On the Road Bike

by Ned Boulting

  In cycling-mad country like Flanders, the very fact of Graham’s career, however brief, held considerable prestige, enough to guarantee the success of the business. They paid off the debts. But the racing was gone.

  Then Graham Webb tells me the story, which he first told me over canapés and champagne at that British cycling dinner months before. I hear it again. But to hear it in context, sitting in his living room as the November night has closed in outside, surrounded by photographs from 1967, I now understand that this is why I came to talk to him.

  The ‘Rainbow Jersey’ is a particularly potent icon in cycling, perhaps even more rich in association than the Yellow Jersey of the Tour de France. Although Graham Webb had won the amateur competition, it was still a huge achievement. It was certainly the apotheosis of all that his career yielded. This beloved jersey hung on the wall of the bar, slowly turning yellow from the smokers and from the wood stove below. There it remained through the years, testifying to his ability, telling anyone who cared to ask about it that the proprietor had pedigree, real class.

  One day, in the winter, when he was elsewhere, one of his least favourite drinkers came in. Marie-Rose was on her own in the pub.

  ‘He was a very bad criminal. He’d been released from jail. My missus served him and he made a comment about the jersey. My Rainbow Jersey. He said to my wife, “What would you think if I tore it down?” She didn’t have an answer.

  ‘When I came home later, she told me what had happened.’

  Something within him, already frayed, must have snapped. In an instant, he knew that it was over. His attachment to a past, which only pointed to an unsatisfactory present, broke free. The jersey, its brilliant white fabric jaundiced, was the problem.

  ‘I said, “Well, he won’t have the chance.” I tore it down, and stuffed it in the stove. I burnt it.’

  It lit and then ignited. In seconds, maybe a minute, it was gone. Not many world champions have deliberately incinerated their memories.

  ‘I had a happy childhood.’

  ‘Did you?’ There is a trace of scepticism in my question.

  ‘I think so.’ Graham pauses. ‘Maybe because of my bike.’

  In the morning I left early, to drive the distance back to Calais without recourse to the motorway. I also wanted to visit the Menin Gate in Ypres. It was Armistice Day.

  11/11/11.

  I drove for an hour through the November fog. Yesterday’s clear blue skies had led to a still, grey Flanders morning. At times it seemed to be getting darker, rather than lighter. Turning off the main road I negotiated a path to the centre of Ypres and, on sighting a group of veterans, I pulled over and parked. They seemed to know the way, so I dropped in behind them and followed as they walked cheerily to the main square and the vast monument that was to stage the centrepiece of the day’s Remembrance service.

  I listened to their chatter.

  ‘I can’t bloody push you straight. Can’t you bloody get up and walk?’ One elderly man laughed at his much younger friend who was in a wheelchair and had lost both his legs from below the knee. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Oh piss off, and do your job will you?’

  For some reason, I thought of Graham. He would not have looked out of place in a uniform. And as a veteran. He belonged to that kind of Britishness. In fact, he told me that he could never forgive his mother for refusing to lie about his age so that he could begin an RAF apprenticeship. It was the alternative path his life never took.

  The veterans, in increasing numbers as their ranks were swelled by comrades, walked past pretty Flemish shop fronts, some of which exploited this annual pilgrimage and its associated year-long trickle of tourists. Tommy’s Spirits and Cigarettes. The Old Bill Pub. Poppy’s Pizzeria.

  After Ypres, I meandered through Flanders as I crossed into France. These were the routes that Graham, as well as scores of other British riders, had ridden. He still rides them to this day, tentatively now, because of his heart.

  The roadside was clustered with signs to military cemeteries. I had always thought that these had been constructed after the event, moved to appropriate locations, chosen for the purpose. But the names suggested otherwise. Many, many smaller graveyards were created at the site of the loss of life. There and then. Red Farm Cemetery. Hop House Cemetery.

  All along the straight roads, with their mountains of sugar beet harvested and awaiting transport, the Flemish had taken to their bikes. Armistice Day amounts to a public holiday in Belgium. As the British lay wreaths in their towns, so many Belgians take advantage of the free time and quiet roads to get out for a long ride and a chat. The first opportunity of the year to don the winter clothing.

