Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

  This piece makes amusing reading now. Keen would go on to head the lottery-funded World Class Performance Plan when it was founded in 1997, putting in place the system which has produced Sir Bradley Wiggins, Sir Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton et al. He then went on to head UK Sport’s performance side. The approach he was taking with Boardman – investigating marginal gains across all areas, questioning traditional approaches – is mirrored in that of Team Sky. And Dr Michele Ferrari – whatever happened to him?

  No joy for Boardman as Indurain is invincible again

  5 August 1996

  Four years on, it is all so different. When Chris Boardman took gold in the track pursuit in Barcelona in 1992, it was a precisely won victory over a small group of specialists who operated in a field somewhat removed from the mainstream events such as the classics and Tour de France.

  On Saturday, when he took bronze in the road time-trial, run for the first time in the Olympics, he finished just behind the Spaniards Miguel Indurain, the man who has dominated the Tour for five of the past six years, and Abraham Olano, the current world road race champion.

  Although the Briton said “1992 was better, because I won”, he was quick to underline the extent to which he has progressed. “These are the best cyclists in the world. When I rode the pursuit I rode against the best guys in that discipline, but it is a very narrow field. Today you can see the very best riders in what I think is the toughest sport in the world.”

  Just to emphasise the point, Boardman caught and passed Bjarne Riis who, two weeks before, had dominated the Tour. Though admitting that the Dane could not have been at his best after two weeks celebrating his and his country’s first Tour victory, Boardman said gleefully: “It’s still great to give him a kicking.”

  [Riis would confess, much later on, to the use of EPO during his Tour win – presumably he had come “off the programme” at this point.]

  A professional career has its price, however, and the fact is that if Boardman had been able to devote the same amount of time to preparing for the time-trial as he did to the pursuit four years ago, gold might well have been the result. Instead, Saturday’s was just one of 90 or so races he will ride this year, and there was no special training, no real acclimatisation to the heat and humidity. “It was simply a question of recovering from the Tour de France and getting to the start as fresh as I could.”

  As a result there was no joy in this medal. Max Sciandri was a happy man after taking bronze in the men’s road race on Wednesday after he had shaped the race for half the distance; Boardman was merely “content” after being forced to compromise, something he finds utterly frustrating.

  “The difference between now and Barcelona is that there I started knowing that the next 4½ minutes could completely change the course of my life,” he said. “There was none of that unpleasant pressure on Saturday.”

  Underlining the change in Boardman’s status, the man who yelled encouragement at the Wirral rider from the team car bearing the words “Great Britain” in large letters was not an official of the British cycling squad but a Frenchman, Roger Legeay, manager of Boardman’s GAN professional team.

  Four years ago Legeay was still trying to make sense of the declining career of America’s triple Tour winner Greg LeMond and probably knew nothing of Boardman until he read the results from Barcelona.

  Typically, Boardman is already looking four years ahead, beyond the tests for the hour record which he will undergo in the next two weeks, beyond his try for a world pursuit title at Manchester at the end of this month, and beyond the world road championships in October. “Sydney will probably be my last Olympics, and there will be no compromise. If I get bronze there it will simply be because that is how good I am.”

  Boardman produced this ride just a few days after finishing his first Tour de France and it heralded his best ever spell of form in which he set a new record for the 4,000m and put the Hour Record on the shelf. Atlanta marked Great Britain’s lowest medal haul since 1952 and its lowest ever place in the table, so in that context, Boardman and Sciandri’s bronze medals were perfectly respectable. Critically, Boardman’s performance against Indurain provided Keen with a key plank of his argument for Lottery funding for a cycling programme: British cyclists, properly trained, could compete with the best in the world. The funding was awarded in 1997.

