by Ned Boulting
My phone call has just taken him back almost thirty years in time. And I can hear from his voice, that it’s caught him slightly off guard.
But he remembers clearly. ‘They went off on a week-long trip. About sixty kilometres from where they were going to meet me and Margaret, they changed driving positions. Mandy started driving. On the way from Châteauroux to Tours, they saw one last chateau. As she was turning round in the road, a motorbike came speeding over the brow of a hill. It went straight into the car door and killed her instantly. Mick was admitted straight to hospital.
‘Mandy loved France. She wanted to visit all the chateaux.’
Mick Bennett spent a week in Châteauroux hospital, recovering from wounds that instantly ended his racing career. Then he returned to Britain, and slowly started a new life. He has since married, and has a family.
Châteauroux. Why does that place name keep recurring?
There is an affectation, which was briefly fashionable among the chattering classes, for a ‘science’ called psychogeography. It’s all about psychological ley lines, the meaning in maps, the spiritual meta-text of places, and their mysterious alignment to history. I used to think it was nonsense. And it probably is.
But then, Châteauroux would suggest otherwise. And, having visited it often in the course of my duties, I am strangely affected to hear its beautifully wrought name crop up again in the life story of another British cyclist.
Bradley Wiggins in 2011, arm in a sling, swaying slightly and woozy with morphine, talking to me in the car park of Châteauroux hospital, his Tour ended by a broken collarbone. Mark Cavendish, on the very same day, winning for the seventeenth time. Back home, Mick Bennett would have been watching on TV.
Three years previously, Mark Cavendish, in the dark blue of Columbia’s 2008 kit, fists clenched in wonderment, crossing the line in Châteauroux to take his first ever stage win on the Tour de France.
Once again, Mick Bennett was at home, watching. And, without a shadow of doubt, cheering.
It’s the flip side of Mick Bennett. The one that, for all his occasional bluster, is too rarely glimpsed. But I’ve seen him taking time out in the middle of the most hectic part of the day to return a free sponsor’s flag that some kid has dropped on the road. Then he’ll spend more time than you might think talking to the youngster, until, with a ruffle of their hair, he’s off to make the race work. When he looks at the future, he has one eye on the past.
‘Now it seems the heart’s almost gone out of it.’
Mick squints at me from behind his desk. It is obvious where this conversation is heading. The march on progress has stolen the joy. The spirit is in danger of being bludgeoned out of the sport. Mick Bennett, despite his reputation, is capable of disarming sentimentality, an affliction that I suffer from too.
‘As a kid, I just had this passion and this yearning to get out on my bike because it was a release. It was independence. I could go twenty or thirty miles on this bike and get away from it. I suddenly realised, and it was like a bolt of lightning: my God, I’m thirty miles from home in this countryside and it’s incredible. It’s amazing. I am in complete control of my destiny. It was the start of a journey that I’m still on.’
Mark Cavendish is a favoured son of Mick Bennett. Mick’s eyes light up when he talks about him. Every year, regardless of which team Cavendish is riding for, Mick goes out of his way to cajole, persuade and ensure the Manxman’s participation in his race.
‘Cavendish is fantastic. That’s what I call a professional bike rider. Because it’s in here.’ He thumps his heart. ‘He genuinely can attach himself to the other side of the barrier. He’s a bit old school.
‘He’s the best in the world at what he does. But that was how he started. He felt that independence and that freedom. And I wonder how many kids have got that. And that’s why he’s pissed off and he’s passionate, because it’s from here.’ He points, again, demonstratively at his heart.
‘It’s almost as if that bit has gone somewhere. And I don’t seem to see it anywhere else now.’
On the last day of the 2012 Tour of Britain, Mark Cavendish, who had suffered like a dog for a week through wet and wild hills and a terrain that punished him every day, rode up the cobbled high street of Guildford for the last time in his cherished Rainbow Jersey. With two hundred metres left to race, he’d torn an unbridgeable gap in the bunch, and had time to look over his shoulder, sit up and coast into a wall of jubilant noise.
