On the Road Bike

by Ned Boulting

  The only really big adventure away from home left a lasting impression. He went to Munich in 1972. He was part of the Team Pursuit quartet who came home with the Olympic bronze medal. The other three men were Ian Hallam, Mick Bennett and Willi Moore, who blew a tyre in the semi-final, allowing West Germany to gain a fatal, and decisive, advantage. They went on to win gold. But Great Britain can feel with some justification, that it could have been, perhaps should have been, them. Such things change lives.

  Ron, people tell me, took a long time to come to terms with that, if he ever did at all.

  The 1972 Games, as they are remembered by Ron Keeble, sound like a terrific Boy’s Own adventure. ‘Hi-jinks’ and ‘capers’ spring to mind. Listening to him relive those two weeks of competition, it’s hard not to feel deeply envious of such an experience, the shared joie de vivre, the camaraderie. Bound together by the sheer effort of getting yourself to the start line, fit and with a functioning bike, the team were held together despite, not because of, their circumstances. They had to supply their own bikes, and their own tyres, for example, and you suspect that if the authorities had found a way of getting them to fork out for their own train tickets to Germany, they’d probably have done that, too.

  The preparation, needless to say, was homespun and eccentric. Mick Bennett had been entered to ride the kilometre time trial (the others had all ridden deliberately slowly in the Olympic trials to avoid being picked) as well as the Team Pursuit. He therefore could justifiably claim to have worked harder than the others and needed more pampering in recovery. He developed his own techniques, and used to borrow Gill’s Novocaine cream, which she was using as a topical anaesthetic during breast-feeding. He used to smother his legs in his friend’s wife’s medicine, and go for a lie down in his room after a training block.

  ‘He loved it,’ remembers Ron, with a wistful smile. Knowing that their teammate would be nodding off, his legs smothered in breast-feeding ointment, Ron, Ian and Willi would sneak up to his room, and then rap at the door, pretending to be race starters.

  ‘Attention, messieurs les coureurs!’ they bellowed through the door (which roughly translates as On Your Marks!)

  There’d be a brief silence during which the trio of athletes held their noses to prevent their giggles from snorting out. And then, from behind the door, ‘Fuck off and leave me alone.’ They’d run off hooting with mirth, like a scene in Carry On Cycling. A young Sid James would have played Keeble. Bennett would have been Charles Hawtrey.

  And in the athletes’ village, they devised a cyclists’ decathlon. This comprised Peach Lobbing (lobbing peaches), Restaurant Racing (a bunch sprint to the canteen), Sauna Sitting (sweating stamina), as well as more conventional disciplines, like the Swimathon. This involved swimming lengths of the pool, having to reach out of the water to touch the wall before splashing back in and turning for another length. It was all well and good, before Willi, reaching for the wall, dislocated his shoulder and locked solid, his outstretched arm trapped in mid-air. He couldn’t move.

  ‘Willi! Touch the fucking wall!’ they yelled at him.

  ‘Fuck off, Ian. Help!’

  ‘Ian was a doctor,’ Ron recalls. ‘He was the only one with medical training. He had to pop his arm back in the socket.’ This was just days before their competition started.

  Mischief. Everything about Ron Keeble implies mischief. To say that his eyes twinkle would be the second cliché in this chapter, but another one that I am prepared to indulge. He twinkles with the delight of it all. Mick Bennett once told me that Ron had found life after Munich very difficult. This may be true. But the man sitting opposite me, scribbling away and chuckling, shows no signs of anything other than rude health, and mischief.

  Occasionally, he reminds me that I still have a mountain to climb. I swiftly change the subject back again. Back to Munich.

  When horror visited the athletes’ village, with the hostage taking of the Israeli Olympic team, the GB Pursuit Team were evacuated from their rooms that overlooked the infamous balcony on which the terrorists were, from time to time, visible.

  The intervening years have given Ron plenty of time to feel the true outrage of this tragedy. But at the time, and with their own race programme interrupted and indefinitely suspended, their self-absorption made them brood.

  ‘The whole time you were thinking about the ride, the ride, the ride. You were still thinking selfishly, “Shit. I’ve got enough on my plate.”’

