Triumphs and Turbulence

by Chris Boardman

  The office set-up at the British Cycling HQ in Manchester was open-plan and made for sharing information. The 30 or so people who worked in the space assigned to the Performance Programme team all knew each other well and readily chatted about anything and everything that they were doing. Coaches would come back from trips abroad and everyone enjoyed hearing their news, being involved. It was a brilliant environment for enhancing communication. Now, for the first time, there was a small group of people who wouldn’t share, because the knowledge they held was so precious it was too risky to discuss in the open, even with friends. It was an abrupt change in practice and not one that went down well.

  In late 2005, I was walking around the curved corridor under the track at Manchester Velodrome, discussing performance improvements with Dan Hunt, the Women’s Endurance Coach. I can’t recall the exact details of the conversation but I do remember the way it came to a dead end.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said in frustration, ‘I’m not in the “secret squirrel club”, am I?’

  We parted company in reception and I considered what he’d said. This small group of people, whose names the public would probably never know, were doing remarkable work that they couldn’t talk about, even to their British Cycling colleagues. They deserved an identity. From that point onwards, we became The Secret Squirrel Club. I spent a few hours messing around on the computer and created a logo – a silhouetted squirrel whose outline was filled with the union flag. When I showed it to the team, one of them pointed out that the squirrel I’d used was Canadian.

  For wind tunnel sessions the small control room was always crammed. There were plenty of other places for people to work in adjacent buildings, but the process of discovery kept everyone tied to the result screens in that cramped space.

  Athletes, technicians, sports scientists, aerodynamicists, engineers and the occasional coach would all wait for the drag numbers to be shouted out by Martyn the instant he finished collating the latest data. Our collective mood went up and down with the readings on the dials. The outcome of the trials matched the pre-test predictions of our experts only about 50 per cent of the time, a poor correlation rate, that I was surprised to find was quite normal in the research game.

  Each unexpected outcome spawned another experiment to find out why, and our 50/50 hit rate meant the testing bill was going up fast. We had to find a faster, cheaper way to make progress. It just so happened that a member of our team had the answer: Computational Fluid Dynamics, or CFD for short. Instead of blowing air over a live subject in a real space that had to be staffed and heated, we could create the same environment virtually and let powerful algorithms run the tests for us. We’d done a little bit of CFD work with Sheffield University in 2003 to guide the shape of the pursuit handlebars for the 2004 Olympics, but what we were about to embark on would be a whole new level of sophistication.

  Like Dimitris, Rob Lewis had quickly become a key member of the R&D team. He knew almost nothing about cycling and almost everything about aerodynamics, which made him a perfect addition to the club. He probably came up with more new ideas than anybody, something he was able to do partly because he had no fear of getting it wrong. When experiments didn’t work out, he just shrugged and moved on to his next theory. Vast as it was, though, Rob brought much more than just his scientific knowledge to the team. His character, committed, supportive and above all fun, made him an invaluable asset when the going was tough.

  Led by Rob’s company, Advantage CFD, later TotalSim, we embarked on a programme of virtual modelling to try to unpick the reason we were getting so many surprises in the real world. To make sure the simulations were as accurate as possible we intended to put everything, including the riders themselves, into the aero­dynamic models.

  Sports scientist Matt Parker, another long-term Squirrel, spent several days in a windowless room in Manchester overseeing the laser scanning of key athletes for use by Rob. Vicky Pendleton, Brad Wiggins and Chris Hoy were all painstakingly recreated in cyberspace. Using their avatars, we could work on optimising riders’ positions while they trained, raced or slept. With CFD we were able to explore and try new concepts quickly and cheaply. More than that, it gave us access to an intelligence greater than our own. Rather than designing a virtual component and then testing it on the computer for aerodynamic efficiency, we now had the option to ask the software to tell us what the best shape was. Its main limitation seemed to be the quality of the questions we were able to come up with.