  Race stopped after cyclists pedal into a dead end

  27 May 1998

  THE PruTour, Britain’s most prestigious cycle race, turned into the Tour de Brierfield yesterday. Direction arrows went missing, and the main field and cavalcade in the round Britain event – 90 cyclists, 40 following cars, and some 20 motorcycle marshalls – disappeared into the middle of a small town somewhere between Burnley and Nelson, Lancashire.

  About half the 116 miles of the stage from Manchester to Blackpool had been covered when the men from the Pru got lost. “We turned right at some traffic lights where we should have gone straight ahead,” said leading British cyclist Matt Stephens. “The roads just got narrower and narrower, and we went round the back of some shops into a car park. It was a dead end so we thought we’d better stop.”

  The result was less a miniature version of the Tour de France than a two-wheeled rerun of the charge of the light brigade. There was chaos as the mile-long cavalcade attempted to find their way back to the course. “There were lost riders and their cars doing a circuit race of the town centre, with pedestrians leaping out the way,” said the manager of the Scottish team, Robert Millar. “We were going down streets to T-junctions and we’d see riders and cars going across in front of us – in both directions.”

  The South African, New Zealand and Australian team cars disappeared the wrong way down a one-way system and were last seen heading westwards, direction Clitheroe. “I saw a motorbike marshal coming towards me and thought ‘beauty, he’ll tell me where to go’,” said Australian manager Brian Stephens. “His first words were ‘where am I?’”

  Once the cavalcade had turned itself around, with all the finesse of an oil tanker performing a U-turn, and the judges had worked out precisely where they all were a different problem arose. Out on the fells of the Trough of Bowland, the five leaders of the race and their smaller cavalcade had ploughed on in blissful ignorance while the 90 men who had been chasing them disappeared into the East Lancashire Triangle.

  They had to be stopped, because the race rules in multi-day events specify that if riders finish more than a certain time behind the day’s winner they are eliminated. The organisers had no choice, unless they wanted the field for today’s 95-mile stage to be reduced to five. The race referee spent several miles leaning out of his car pleading with the quintet to slow down before they stopped.

  After a half-hour halt they sprinted down off the fells and into Blackpool where the finish line had been positioned with curious prescience. The chequered flag fell in front of the Casino, where “master magician Richard De Vere” was offering “a magical mystery”. He could so easily have added the word PruTour.

  The PruTour has a permanent place in my heart – a well organised Tour of Britain at a time when the sport did not enjoy its current prominence. This was a hilarious episode on the first edition – note that Robert Millar, no less, was managing the Scotland team. This piece was also that rare thing at the time – cycling on the front page of the Guardian – so there was no mention of the stage winner. The scene where the commissaire, Gerry McDaid, had to cajole the break into waiting could have graced any Ealing comedy. The PruTour had a second edition in 1999, but Prudential then pulled out. Five years later the British Tour was relaunched. In 2013 Prudential returned to cycling sponsorship.

  A woman in hot pursuit going for a Burton record

  24 August 1998

  The essence of the Italian cyclist can be summed up in a single image – that of a rider ascending a mountain alone, way ahead of the chasing pack. Un uomo solo was the sentence which immortalised Fausto Coppi in the 1950s and it was used again this summer
as the little climber Marco Pantani won the Tour de France.

  The image that best sums up the British cyclist is that of a solo cyclist on a velodrome, not riding a road race such as the Tour de France but engaged in the track pursuit. British cyclists have earned more medals in this slightly esoteric cycling discipline in the post-war years than in all the others put together. They include the only post-war Olympic gold, won by Chris Boardman in the pursuit at Barcelona in 1992.

  Boardman travels to Bordeaux this week in quest of a third pursuit gold medal in the World Track Championships. But, even should he win in spite of his disastrous crash in this year’s Tour de France, he will be well short of being the best Briton ever in the discipline. This honour is still held by the late Beryl Burton, who won the women’s title five times between 1959 and 1966.

  Just as Boardman has picked up the torch from Hugh Porter, four times champion between 1968 and 1973, Burton has her heiress in a fellow Yorkshirewoman Yvonne McGregor. After taking fourth in Atlanta she went to Perth, in Australia, to take the bronze medal in last year’s World Championship.