  Besides, as the siege went into a second day, Ron thought they could have been of use to the authorities. One of their ‘cyclists’ decathlon’ events had involved tossing cartons of the sponsor’s chocolate drink Sour Milo onto the exact balcony they now saw on their TV screens.

  ‘We could have taken then out. If they’d left it to us, me and Willi could have taken them out, whack! No problem.’

  Appallingly, no amount of improvised British bravado would have had the slightest effect. The siege ended in bloodshed. Eleven members of the Israeli Olympic Team were murdered.

  Ron shows me his Munich medal. It’s not kept anywhere special; today he leaves it curled around a statuette next to the telly. Tomorrow it might be slung round the door handle of the fridge. But, if Munich and 1972 represent certain things to most of us, they mean much more to Ron Keeble. Of that you can be sure.

  Now, suddenly, there is another cyclist in the kitchen. Brian Smith is a retired Scottish pro, a two-time British National Road Race Champion, no less, and once, briefly, a teammate of Lance Armstrong on Motorola. He was a tough rider, racing clean in an era when not that many others were. He’s still a prodigiously tough man, with fingers in many pies: a team manager, a commentator, a fund-raiser, a fixer. He is also married to Ron Keeble’s daughter, and the grandchild with whom Gill has been preoccupied is his oldest boy.

  My otherness has just been made flesh and blood. I am no longer merely ‘not a cyclist’, I am also ‘not family’.

  Brian had got wind of my visit, complete with my vaguely promised intention to ride up this mythical mountain. It transpires that the mountain in question is Alpe d’Huez. Ron Keeble has a virtual trainer, complete with a video display, in his gym. This, it seems, Brian Smith cannot miss.

  ‘My record’s thirty-four minutes,’ he claims, with not the slightest flicker to give away the fact that this is utter bollocks.

  ‘But Pantani’s record is thirty-seven something!’ I protest. ‘And he was doped.’

  ‘Well, I did thirty-four.’ There is no trace of self-doubt. I later find out that his record is in fact forty-six, but at the time I believed him. Ron, meanwhile, has got up to boil the kettle.

  It’s good to see them together, the archetypal cockney and the deadpan Scot. They should have little in common, being two alpha males from opposing ends of the country and a generation apart. But here they are, cutting each other to ribbons with their barbed comments, completing each other’s sentences, clearly utterly comfortable in each other’s company, two peas in a pod. Or, as Brian later confesses, like father and son. They are both, after all, cyclists. I listen as their conversation weaves in and out of the sport.

  Then suddenly, as the kettle bubbles up and then switches itself off, Ron remembers something about his childhood.

  ‘Mum started working for this woman, you see, who owned her own company.’ Ron begins to pour the tea. His mother had been a contract cleaner. ‘At the time, I was still crap on a bike.’ I glance at Brian, expecting him to seize on this assessment. Just the merest raised eyebrow from Brian.

  ‘Thing was, she was a clairvoyant. Anyway. I was crap, like I said, but she told my mother that she’d had this dream that I’d become an Olympic champion.’ Ron declares this with a slight flourish, looking satisfied. He puts the kettle back.

  Ron goes on, and tells us of the strange fate that awaited the poor lady. ‘She went missing. A couple of months later, they found her in the loft in her house on Sydenham Hill. She’d ended up hanging herself.’

  He
strains the teabags. ‘Sugar?’

  ‘One please.’

  ‘But, before she died, I remember that she told Mum I’d become an Olympic champion.’

  There is a pause. Long enough for me to guess what Brian is going to say.

  ‘She got that wrong, then.’

  ‘Fuck off, Brian.’

  Brian organises an annual fundraising event for the British cycling family. Big name riders, as well as all sorts of other people with a love for the sport make their way to attend the drinking-fest that is the Braveheart Dinner. Ron is always there. It seems that, in common with just about everybody else, he’s often a little bit the worse for wear. And he always comes away with something from the charity auction.

  That explains why his outbuilding, a small rectangular brick construction at the foot of his garden, houses such an extraordinary amount of stuff. It’s not just bits and pieces that he has accrued at the Braveheart Dinner, it should be noted. There are boxes containing brand-new bikes, unopened, and, on the day I was there, a fifty-five-inch plasma TV complete with ‘Six hundred pounds’ worth of 3D glasses. Never used the bloody things. Nor the telly.’