The crowd had stood ten deep all day waiting for just this moment. It placed a perfect full stop at the end of an extraordinary summer.
No longer was the Tour of Britain an oddity, a quirky secret, an irritation to the flow of traffic and a financial basket case. The mainstream, for better or worse, had washed in.
‘We’re on a tidal wave of support for cycling. We are pushing on open doors.’
I put it to Mick that he’s sometimes not as hard-nosed as people think he is. ‘You’re quite sentimental,’ I tell him.
‘I am.’
Then I make a confession. I admit that, driving past the dozens of primary schools on the route of the Tour of Britain, whose children have been lined up to watch the race go past, all cheering, I sometimes start welling up.
‘I do! I do, too, Ned!’ And his eyes, now I look, are watery. We both sit there in his office, surprised by each other and surprised by ourselves.
There came a moment on the 2012 Tour of Britain, when I knew that I had finally, perhaps definitively, been accepted into the bosom of the British cycling family. Interestingly, it happened standing on the top of a truck in Stoke-on-Trent, which is not the place you normally would start when you are trying to track down rites of passage.
I was standing (on the truck’s roof) in front of a camera, a microphone in one hand, and touching an earpiece with the other. To my right, bolt upright, and deferring to me, stood one of British cycling’s most grizzly hard men, Rob Hayles, a rough geezer, by outward appearance, with the slow heart rate of a Buddhist monk. The recently retired former World Champion and Olympic bronze medallist was as popular on the roads of this country as any man who has ridden a bike in anger over recent years. I was somewhat in awe of him. We were both concentrating hard, as the voice in the truck below counted down to our ‘on air’ time.
‘One minute left on the break.’
Rob momentarily broke his pose. I could see from the corner of my eye, that something had caught his attention. He was staring intently at me, or more specifically, at my nose.
‘What?’
‘Thirty seconds to on air.’
With great care, Rob reached out towards my face and gently, almost lovingly, stroked the end of my nose with the back of his hand. I watched on, wide-eyed.
He withdrew his hand. ‘There. That’s better.’
‘What, Rob?’
‘A bogey, Ned.’ We both looked down, and sure enough, a small offending crust still clung to the back of his non-microphone hand.
‘. . . in ten, nine, eight, seven . . .’
‘Thanks, Rob.’
‘Pleasure.’ And with the merest hint of a frown, we both assumed our on-air smiles.
Just out of shot, and with great subtlety, Rob Hayles, shook his left hand free of its encumbrance.
But as for me? I knew I had arrived on the Tour of Britain.
‘. . . . cue Ned.’
‘Hello, and welcome to Stoke-on-Trent.’
CHAPTER 5
SOMETHING TO MAKE YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND
I HOLD MY hands up. This book is not even slightly comprehensive. Without justification, or remorse, it ignores shamefully large swathes of the country. The heart of my cycling experience resides elsewhere.
My story pays only lip service to the Union-Jack waving melodrama of the velodrome, skirts the Olympics (haven’t we heard enough about them?), only occasionally mentions the Tour de France and leaves BMX racing and cyclo-cross entirely alone to entertain those who understand their peculiar ap
peals. And, just as it also fails to engage with the important and hugely successful women’s cycling scene, so it becomes clear that I am writing with only one particular type of bike rider in mind: me.
Not only that, but it is a story generated in a particular place (London) for a particular audience. Me, again.
Cycling connects the dreamer with the expert practitioner. On my bike, I could be, in my own deluded imagination, a little like the champions I had met, and continued to meet. That’s why I found myself drawn over and over again to the same sort of men (and they were, exclusively, men).
The more I bored down into what I sought to understand, the narrower the hole became. But it was no less rich a seam for that.
My own personal history with the bicycle is unremarkable, and features a considerable time out, during which Margaret Thatcher stepped down from power, the Eastern bloc collapsed and Take That came and went. I think Mickey Rourke’s pre-comeback career fitted neatly into that void, too.