  Being able to see the airflow on a computer screen had a huge impact on every project, not least helmet development, which early tests identified as an area where significant gains could be made. The teardrop-shaped aero lid used by the team and individual pursuit riders was a fairly straightforward design because their head positions were exactly that – straight and forward-facing. For the sprints and bunch racing events, though, things were less clear cut.

  ‘Do you want to optimise the shape for the final dash in the last 100 metres or for the majority of the race, where the riders are turning their heads from side to side to watch the opposition?’ This was a question posed by Matt Cross, one of Rob’s CFD engineers, as we reviewed a video of a sprint race. Matt’s inquiry led to a carefully compromised design: the bulbous sprinter’s helmet used in Beijing. It was a form later used by Team Sky for time trials and is now widely copied by helmet manufacturers.

  To make sure the CFD was telling the truth, we still went back to the wind tunnel to validate early results. Jason Queally was dressed in a wetsuit and sprayed with a mix of solvent and bright pink chalk, a process that caused much hilarity. With the wind blowing, the mixture streamed, covering everything before quickly drying and leaving a visible pressure map all over Jason. When pictures of his painted form were compared to CFD stills, there was a satisfying correlation. Despite the best efforts of Martyn and Sandy, pink chalk can still be seen in the cracks of the tunnel to this day. I suspect it’s still in Jason’s ears, too.

  Involving the various squad members in our testing certainly helped with validating results, but including them was expensive, time-consuming and often frustrating, so the bulk of our experi­mentation was conducted with our regular guinea pigs: Jason Queally and Rob Hayles. My intention was for us to find performance gains with a small, secure team and then take the findings back to the squad as a whole and convince them with the irrefutable evidence. It was a reasonable plan. It was also naive.

  Late in the first Olympic cycle, as the GB riders headed into the final World Cup series to qualify for the World Championships and ultimately the Olympics, I turned up in Manchester with the first few aero helmet prototypes. To minimise their frontal area and still maintain sufficient strength to meet safety standards, a lot of carbon was used in their construction, making them quite heavy compared to the off-the-shelf foam models that had traditionally been used. I knew the aero gains far outweighed the negligible effect of a few extra grams, but when the athletes and coaches saw the helmets for the first time, they ignored our explanations of the advantages and obsessed over the weight.

  In February 2008, I travelled out to the final round of the World Cup in Copenhagen and watched in disbelief as 80 per cent of the riders carried on wearing the helmets they’d used before. I was angry that we’d worked so hard to give them proven performance-enhancing equipment and they’d dismissed it. All that costly research, and only one in five of the squad had adopted all of the new equipment and positional advice.

  But there was a pattern: the adopters were those who had helped us in the wind tunnel. I remembered my own reaction a decade earlier to Graeme Obree’s riding position, a highly advantageous approach that I’d dismissed out of hand because it was different – until I tried it myself.

  So we quickly arranged for all of the Olympic riders to have the opportunity to go to the tunnel. Sessions were organised so that each individual had a ‘freeform’ session, where they were allowed to experiment. While they tinkered, we projected their
live drag data onto the floor in front of them, not in Newtons of force, our usual unit of measurement, but in seconds saved or lost. Bars, forks, clothing and helmets were all given to them to compare against their current set-up.

  It was no longer our information, our findings: it was the evidence of their own eyes. To a man and woman they adopted the new kit and most of the positional advice that was offered. The tunnel had become as much a psychological tool as a scientific one.

  In the end we conducted just shy of 10,000 tests and boiled down a long list of projects to the most advantageous – a still daunting 24 – to be made into real products fit for Olympic athletes to use in battle.

  Production started in early spring, the hardware largely overseen by Dimitris and textile projects the responsibility of Sally Cowan. If they’d known just how hard these last few months of the process were going to be, I wonder whether either of them would have signed up for the journey. With manufacturers now involved, bringing with them their own issues and priorities, things got very complex. We had parts being produced all over the country and sections of helmets being fabricated as far away as Italy. I spent my time trying to unblock bottlenecks, cajoling suppliers who weren’t delivering on time, ensuring everything met safety standards and managing the dwindling budget.