  But, as he explains, there’s enough money sloshing around the Keeble estate (he owns a chemical firm) for him to buy things according to the principle of ‘Because I Can’. This, I agree with Ron, is a very good reason to buy things, and much more sustainable than its poor relation, ‘Because I Can’t’.

  All around the room, some hanging from nails and hooks, but mostly just stacked up against the wall, Ron has a collection of framed cycling jerseys. Apparently there are ‘loads more up in the bedroom’, but this assortment would do just fine. Brian, who finds the whole thing faintly amusing (but whether it’s the room, my presence in the room or a combination of both of those I can’t be sure), points to a signed Rainbow Jersey, which once belonged to Tom Boonen, after his victory of 2005.

  ‘That’s Tom.’ Brian makes the sign of the coke snorter, with a thumb held to his nostril. ‘And there’s Rasmussen, look.’ Sure enough, and largely inexplicably, Ron Keeble has acquired a signed Polka Dot jersey from the 2006 Tour de France, worn by Denmark’s skeletal climber the year before he had to be bundled off the race in drug-related ignominy and confusion. I look around for more. There’s Ivan Basso. His Liquigas team jersey had been signed just before the enforcement of his two-year suspension. It seems that Ron Keeble has unwittingly assembled a rogues’ gallery of some of the most notorious riders of the last decade.

  ‘And that’s the best of all.’ I look across the room. There, leaning against a wall, behind a rowing machine, is a real beauty: a signed yellow jersey of Floyd Landis, the first man ever to be stripped of his title (many more have subsequently followed where Landis dared to tread).

  It’s a gem; a framed scrap of cycling iconography, a Turin shroud, with the face of Floyd Landis secretly embedded into its weave, if you stare at it hard enough. I ask Ron how much he paid for it. He winks at me, but it’s clear he doesn’t want to tell me, either because he believes that discussing his fiscal largesse would be distasteful in such straitened times, or that he’d been too pissed to remember. I suspect it is the latter.

  I could no longer delay the inevitable. An Alp rose up in front of me. It towered before my eyes, or it would have done had Ron not briefly lost the remote control. Then the screen sputtered into life, a flickering still frame of a road leading away, and up into the distance.

  Ron set about getting the training bike ready for use. It was a turbo trainer; a bike whose front wheel has been removed and whose back wheel is held in place against a roller. It wasn’t going anywhere, except in this particular bike’s case, Alpe d’Huez. Virtually.

  The handlebars were adjusted, my feet clipped in. I adjusted my Lycra, grateful for the padded seat of my shorts against a saddle which felt wooden. Last words of advice were imparted as I stared up at the computer screen. I actually knew this road for real. It lay on the outskirts of Bourg d’Oisans, a town whose familiarity lies in the fact that it is included almost every year on the route of the Tour de France. I have driven through it on many occasions. This time, in a small suburban back garden, I would ride it. My heart beat fast. Ron and Brian stood either side of me. They wished me luck, and I thought I could sense a smirk, not because I could see it, but because the urge to snigger was buried not far beneath the surface of their last-minute ministration.

  I suddenly thought about the exchange of text messages with Ron I had stored on my phone from the day before:

  Me: Is Alpe d’Huez going to make me physically sick?

  Ron: Let’s put it like this. If you get to the top I will be surprised, and it will probably be the hardest thing you ever do.

  Ron: Only joking!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Ron: Or am I??

  It wasn’t the twelve exclamation marks that bothered me, but the two question marks. Suddenly, as I perched on this unwieldy bike, flanked by a family pack of former pros, in this glorified shed surrounded by the signatures of the decade’s most infamous dopers and bounders, I felt that those two question marks got to the very heart of my predicament. What was I doing here??

  ‘Right, off you go.’ The clock started to tick. I pushed off. Magically the video display sprang into life, and I started to move forward, but ever so slowly, my legs instantly rebelling against the gradient. I was wading through treacle. ‘You’re just on the flat now, the climb starts round the corner.’

