Etape

But as the Tour got closer, he began to feel unwell. He suffered terribly with nerves, which led him to work with a psychologist, John Syer, in the run-up to the Barcelona Olympics. The stress would force Boardman to think himself ill, or falling ill, even when he wasn’t.

His preparation, after his triumphant Dauphiné, was typical Boardman – on the face of it, idiosyncratic, but meticulously planned and thought out. While his peers were doing warm-up road races in Europe, he rode and won a 10-mile time trial for amateurs in north Wales. Looking ahead from north Wales to Lille and the Tour prologue, he said: ‘The podium is a possibility. It’s difficult to know who will be up there. Specialists like Thierry Marie seem to be fading. Indurain has been very quiet … Rominger is lying low.’

‘Chris is very close to his best form,’ said his coach, Peter Keen. ‘He still has a slight problem with a chest infection that we’re trying to clear up. A sputum sample enabled us to find the type of microbe and he is now on antibiotics.’

Boardman kept talking about this illness, too. Now, however, he says he can’t remember being unwell. He thinks it might have been a case of getting his excuses in first. ‘I used to need mental crutches like that, like many athletes do. You’re hypersensitive to any sensation or the slightest twitch or anything. It’s a bit childish, but it’s a crutch, in case it goes wrong. You don’t just say, “I couldn’t go any faster and I wasn’t good enough.” You weren’t secure enough in those days to think like that.’

In the days before the prologue, Boardman carried on doing his own thing, as strange as it seemed to his team-mates. He had his routine for coping with the nerves. ‘What I used to do was read and sleep. They were my two escapes.’ To assist the ‘escape’ he liked science fiction – Iain M. Banks was a favourite. ‘It was a way to not be there, while you were still there. And I slept under pressure. A lot. Which is quite a handy trait.’

He didn’t do what his team-mates did, what professional riders had always done, which was to go out for easy rides in the week before the race, recce-ing the prologue course at a gentle pace to get a feel for it. ‘They used to go out and ride the course if it was open and have a chat,’ Boardman says. ‘I went out on my own and I could probably tell you now where all the grids were, where there was a bump on the road. I memorised it.’ Most importantly, he memorised it at the same speed as he would tackle it on race day. ‘They put the team car in front of me; I had to do it at race speed. So I had the car in front, it would take me up to speed, then get out of the way before the corners. I thought I could get round the whole course without braking, but that was the only way to find out. So I had it all mapped out. That was two days before. From that point forward, we got all the information we could.’

Boardman habitually uses ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, meaning his team – not his professional team-mates, who were mere colleagues, but his far more important support team, led by Keen. But Keen wasn’t there – he ‘felt like a fish out of water’, says Boardman, and rarely went to continental races.

Boardman’s wife, Sally, was in Lille. ‘I used to resent Sally being there,’ says Boardman, with a smile to suggest he is joking. Only, he isn’t really. ‘She used to have a good time, a party, and her friends came over. I’d see them, they’d come to the hotel, all in happy spirits. They were going to have a good day. And I’m thinking, I’m crapping myself here. I’ve got seven minutes that decide my salary for the next year. It used to, reasonably or not, make me quite angry.’

Did he dream of becoming only the second Brit after Tom Simpson to wear the yellow jersey? ‘I did, yeah. But you just go out there and try and win. That’s the beauty of the time trial. You do your thing. It was the psychologist who got me to realise that you can only do what you can.’

Prior to the Barcelona Olympics, Boardman spilled out his fears to John Syer. ‘What if this goes wrong? What if I can’t go fast enough? What if the other guy’s faster? What if I puncture?’

Boardman expected Syer to offer words of reassurance. Instead, he said: ‘Yeah, well those things could happen.’ Boardman was puzzled. ‘I said, “Hang on, aren’t you supposed to be helping me here?” But he said, “No, this is the deal, mate – elation and despair are two sides of the same coin, in equal and opposite proportion. If you want the big win, you’ve got to risk the big low. So instead of trying to deny that, why don’t we stare it in the face?”

‘I sat on the start line at the Olympics and thought, fuck it, I’ll just be as good as I can. And when I cross the line I’ll look at the board and see what I’ve done. He taught me that you can’t affect what others are doing, or let them affect you.’

Now, when it came to the ‘others’, there was only really one. Indurain. ‘He was a brick,’ Boardman says. ‘However he did it, it was pretty amazing.’ He had never raced Indurain before the start of the 1994 Tour, so predictions were difficult. While Indurain had won the last two prologues, Boardman was the Olympic pursuit champion and hour record holder. Indurain might confirm what many suspected – that continental road pros were a different breed, even a superior species. Then again, Boardman, although he came from a small pond, clearly had a special talent. The contrast between the pair was striking in almost every way. Indurain was tall and rangy, six foot two and twelve and a half stone; Boardman was compact and stocky, five foot nine but solid at eleven stone. On a bike, the differences were more marked: Indurain was a jumbo jet, Boardman a fighter plane.