  In late June, Sally Cowan turned up in the track centre in Manchester with the last of the products: the finished skinsuits for the riders to try on. In the large cardboard box she carried were the fruits of three years’ labour – smooth, form-fitting plastic garments very different from the faded Lycra of Jason’s suit that had started all this off. She plonked the box down in the athletes’ pen and everyone crowded around to see the new kit.

  Having now produced dozens of the plasticised prototypes with their high-tech bonded seams, Sally was confident they’d be up to the job. These final versions, carrying the full Olympic livery, had been produced in bulk by a British manufacturer to her specifications. Or so we thought.

  The honour of putting on the first one went to sprinter Chris Hoy, who’d barely got his arm into the sleeve before it ripped all the way from cuff to shoulder. There was a pregnant pause before Sally reached for another suit and checked it. The seams of this one came apart easily too. Almost the entire batch – the only batch – was the same. With just weeks to go until competition started, we didn’t have time to make replacements.

  Other members of the R&D team gathered around a clearly upset Sally and without missing a beat began to exchange ideas about what could be done. There was no looking backwards, no deciding who was to blame, they had instinctively assumed it was their problem, not Sally’s, and moved immediately to looking for a solution. I couldn’t have been prouder of them than I was then.

  Over the next few hours, a solution was found to repair the clothing and Sally set about implementing the fix. It turned out that the manufacturers had changed her design in an attempt to simplify the assembly process for themselves. The sleeves were made from two pieces of plasticised fabric. One featured a narrow painted stripe on the reverse side, which overlapped the seam by 5 mm so that when the two halves of the sleeve were heat-bonded, only this 5 mm would remain on the outside. The result would be a perfect red stripe: slightly raised, nicely aerodynamic. It was fiddly, but doable. Instead, the manufacturers had extended the paint to the full width of the fabric on its reverse side. There was still only 5 mm visible on the outside, so they reasoned that it wouldn’t make a difference. It did. It meant that instead of heat-bonding two pieces of fabric, they were sticking one piece of fabric to a layer of paint, which, of course, peeled off with little resistance.

  In the last week of July, having added a second layer of glue to the other side of the painted stripe on the sleeves of all 75 suits, Sally delivered the now perfect garments to the Olympic holding camp in Newport. It was just days before the squad set off for Beijing and we had no time to do anything else. If these didn’t work, then we’d wasted years of work and a serious amount of money.

  We stood in the centre of the track and watched the riders don the clothing. All good, no rips. One by one, they took to the track where Matt Parker conducted the final trials. To our relief, using both new clothing and equipment, their times dropped significantly.

  There were no high-fives or whoops of joy, it was more like the fountain scene at the end of Ocean’s 11, but without the fountain. We just shared smiles and let the warm sense of relief wash over us. We’d started with nothing – a blank piece of paper – and less than four years later we’d delivered. Perhaps not everything we’d intended, and in time rather than on time, but we’d delivered. Now it was up to the riders and coaches to do the hard bit.

  CHAPTER 17

  Boardman Bikes

  Long and rambling, with little punctuation, the message that landed in my inbox in late 2004 had the hallmarks of a nutter email. Still, I hesitated over the delete key. The sender was Alan Ingarfield, a former triathlete who’d held the British Ironman record, and the gist of his proposal was to start a company together to make bikes.

  I’ve always loved making things. As a teenager there was barely a component on my bike that wasn’t drilled out for lightness or filed down for – well, I don’t know what for, I just liked filing things. As a professional I’d designed the custom carbon bar/fork assembly that I used to break the hour record in 1996 and win the 1997 Tour prologue. Even in retirement I’d stayed in touch with the latest technology. The bike reviews I’d written for Procycling had allowed me to try the best – and worst – that the world’s manufacturers had to offer. So by the time I received Alan’s email, I had loads of thoughts on what makes a good bike.