  Compared to the Tour de France, the pursuit is a brief, if repetitive, assault on the pain barrier. The principle is simple: two riders start on opposite sides of an oval velodrome – usually in a stadium these days, as at Bordeaux, and its British counterpart, Manchester – and pursue each other over the set distance. For Boardman and company this is four kilometres, for McGregor three.

  In theory the object of the exercise is for the stronger cyclist to make up the half-lap. In practice this happens only when the difference in ability or strength is particularly marked, and usually the two cyclists are simply timed for the set distance, and the faster wins. Aerodynamic bikes mean that McGregor will be in action for barely three and a half minutes in each round.

  A qualifying round decides the fastest eight and then it is sudden death to the final. Compared to the infinite nuances of road racing, pursuiting is barely tactical. It is principally a question of the cyclists calculating how much energy they can expend to keep their opponent within or just out of reach before the crescendo into exhaustion. The physical effort is intense but not as obvious as, say, Pantani climbing l’Alpe d’Huez. So what intrigues is the psychological battle, the more so now the cyclists’ faces are hidden by aerodynamic helmets.

  Coping with pain is not a problem for McGregor, who regularly broke bones in her early years – she managed to smash collarbone, shoulder and cheekbone in 1995 alone. A wry sense of humour helped her cope with four major accidents in three years. Like Boardman, she has held the world distance record for one hour, the toughest feat, in terms of distilled agony, that cycling has to offer outside the Tour.

  The Boardman connection runs deep: since 1993 she has been part of the team which Boardman set up to bring on Olympic prospects; famously Boardman has helped repair her bike on occasions in the past, and she has shared the expertise of the sports scientist Peter Keen, who guided the Wirral racer to his Barcelona gold. Their training plan for Atlanta’s humidity included riding a stationary bike in the bathroom with the central heating on and the shower running.

  McGregor has moved across the Pennines to be close to the Manchester velodrome but she is all Yorkshirewoman in her accent and her penchant for plain speaking. The Leeds-born Burton is her model; McGregor, from Bradford, was inspired to take up cycling when she took Burton’s autobiography Personal Best out of the library after an Achilles tendon injury put paid to her running career.

  She has taken several of Burton’s British time-trial records but, whereas her fellow Yorkshirewoman remained a British-based cyclist throughout her career, making an annual sortie abroad to pick up her medals in the World Championships, McGregor has recognised the need to race on the women’s circuit in Europe to improve her strength and moved into the top five on the world road rankings earlier this year.

  The next few weeks are vital ones for her and Keen, who for the last nine months has been performance director of British cycling, responsible for turning Lottery money into medals. McGregor views this week in Bordeaux as a dry run for the Commonwealth Games, where she took gold in the track points race in 1994; Keen is well aware that the Games will be the first high-profile display of what he has achieved, and that McGregor is one of his few reliable hopes for a medal.

  McGregor’s annus mirabilis came in 2000, when she won bronze at the Olympic Games and gold in the world pursuit championship. She retired a couple of years later, and was made an MBE. Like Boardman, she was a vital part of Keen’s medal strategy in the early years of Lottery funding.

  To Sydney via Stourbridge

  9 September 2000

  Chris Boardman’s road to his final Olympic Games will take him through a time warp today, when he goes back seven years to his roots in British amateur time-trialling to compete in the Stourbridge Cycling Club’s hilly 26-mile event on the sedate back lanes around Astley, Shrawley and Great Witley in deepest Worcestershire.

  His entry is born of a dire need to race: because he is retiring at the end of the year his French team, Crédit Agricole, have declined to enter him in any events in favour of team-mates who may be able to earn world ranking points to help the team qualify for next year’s Tour de France.