Before that, some indeterminate time after the end of the Second World War, but before The X Factor, I clearly remember standing with my dad in a back garden in Bedford frowning at a skinny blue aluminium bike that some bloke was flogging for fifty quid. Dad had read a small ad in the Bedfordshire on Sunday. It was to be my birthday present.
‘This bike was used in the Tour de France, you know.’ The bloke in the back garden was perspiring in the July heat, or maybe because he was lying through his teeth.
He seemed very authoritative, very knowledgeable, as he hauled it out of his shed and leant it against a wall. Dad and I were impressed, as much with ourselves for knowing that there was a bike race called the Tour de France as with the bike itself.
‘Really?’ Dad looked at the machine in muted wonder. He pinched the back tyre, testing all-knowingly for pressure. Once again, I was impressed, this time with Dad, for knowing stuff about tyre pressure.
‘How about forty-eight?’ Dad said, and the deal was done with an instant handshake. He was good at haggling, too. I noticed how very suddenly the bloke had stopped perspiring.
It was a great bike, though. I rode it for many years. Even after it had grown fractionally too small for me, I still loved it, and went to college with it. Then I promptly got it nicked, swapped it for a pizza or set fire to it as an act of genre-breaking installation art, I forget how it went.
But that was that for me and bikes for a long, long while.
I left college, moved abroad, drifted around, ran up debts, phoned home for help, then came and settled in London, not knowing where else to go, nor what else to do. Eventually, circuitously, fortuitously, miraculously, just as middle age was finding me, I found the bike again. Luckily.
This renewal of acquaintances followed only after I had been introduced to the Tour de France. That was ITV’s fault. It’s normally the other way round, of course: first comes the passion for cycling, then the interest in the Tour. But with childlike simplicity, having spent a month watching young men ride bicycles unnaturally fast, I decided, on my return to these shores, that I needed a bit of the action, too.
So I went to Harry Perry’s in Woolwich and came out with a mountain bike designed, as its genus suggests, for mountains. The fact that Woolwich and its environs presented nothing more challenging than a gentle slope down Thomas Street to the ferry seemed not to cross my mind. I liked the bike’s bulk and the proper heft of its chunky tyres. It felt serious, appropriate. Its dead weight was made even more unequivocal by the addition of a day-glo orange child’s seat attached to the seat tube.
I sat unhappily on this thing, all the while trying to convince myself that I was enjoying the experience, my thirty-something legs feeling themselves back into some sort of usefulness after a decade of sedentary motorway miles (my pursuit of a career in sports reporting had taken me up and down the M1, but it had not done much for my cardiovascular system).
Nonetheless I enjoyed the views of the lower reaches of the Thames as I rumbled along the riverside path. It was the movement that made it all worthwhile, a cold wind forcing water from the corners of my eyes; the sounds, even the smells (there are dog food and syrup factories nearby – a heady mix).
I used to ride along a twenty-minute waterfront stretch from my old house in Woolwich to the Underground station at North Greenwich. This is a long, ostensibly ugly reach of very tidal river, not the prettified riverside setting so beloved of ramblers further upstream where the Thames tickles Berkshire. There are no quaint pubs, nor creaking locks to negotiate.
Instead there are industrial units, a giant concrete-clad storage depot for Sainsbury’s, mysterious, villainous pubs. Fred’s Wood Workshop used to stand along the river, next to his son’s metal yard. Cory Barges still go about their business, letting fly sparks as they cut and weld their floating stock, the barges that carry garbage from the City to the incinerators. Along this wide stretch of river, shingle and gravel from the sea bed are brought to shore and sifted into their constituent parts. Rusty conveyor belts rumble overhead as dredgers are unloaded. Their cargoes hold the dank smell of the North Sea’s greyish depths. Now and then, the footpath silts up with lifeless sand, carelessly dropped from the boats.
Here, the river is broad, tidal and grey. At high tide it comes rushing towards London, slowed only by the silvery buttresses of the Thames Barrier and cut in two by the churning of the Woolwich ferry, whose two boats criss-cross the river in perfectly executed synchronicity, thundering their old diesel engines against the ebb and flow as they hold their position on the river. Built in 1963, they are great anachronisms, with names likes Ernest Bevin, and John Burns, who led the great Dock Strike of 1889, and coined the marvellous phrase ‘The Thames is liquid history’.