  This was unwelcome news. I tried to push on a bit. But the gradient display showed that I had now hit Alpe d’Huez itself and that the road was getting steeper. Commensurately, the resistance applied to the rollers increased. It was nightmarishly stiff. Ron placed a water bottle at my side, and a towel on the handlebars.

  ‘Just pedal. Just pedal up it.’ Brian may be many things, including bright, clever and thoughtful. But ‘just pedal’ struck me as particularly asinine. What other choice did he imagine that I had? Not pedalling would get me nowhere. Not even out of this bloody shed.

  On and on it went. The display suggested that the summit was 8.6 miles away. Eventually, after what seemed like an age, and at the cost of a sapping amount of effort, it budged. I stared at it in disbelief. It now read 8.5 miles. The sweat already poured off me.

  Ron had left me to it. He’d gone to get changed into some shorts so that he could exercise on the rowing machine and keep an eye on my progress. Brian, after a few more encouraging, yet useless, words about pedalling, simply left, never to return.

  And after that I can’t be sure of anything.

  Sometimes I was alone in that garden in Orpington. Other times I was alone on the tree-lined slopes of the great mountain. Voices came and went. The occasional laugh. The odd solicitous enquiry. My calves burnt. My thighs howled their disapproval through the medium of hurting unimaginably. At one point Ron tried to hold me still on the bike, to prevent my upper body from swaying from side to side like a Weeble. 8.4 miles, and then, an age later, 7.9 miles to go. Would this ever end?

  My water bottle was dry. My towel was wet through. Sweat ran all the way over all of me. I had never seen the backs of my hands sweat before, nor my elbows, nor knees. I had not known that these areas of my body’s surface had pores through which it was possible to sweat. Perhaps the subcutaneous pressure had simply bust holes in my skin.

  Rivers of Salty Distress. For a while that phrase stuck in my imagination. It repeated itself on a permanent loop in my inner ear: ‘Rivers of Salty Distress.’ Where had I heard it before? Was it a Johnny Cash album? If it wasn’t, I thought, it damn well should be.

  7.3 miles to the top.

  In my delirium, and to his wild excitement, Ron calculated that, at my current rate of progress, I would breach the finish line exactly seven seconds short of one hour. He showed me the readout of his prediction on his iPhone. Through a film of sweat, I made out the numbers: 59’53”. So I had a target. This made it even worse.

  But, as all things do, given time, this dark, da
rk hour came to an end. As Alpe d’Huez itself, the nasty ski resort that it is, reared hideously into pixelated view I sprinted for the line. Somehow, I hauled myself there with one last effort.

  My time? Fifty-nine minutes and fifty-one seconds. Not only had I smashed Ron’s predicted time by a whole two seconds, I had finished comfortably within the hour, and only twenty-two minutes slower than Marco Pantani.

  Once Gill had handed me my orange juice, and Ron had stopped laughing about my sweat-stained clothing, everything started to come back into focus. Not just Ron and Gill’s kitchen, but my life itself. It was time to get going.

  That’s what happened to Ron, too. At the age of twenty-six, just after the Munich Olympic games, he retired from cycling to start a family, only to realise after a further five years that he missed it too much, at which point he came out of retirement to race again, this time against people ten years younger than him. The lengthy time out had done nothing to diminish his ferocity on a bike. On his first race back, he declared, ‘None of you little boys are going to piss over me. You’re going to have to climb over me to beat me.’

  But often they did beat him. His best years had gone. ‘I wasted all them years. Wasted them really.’

  He went on to do very well for himself, when cycling finally let him go, or he let go of it. ‘Money doesn’t make you happy. No. But it makes being unhappy easier to bear.’

  ‘And this generation? Wiggins? Cavendish? Brailsford?’

  ‘Dave Brailsford? Either he’s been arsehole lucky . . . or he’s been brilliant.’

  He thinks about the Tour of Britain, the triumphant lap of honour for the two British superstars on the team. A few weeks after the Olympic Games, both Mark Cavendish, racing for the last time as the reigning World Champion, and Bradley Wiggins, the Olympic gold medallist winner of the Tour de France, had taken part in the race. Cavendish raced hard to the end. Wiggins, perhaps less so. In fact, he climbed off halfway through with a tummy bug, having ridden an almost invisible race to that point.