  Until he turned professional in 1993 Boardman rode time-trials weekly. But for a former Olympic champion and three-times wearer of the yellow jersey in the Tour de France to return to this world is the equivalent of Mike Atherton turning out in a village cricket match to prepare for a Test.

  British time-trialling was born 100 years ago, when cycle racing was banned by law, and it maintains many “private and confidential” traditions. The course on which Boardman will compete at 1pm today is known as K22/14, under the coding system devised at the turn of the century to ensure the police had no idea what was going on.

  He will get changed in Astley village hall and his finish time will be taken “at the field gate approximately 100 metres before the junction of Pearl Lane and the A451”, according to Stourbridge CC’s decidedly unconfidential website. Having paid his £9 entry fee, he will be favourite for the first prize of £100 and a “silver trophy donated by the Albury and District Cycling Club”.

  So removed from the main stream is the British time-trial world that he was almost refused entry because the Road Time-trials Council does not recognise Crédit Agricole and would not permit him to race in their jersey. “Funnily, they aren’t affiliated,” chuckles his manager Peter Woodworth. Instead he will race in the colours of the North Wirral Velo Club.

  To underline the contrast, Boardman’s final preparation event in eight days’ time is the Grand Prix des Nations in Rouen, the most important contre la montre on the European calendar, where he is expected to come up against Lance Armstrong, the double Tour winner’s neck injury permitting.

  Today the unlucky man starting two minutes before Boardman is British time-trialling’s man of the year Michael Hutchinson, a Cambridge graduate in European human rights law. He is a full-timer “making a living even if it’s not a very good one”.

  Having won RTTC national championships this year at 10, 50 and 100 miles, plus the 12-hour distance event, Hutchinson would have been the favourite. But he feels no resentment at having his party gatecrashed. “It will be interesting to see how soon he comes past me. It’s great for us to measure ourselves against him; we can all work out how we would have done in the Olympics.”

  The sports desk at the Guardian loved the idea of the British Olympic gold medallist riding an obscure time-trial in the middle of the countryside; this was a great – and rare – opportunity to bring the wider story of British time-trialling and its culture to the paper. The course is also well known to West Midlands cyclists as a popular road racing circuit.

  Michael Hutchinson, cycling aficionados will note, is still racing today, having written a fine book on the history of the hour record, and he is also working as a writer at Cycling Weekly.

  So where has this ban
d of British cyclists sprung from?

  18 September 2000

  Two days, four cycling finals, two medals, one near-miss. Thus far in Sydney Britain’s strike rate on the velodrome has been unmatched in any other sport. But Jason Queally’s gold medal in the kilometre time-trial and his team’s silver in the Olympic sprint are the fruit of a quiet, unseen and relatively unsung revolution in British cycling which has, according to its driving force, only just begun. Britain’s man with the two-wheeled plan is the sports scientist Peter Keen.

  Eight years ago he took Chris Boardman to his dramatic gold medal on the Barcelona velodrome and just under three years ago this cerebral former schoolboy cycling champion gave up his post as a senior lecturer at the University of Brighton to take over at the head of the lottery-funded performance side of British cycling.

  Keen, never part of the British cycling establishment, had twice resigned in the past as a national coach due to the dismal lack of funds. Suddenly he had £2.5m to play with – about 50 times the previous year’s budget. However, Keen had a dilemma. An entire system had to be put in place, while at the same time medals had to be won, or at the least tangible progress made towards those medals, in order to gain fresh lottery funding each year.

  His answer was to target specific areas such as the power-based disciplines on the track like the 1km time-trial and the Olympic sprint where, due to the absence of tactics as on the road, training input directly equates to performance output.

  Track racing – traditionally the Cinderella alongside the more glamorous road racing – was highlighted in Keen’s Performance Plan, simply because 14 of 18 Olympic medals are on the track. Women’s cycling, with only a small band of elite performers worldwide, was another target: another medal contender, the 20-year-old Ceris Gilfillan, has appeared from nowhere.