  I also had loads to do at British Cycling and almost no spare time. The prospect of being backed to engineer and design on a grand scale was tantalising, but Alan’s proposal contained no real detail on how he planned to make it all happen. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I hit reply. Like the call I’d made when I was 13, choosing the evening club race over going diving, it was another mental coin toss.

  We met up for the first time a few weeks later in a Liverpool café. Dressed in a white shirt and black jeans, Alan was tall, fit-looking and wore a big smile. The initial finance was no problem: Alan’s partner, Sarah Mooney, was a successful businesswoman and keen to invest. Alan was just keen. Every comment I made, no matter how off-the-cuff, was met with unbridled enthusiasm and he instantly tried to incorporate whatever it was I’d said into his offer, which in turn changed shape every time I opened my mouth. I quickly realised that he didn’t have a well-defined plan or even a clear direction: he just wanted to ‘do something great’. That something – and this was as much as I could make out – involved me designing bikes that I would then put my name to, while he would find a way to both manufacture and get them to market.

  Alan certainly didn’t seem cut out to be the head of a venture on the scale he was talking about, but by now I’d met a lot of high achievers and few of them fitted the stereotype of the successful businessman either. He was just a bloke who wore his heart on his sleeve, looking for an adventure. I didn’t really think anything would come of it, but as always there was the tiny voice in the back of my head interrupting the naysayer: ‘Yep, I know it’s not going to work – but you’re going to do it anyway.’

  Despite the vagueness of it all, I tentatively agreed to form a partnership. A pessimistic former pro cyclist and an enthusiastic former triathlete, with no relevant experience between them, setting out to mass-produce some sort of as yet unspecified bikes.

  Leaving Alan to get to grips with the world of bicycle manufacture, I got back to juggling my work at British Cycling with a home life that was very much in flux. Sally was pregnant with our sixth child, meaning the Meols home that we’d once considered enormous would soon be bursting at the seams. We considered converting the attic to create more living space and looked at some larger houses in the area without much enthusiasm. Then we discovered that my childhood
dream house had just come onto the market.

  When I was growing up, my mum had worked as a cook at Red Rocks nursing home: a grand whitewashed building in Stanley Road on the western corner of the Wirral Peninsula. The home took its name from the sandstone outcrop on which it was built and had unique 180-degree views out over the sand flats of the Dee Estuary towards Hilbre and across to the hills of North Wales. I say unique: it shared the headland with one other house, Wirral Point. I’d walked past them both countless times on my way to play in the sand dunes or swim in the tidal pools on the far side of Periwinkle Island.

  Not even when I was a pro earning hundreds of thousands of pounds did I dream of owning a ‘big house’ on that exclusive road. That was where the posh people lived. But with my position at British Cycling now secure and a small retainer coming in from the Boardman Bikes project, we thought it might just be possible. The sale was via sealed bids, so Sally worked out the most we could afford and put in an offer for a bit more. She sent it off in a pink envelope to make sure it stood out. It was accepted.

  The reason we’d been able to afford the place was the amount of renovation it required, so much that we’d need to move into rented accommodation for nearly six months while floors were replaced, wiring was renewed and plumbing upgraded. The fact that Sally was pregnant didn’t faze her in the slightest. She set about finding our temporary abode and co-ordinating the tradesmen.

  On 31 January 2005, Sally went into labour and we made the familiar journey to the maternity suite at Arrowe Park Hospital. I was surprised she hadn’t been issued with a loyalty card. At 7.20 in the evening, Agatha Wallis Boardman arrived and by 9.30 both mother and daughter were back at home on the couch. First thing the next morning, with Aggie in her arms, Sally was at the new house getting quotes for putting up walls from Barry the builder.