  At the mouth of the tunnel, there was an almighty queue. For three-quarters of an hour we inched forwards to the UK Passport Control. Belgian cars, French cars. There was a German BMW to my right from Cologne. Tempers flared, as people started to miss their departure slots.

  I was the next car in line for passport control when we all stopped moving completely. I could make out the immigration officer in her hut, dealing with the Belgian sports car in front of me.

  She appeared suddenly to be standing motionless at her desk, staring ahead. I glanced at the clock. Twelve midday in Calais, but it was eleven o’clock on the other side of the channel. She did not carry on her work for the full two minutes, and along the line, nobody moved.

  It was a weird re-enactment. A thin line of determinedly different islanders facing down waves of Continentals. From the battlefields of the First World War, to the retreat at Dunkirk, this narrow strip of water, and the passage of British youth across it, has been a step into the unknown, a step into, or out of no-man’s-land.

  I thought of Graham’s emigration. I had seen how Britain unsettles him, and how his peace of mind only returns when he reaches home again in Flanders.

  He’s a Dunkirk soldier no one went to pick up. I’m not sure he wanted anyone to pick him up.

  CHAPTER 4

  MICK’S GRAND TOUR

  THE TOUR OF Britain is not the Tour de France in the same way that there is no adequate translation into French for ‘Sausage Roll’. There are no Alps; there are no Pyrenees. And sometimes, there is no race.

  While ‘le Tour’ came into being in 1903, its British counterpart stumbled into existence many, many years later. The late forties witnessed the regular running of an amateur race from Brighton to Glasgow, which sufficed for a time, but it wasn’t until 1951, when the Daily Express bunged the race organisers a decent amount of money (and a great deal of free publicity), that a proper Tour of Britain was up and running. Astonishingly, and ingloriously, one of the riders that year was Jimmy Savile. He didn’t win it.

  Eight years later, the Milk Marketing Board got involved, and their eponymous, mostly amateur, race became a fixture in the calendar. The Milk Race then briefly coexisted with the professional Kellogg’s Tour in the 1980s, creating a perfect fusion of the two primary requirements for a nutritious start to the day. Breakfast, at least for those Britons who followed bike racing, was sorted.

  But by 1993 the milk had run dry, and, a year later, the cereal box emptied too. Four years of Tourlessness then followed, before the Pru-Tour (sponsored by Prudential) sputtered into life in 1998. Just one year later that particular insurance-based party was over, presumably because we’d fallen behind on our premiums.

  After a five-year abstinence, in which the British cycling scene licked its wounds and decided what to do next, the modern Tour of Britain was born. And that’s where, for the purposes of simplicity, we join the story.

  Learning about the Tour of Britain, and the army of people who make up the wonderful, bizarre sitcom of the race, was a challenge and delight. I was first introduced to it when ITV signed a contract to televise it. Without wishing to resort to hyperbole, I would go so far as to say that in the spring of 2008, my life took a new, entirely unexpected and seriously pleasing twist, when I was called to a meeting room high up in ITV
’s glass and steel headquarters on the Grays Inn Road in London. Tea was served, and there was a clutch of chocolate Hobnobs on a plate, as there often is when there is momentous news to impart.

  It wasn’t without its awkwardnesses.

  ‘Hello. My name’s Ned Boulting.’

  I was talking, as periodically I am forced to, to that particular type of efficiency-exuding lady that sits behind reception desks at major institutions. I wither visibly in the face of such authority. Hers are the laminated visitors’ badges. Hers, as a consequence, is the power to withhold or impart both the prospect of happiness and the prospect of future happiness, my children’s prospects, and those of their children, too.

  ‘I’m here to see Mark Sharman.’

  Mark Sharman was the Head of ITV Sport. My livelihood depended almost entirely on his munificence. I thought about the word ‘munificence’ as I watched her tucking in the plastic folds of my visitor badge and handing it over.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, my voice a little too high.

  And soon I was following her lead, walking through open plan offices and down corridors, trundling towards a minor junction point in my life, a rumbling and grinding of wheels over railway points, a slight diversion, or at least the arrival at a different platform from anticipated. I walked through the door.