‘It was really, really hot,’ Boardman recalls of the day. He didn’t have a special routine before the race. ‘Most of it was having the courage to do nothing. I learned that from my pursuiting days. Because when people are nervous, they go out for a ride. We were staying in a hotel just out of town. On the morning I went out on my bike for an hour. Just really easy. The others went for a couple of hours. The days before, too, they went out, and said, “Are you coming?” I said, “No, I’m going out on my own with two sprints.”

‘My routine was worked back from the time of the start: I want to be on the start line with three minutes to go, so how far is it, to walk from the bus to the start house? When am I going to warm up – because that had to be really close to the event. Where’s the signing on? When am I going to put my numbers on? When am I going to eat? It’s incredibly detailed. But the day is mainly waiting, until it’s time to act.’

While Boardman’s day was ‘dialled’, others’ were more flexible – or shambolic. ‘I remember riders getting their time trial bikes and getting their tools out, adjusting their saddles and bars.’ It was inconceivable to Boardman that this would not have been taken care of in advance. ‘This was my office; this was where I went to work. You don’t plug in a new piece of equipment before the most important meeting, do you?’

Boardman’s bike, a new Lotus ‘Superbike’, essentially a road version of the machine he’d ridden at the Olympics, attracted attention. LeMond, always interested in equipment, was spellbound. He warmed up facing Boardman outside the Gan team’s campervan. ‘Greg was like, “Oh, a shiny new piece of kit!” He was genuinely fascinated, and he picked your brains about equipment a lot. He was like a very, very intelligent kid.’

As he waited to start his effort, Boardman tried to take his psychologist’s advice and embrace the challenge ahead – which meant embracing his fear. ‘I thought, right, this is going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And there’s no escaping that. There’s no pretending I’m going to have an easy day. It is going to be the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever done and I accept that.

‘It was quite liberating.’

The scale of the Tour was something new, even compared with the Olympics. ‘But I had to accept that all these people lining the road ahead of me, and the size of this event, and the millions of people watching. I can’t affect that and that doesn’t affect me. Put it to one side. It was all about my performance.’

Boardman was among the last starters, along with the young world road race champion, Lance Armstrong; finally, Indurain, in the yellow jersey as the previous year’s winner, would be the last man to go.

In the start house, Boardman was held up by an official and the TV camera lingered – the commentator Phil Liggett described it as ‘a tense but marvellous moment’ – before the countdown began, the official holding out five fingers and folding them over:

‘Cinq ... Quatre ... Trois ... Deux ... Un ...’

Boardman shot into a corridor of people: there was a huge crowd, six deep, lining the straight, pouring over the barriers, leaning into the road. Boardman sprinted, out of the saddle, before settling into his extreme position: arms stretching over the front wheel, head down, like a bullet. He remembers little of the ride. He doesn’t recall it being painful. ‘They tend not to hurt if you’ve got it right and you’re fresh, which I was.’

The rider who started a minute in front of Boardman was Luc Leblanc, who had been so dismissive of his hour record a year earlier. The contrast in styles was remarkable: the bare-headed Leblanc, his brown hair blowing in the wind, on a bike on which he didn’t look comfortable, shifting in the saddle, frequently standing up for more power – which, as Boardman knew, came at the cost of aerodynamics. Boardman had clocked Leblanc as he waited in front of him, ‘on a bike you could quite literally go and buy in [the sports shop] Decathlon. Probably 44cm [wide] bars.

‘Even if he’d been producing the same power as me, he’d have lost at least a minute …’

There was something else that Boardman knew, though he doesn’t say whether he derived any special advantage from the knowledge. Having the team car behind you could serve as an aerodynamic aid: ‘People don’t realise that having a car up your butt makes a bloody big difference. Because turbulence goes behind you and sucks you backwards, having a car behind you is beneficial. It’s 20 watts difference.’

All the riders had cars behind them, but perhaps Boardman’s was closer (it was certainly close the following year, when Boardman fell in the rain at Saint-Brieuc, and was almost run over, ending his second Tour within a few minutes of it starting).

In Lille, Boardman knew he was on a good day, but didn’t know how he was going relative to anyone else. For those watching on television, too, there was scant information; the action was mainly transmitted from a fixed camera on the finish line, which tracked the riders as they sprinted up the long, wide, gently rising finishing straight – all of them fighting, weaving from one side to the other in search of a smoother surface or the most sheltered spot, getting out of the saddle to try and generate more power.

