team director or some other cycling-related role would have felt like a cop-out, letting myself be institutionalised for the sake of financial security. For at least the first two years I wanted to look outside the narrow world of sport: I could start doing woodwork again, see if I could get Cookie to run more than 50 metres, spend more time scuba-diving and generally see where the wind blew me.

  To accommodate this utopian lifestyle, Sally and I had begun to economise: the flashy Lotus was sold, the kids were taken out of private school, health insurance and gym subscriptions were allowed to lapse. Without all the financial pressures, I’d have what I’d wanted for years: the freedom to explore and choose work simply because it interested me. It was all very exciting, and after I swung my leg off the bike for the very last time life was everything I had hoped it would be. For about six weeks.

  The sudden removal of the central object around which my existence had orbited was disorientating, and the unfettered liberty quickly lost its lustre. I had no idea how much I’d needed pressure, challenges to overcome and problems to be solved.

  I began to invent them. Things I’d never really noticed at home started to leap out at me. Sally’s CDs were strewn around the house, left wherever she’d last listened to them. I spent a whole day hunting them down then carefully filing them alphabetically. I developed firm opinions on everything from the colour of Ed’s shoes to which route the kids should take on their walk to school and generally began trespassing on territory that had always been Sally’s.

  It was no surprise that she wasn’t too upset about my growing infatuation with diving, it got me out of the house for a few hours. With the local dive club I explored the delights of Liverpool Bay, scoured the bottom of Salthouse Dock and jumped into just about every flooded quarry in North Wales. When I returned from my muddy exploits I spent hours in the garage obsessing over my diving equipment (now installed in its own custom-built racking system) and even knocked up a self-contained underwater breathing pack for the children. Luckily for them it was never tested in earnest.

  I wasn’t short of invitations to rejoin society at large during this period. Even with the minimal methods of contact I maintained with the outside world, I was amazed by the almost daily weird, wonderful and worthy requests that reached me. The hardest to answer were generally in the last category: selfless individuals representing some wonderful cause or other who want nothing more than a bit of your time.

  During what I’ve come to think of as my gap years, I received an email from a Squadron Leader Graham Staunton. It looked merely worthy to begin with but quickly turned both weird and wonderful. It was a heart-warming account of fun and fund-raising for a new gym at his RAF base. He didn’t need me for that – after years of sponsored bike rides, three-legged-races and fêtes the gym had been built. All I had to do was come and open it. No problem, except that the RAF base was at Kinloss, way up on the east coast of Scotland. After a quick Internet search to confirm how long it would take me to get there and back from the Wirral, I sent Graham my apologies and wished him all the best with finding someone else. The next morning there was a reply. Not the ‘thanks anyway’ I was expecting but something almost as short: ‘Oh go on, we’ll send a Nimrod for you.’ As offers-you-can’t-refuse go, it was hard to beat.

  So on an overcast early May morning I wheeled my bike into Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport and made for the two figures in the green RAF regulation flight suits: Graham and his co­­­pilot Craig ‘Mucky’ Mackie, both Scousers born and bred. They might as well have landed from a different planet as far as airport security was concerned. There followed a stand-off between the worlds of military and civil aviation as the two pilots attempted to get their single passenger and his luggage onto the plane. My fully assembled bike was too big to go through the standard X-ray machine. Despite Graham’s assurances that it was OK, the airport staff insisted it had to be scanned: ‘For all we know, there could be bombs in the tubes.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Graham. ‘We can stack them next to mine.’

  The dark blue uniforms weren’t amused and we had to go and find an X-ray machine that could handle freight in the bowels of the airport.

  Once the bike had been cleared of any terrorist threat, it was our turn. Graham set off the metal detector.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘it’s just my knife.’ From his top pocket he pulled the razor-sharp folding utility blade that he kept for cutting himself out of his harness in an emergency.

  ‘You can’t take that on board!’ said the flustered guard.

  ‘What’s he going to do?’ I chipped in, mimicking holding a knife to my own throat. ‘Hijack himself?’

  On board, things felt no less bizarre as I was ushered into the cockpit and invited to try out the co-pilot’s seat. Just like in the movies, every surface was covered in gauges, switches and dials. On the ‘steering wheel’ was a large red button with a bold letter N in its centre. I asked, tongue-in-cheek, if that was for releasing the nuclear bombs. ‘Yes’ came the answer. Apparently in its past, the Nim
rod had carried nuclear depth charges. Having your hand right next to a button that launched weapons of mass destruction is a sobering experience.

  After take-off we climbed to an altitude of just 300 metres which we maintained all the way along the Mersey towards the Irish Sea. It was an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime view of my home peninsula and the city of Liverpool. We were almost level with the Liver Birds perched on top of the building that bears their name. As we reached New Brighton and the mouth of the Mersey, Craig banked right, skimming the sand dunes at Formby, and headed north hugging the coast.

  To justify using a multi-million pound reconnaissance aircraft as a taxi, the trip had been logged as a training exercise to track ‘enemy ships’, in this case a real Russian warship, the Admiral Chabanenko, that had been visiting Liverpool as part of the Battle of the Atlantic celebrations. It was known to be ‘somewhere in the Irish Sea’. In the interests of post-cold war friendship the crew had agreed to take some aerial publicity photographs of the vessel. When we’d pinpointed it – which we seemed to do suspiciously quickly – I assumed that the millions of pounds’ worth of spying equipment in the wing-mounted pods would be used to capture high definition images, taking in the tiniest details on the decks below. Instead Graham strolled back through the cabin to the domed window on the port side and removed it. He then reached for his own camera, leaned out and started snapping away.

  After another spectacular low-level swoop, this time along the Great Glen to take us from west coast to east, we arrived at Kinloss, the home of 120 Squadron. The gym opening went well and I even had a go at piloting the base flight simulator, although it couldn’t compare to being a passenger on the real thing.