  ‘Ah Ned, I’ve got a special project for you,’ said the Boss when I was finally admitted into his glass and steel tomb. He looked like a man who had special projects up his sleeve. He had a way of doing things like that, which marked him out as boss material, that and the grey suit, with sleeves that were specially tailored to conceal the special projects they had hidden up them.

  ‘Oh yes?’ I sat forward on his leatherette couch, in a style loosely based on James Bond, but at the same time managing to knock my bike helmet from the couch onto the ground, in the style of Rowan Atkinson.

  I glanced down at it. And so did he. We locked eyes briefly over the upturned shell of the offending headgear. He shot his cuffs, and resettled himself on his couch, in the style of Alan Sugar.

  ‘Ned, do you ever turn up to meetings looking smart?’

  ‘I rode here. On my bicycle.’ I threw my head slightly back and slightly sideways, a nod to where my bike stood locked up on the busy London street outside. ‘Sorry.’

  Mark Sharman, the poker-faced, crisply suited TV executive that he was, sighed, in precisely his style. It wasn’t a generalised sigh. He actually sighed at me, but then momentarily appeared to have lost his thread. A slight cloud passed over his reptilian executive gaze. Let’s call it nostalgia.

  ‘I used to time trial when I was a kid. Around Derby.’

  ‘Did you?’ An image of a teenaged Mark Sharman, dressed in a suit and tie, on a Raleigh, flashed past me. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was another one of the awkward pauses, which occasionally characterise meetings with Mark. He picked up a Hobnob, and then put it down, distractedly. I couldn’t help noticing that there was still no mention of the special project.

  ‘What gear set have you got on your bike?’

  This was not a question I was expecting. ‘Campagnolo.’

  I hoped that I had pronounced it correctly. It was a word I had only ever read in glossy black-and-white literature about bikes (well, Rouleur magazine, to be precise), or glimpsed on the ‘mech’ as I tried to untangle the mess of chain and cogs, which resulted whenever I tried to change the tyre on my rear wheel.

  ‘Good God. Are they still going? And Shimano?’ His face lit up.

  ‘I think so, Mark.’ And then, simply to fill the empty noise that whistled in to fill the gap in this sparing conversation, ‘They make gears.’

  He looked disappointed at me, not for the first time that day. Then, suddenly, he was down to business. ‘Tour of Britain.’

  This was neither a question, nor a proposition, nor a threat. It was cut and pasted straight from some niche cycling website into our actual conversation. It sounded a bit like the Tour de France, only over here. But beyond that, I couldn’t have told you much.

  ‘O . . . K . . .’ I said, with some hesitation.

  I thought about a map of the UK (excluding, for the sake of practicality, Northern Ireland) and imagined animated routes wriggling all across it. I had an image of a rain-soaked finish line, and clutches of people in kagouls standing by the side of the road eating fried chicken from oily red boxes. For some reason, I had a fleeting mental image of Northampton, the county town of Northamptonshire.

  ‘Great,’ I said, massively unconvinced.

  That meeting was five years ago.

  The first edition of the Tour of Britain that I presented was in September 2008. It started in bright sunshine on the Victoria Embankment in Westminster.

  The chimes of Big Ben set the tone for a race richly bathed in post-Olympic euphoria. The British Cycling team had taken the Beijing velodrome by storm, and catapulted Victoria Pendleton and Chris Hoy onto the back of cereal packets, from where they now beamed down at bowls full of sugary milk. That was partly why ITV got involved, I’m sure. Suddenly, cycling was as mainstream and wholesome as Bran Flakes.

  That year I had as my wingman/pundit the newly retired, marvellously phlegmatic West-Midlander Paul Manning. He had been part of the quartet of riders (along with Ed Clancy, Geraint Thomas and Bradley Wiggins) who had won the gold medal in the Team Pursuit at the Olympic Games.

  Before the Tour of Britain got underway, and because I had hardly heard of any of the teams or the riders on the race, I paid Paul a visit at his terraced home in Stockport. It was to be a research trip, and a chance to get to know Paul, with whom I had only ever spoken on the phone. We sat in his tidy, tight front room (barely big enough to fit a bike in), drank tea, and spoke about the race.