One day, someone will connect the North Circular to the South Circular road by building a giant new bridge, and the ferry will stop running forever. But in the meantime, this was the awe-inspiring backdrop to my earliest commute on a bike.
Some friends from Paris came to stay with us once. We lent their teenage daughter and her boyfriend some bikes, and suggested they rode this stretch of the Thames Path and that we’d meet them in the beautiful surroundings of Greenwich Park for a picnic. They set off full of youthful verve. By the time they reached us all waiting by the Royal Observatory, their faces had clouded over. They had found the experience, in their words, ‘apocalyptique’, ‘dégolace’.
They were right, in their own way, the little Parisian prigs. The dull sweep of the estuary with its prosaic surrounds happens to be a source of constant wonder to me. But, if you are used to pinching aubergines for ripeness, scribbling poetry and sniffing flowers amidst the prettiness of the rue Mouffetard in Paris, then you are a long way from your comfort zone when you are cycling through Charlton. London is a brute, frankly.
My ride left behind the industrial remnants of the working river, and as the Greenwich peninsula drew its shape ahead of me, so too did the toy-town architecture of the Millennium Village, and its centrepiece, the Dome. That was my final destination. From there I would hop onto the Tube.
It was, I guess, about three miles, all in all. It was a great revalation to me that a bike ride on this scale was even possible.
I rode it, at a very gentle pace, in something like a quarter of an hour. And, arriving slightly breathless, I padlocked the bike and made my way underground, feeling glowing and virtuous. Within minutes, I was whisked into Central London.
Back at the station though, and while I was up in town working, my bike did not fare well. Malevolent forces went to work, picking over its aluminium carcass, harvesting the usable parts. Time after time I would return to find my lights missing, the saddle gone, a wheel nicked. Each time this happened, I would take the bike back to the workmanlike setting of Harry Perry’s with increasing malaise.
‘I need a new saddle.’
He would look up from whatever bike was upside down in front of him. ‘Not again. Can’t you leave it somewhere else?’
‘There is now
here else.’
One week, and one new saddle later.
‘Back again, then, Ned?’ He put down his spanner and wiped his hands on a cloth, as if he were a barman in a French bar, not a mechanic in Woolwich.
‘Why would anyone try and steal handlebars?’ I wheeled in my decapitated bike.
He sighed and shook his head.
And then, he said it. Life-changing words, muttered innocently over a till as he racked up the price of the new set of handlebars.
‘Why don’t you just ride all the way into London? It’s not that far.’
Was the man insane? I had an instant vision of vast distance, like a Dalí landscape, an unreachable horizon. This was a journey of such prodigious length that it needed to be executed by subterranean electric trains, hurtling along at great speed through the blind, dark tunnels underneath London’s sprawling mass, and overhead, mile after mile of Victorian streets blindly flashing by. It was an act of faith and hydraulics. It was not something you could accomplish by bike. That much, surely, was obvious.
‘Eight miles, door to door. Take you forty minutes.’ He picked up his tools and returned his attention to the job in hand, leaving me gaping in the doorway to his shop, with the shape of my life already, imperceptibly changing.
My first trip into Central London by bike was my Road to Damascus. Actually, it was the road to Bermondsey, but I wasn’t going to be fussy. It didn’t take the predicted forty minutes, I was too slow for that back then, and besides, the half-deflated, heavy tread of my mountain bike tyres made the ride feel like driving a car with the handbrake still half-engaged. But it was a huge adventure.
On returning home late that afternoon, I felt as if my legs would seize up forever. They ached in a way that they had never ached before, my thigh muscles, my calves and lots of nameless tiny little fibres that make the joints bend. My body had been stunned into usage. I sat down on the toilet, as the bathtub filled, and then didn’t have the strength to stand up unaided, having instead to fall off sideways and crawl to the bath, so I could haul myself up from floor level.