  Although he had devoted his career to riding the Team Pursuit on the track, Paul had also ridden a fair amount on the road, by no means an automatic choice for riders of his generation and pedigree. In fact, as we sat slurping from giant mugs while the rain rattled against his front window, he informed me that he himself had won a stage on the Tour of Britain, a solo breakaway into Glasgow in 2007.

  ‘It was good, that. I enjoyed it.’ Paul cracked a huge smile.

  Then, feeling like a fan and not a hard-headed journalist, I plucked up the courage to ask him if I could see his gold medal. I had not often met gold medallists before, and had certainly never seen a medal face to face.

  No sooner had I popped the question, than he bounded upstairs, his long legs leaping the steps three at a time. I could hear him scrabbling around under his bed, which I thought would be the first place I’d keep a gold medal too, but probably the last place any burglar would expect to find one. I liked Paul for putting his medal under his bed. He returned with a box.

  ‘Can I take it out?’

  ‘Sure, go ahead.’ Paul looked down at it, as if he too were seeing it for the first time. Gingerly I prised it out of its cloth berth. It was as big as a small saucer, and half an inch thick. It was magnificent. I told Paul I thought it was magnificent.

  As awestruck as we have been by our Olympians, there is often a homeliness at the heart of their character that sits at odds with the grandeur of their achievements. It’s a phenomenon best witnessed every four years, where the nation, through the BBC, watches a procession of British athletes crossing over the track to talk to their reporters. Seconds earlier, they’ve been flowing gracefully down the finishing straight, chin purposefully set and eyes menacingly vacant. Now, in the glare of the camera, they melt into hyper-normality.

  ‘It was, like, just amazing? I mean it was awesome? I just knew when I hit the home straight that it would be, like incredible . . .?’ On and on they gush, grinning, twinkling, loving the moment. If you or I gave a post-race interview, that’s exactly how we would sound, too: uncomposed, raw, wonderful.

  Many hundreds of Britons (across the breadth of the summer games) have come, won medals and gone. Some have won a solitary bronze medal. Wal
k down the street, and there’ll be no golden post box to mark their location. They’re remembered by a select few, their achievements painted in gold ink on wooden boards, or up there on home-made websites, maintained by enthusiasts. But beyond that, there’s not much, save for a medal wrapped in velvet, locked up in a safe or placed carefully under a bed. A lifetime, cast in metal.

  Everywhere we went on the Tour of Britain, Paul took his medal. People were always asking to see it, and he would always oblige. They didn’t always know who he was, or what he’d won a medal for. In fact, sometimes, they didn’t even know there was a bike race on. ‘Why’ve they bloody shut the bloody high street, then?’

  But at the sight of a gold medal, encased in red velvet, its ribbon neatly folded above it, all opposition to the high street being temporarily out of bounds would swiftly fade away.

  ‘That’s bloody brilliant, that. Here, Keith! Come and have look at this bloody medal. It’s real gold, that.’ And Paul’s expression would reflect their awe, as he gazed at it for the thousandth time. ‘What was your name again, mate?’

  ‘Paul Manning.’

  ‘Bloody well done, Paul.’

  It worried him, carrying it from hotel to hotel, from Gateshead to Taunton. He was terrified he would lose it, or it would be stolen. Nothing bad happened, though.

  The race finished in Liverpool where I met up with Chris Boardman, a man whose isolated, splendid gold medal in 1992 had set the tone for all these things to come.

  ‘The class of 2008 have stolen a bit of your thunder, haven’t they, Chris?’

  ‘Just a bit, Ned. Blown out of the water.’

  We sat down by the Liver Building with the race closing in on us. Despite the late summer sun, a wind picked up, and the Mersey winked its agreement. Things were indeed moving on. And that included the Tour of Britain.

  To the casual observer, the Tour of Britain looks a bit like a value-brand Tour de France. It is not three weeks long, but eight days. The teams are not nine men strong, but six. It is not ridden in the blazing heat of a Provençale July, but in the mellow sunshine, and occasional torrential storms of an Atlantic September. In 2009, when ‘Le Tour’ started in Monte Carlo, ‘The Tour’ started in Scunthorpe. Twice in two years, the stage into Blackpool has been accompanied by a cyclone. Once it had to be cancelled.