Boardman was careful not to start too fast. He was wary of getting carried away by the occasion; the people cheering, the realisation that he was riding the Tour de France – the Tour de France! The knack to riding a good time trial is always the same: it’s all about pacing, judgement, calculation. Things that Boardman is good at. ‘The equation in my head, in any time trial, was: how far is it to go; how hard am I trying; is it sustainable?

‘And that changes depending on how far you have to go. If the answer is “Yes, it is sustainable,” then you’re not trying hard enough. If the answer is “No, I can’t sustain it,” then it’s too late.

‘So the answer you’re looking for is: “Maybe.”’

For the entirety of his ride, Boardman remains in his aerodynamic position: bum up, head down, only shifting slightly for corners. He knows where he has to touch the brakes, where he doesn’t. And as he enters the long finishing straight, he can see, in front of him, his minute-man, Leblanc.

‘Look at this!’ says Liggett on commentary. ‘The arrival of Chris Boardman! He has almost caught Luc Leblanc!’

‘I thought that was perfect,’ says Boardman, a wry smile playing on his lips. ‘After Bordeaux, he says that half the peloton could break the hour record. And next year, I catch him for a minute …’

Leblanc gives Boardman a target to aim at in the final kilometre: a big, 44cm-wide, off-the-peg bike-shaped target, hair billowing in the wind. Now it is impossible not to be struck by the contrast. Leblanc is a diminutive climber but he looks twice the size of Boardman.

Boardman aimed for his back wheel. ‘The straight was long, and seeing Leblanc allowed me to change strategy slightly.’ This was where the answer to the question always in his mind – ‘Can I sustain this effort?’ – went from ‘maybe’ to ‘no’. But it didn’t matter. It would be over soon. ‘When you see something coming up and think, “I can push on a bit more and get a ‘reward’ before the end…”’ The reward being the catch. ‘That helped quite a bit.’

Leblanc, riding up the right-hand gutter, becomes aware of the Exocet missile behind him, turns around to glance over his shoulder, then moves over as Boardman, who had seemed to be toying with which side to pass him on, rockets up the inside. The time to beat is 8 minutes, 13 seconds, by Armand de Las Cuevas. Boardman speeds through the line: 7:49. The fastest time by 24 seconds. And at 55kph, the fastest time trial the Tour has ever seen.

Boardman already knew it had been a good ride. ‘It was one of the very few moments in my entire career where I could not have done anything differently. It was perfect. They don’t hurt, you just can’t go any faster.’

He looks a little wistful as he adds: ‘I never got those conditions again.’

There’s no time to linger on Boardman in the aftermath of his ride; we see him freewheeling into a mass of bodies and disappearing. The camera flashes instead to an expressionless, yellow-jerseyed Indurain in the start house. Three seconds later, his countdown begins. Eight seconds after Boardman finishes, he starts.

Indurain, the last of the 189 riders, hammers around the course. His time trialling had let him down at the recent Tour of Italy, where he finished second to Evgeni Berzin. But now he looks formidable. Whereas Boardman was compact and bullet-like, Indurain is a blunt instrument: he bludgeons his way through Lille’s broad boulevards. He gets out of the saddle: a rare sight. His mouth is open, gasping for air: also a rare spectacle. He’s usually so cool, so impassive. Finally he appears, swinging around the final bend, on the brink of his third consecutive prologue victory – or is he? The clock reads 7:40. ‘It’s a long, long way to go, Miguel,’ Liggett’s voice crackles with emotion.

The clock counts on: 7.44 … 45 … 46 … 47 … 48 … 49 … And still Indurain powers up the finishing straight. Liggett again: ‘Boardman is the leader of the Tour de France! He’s done it!’

Indurain lunges across the line and the clock stops at 8:04: a full 15 seconds slower than Boardman.

Boardman remembers little of that eight-minute wait. ‘It’s a blur. You do something, there’s loads of noise, then people say: “You’ve done it!” And that’s the first time you start to have self-belief.’

Boardman is perhaps not as impassive as Indurain, but he is not exactly emotional, or sentimental. ‘I was happy,’ he says. Then corrects himself: ‘Relieved. That there had been this opportunity and I’d taken it. I had done what I came for.’

Classement

1 Chris Boardman, Great Britain, Gan, 7 minutes, 49 secs

2 Miguel Indurain, Spain, Banesto, at 15 secs

3 Tony Rominger, Switzerland, Mapei-Clas, at 19 secs

4 Alex Zülle, Switzerland, ONCE, at 22 secs

5 Armand de Las Cuevas, France, Castorama, at 24 secs

6 Thierry Marie, France, Castorama, at 29 secs

Bernard Hinault Leads Over the Pavé Early in the Stage

1 July 1980. Stage Five: Liège to Lille

236.5km. Flat, cobbles

The French call it pavé. It sounds exotic and benign – it could be a succulent cut of beef – but for cyclists it has a different meaning. It is the pavé that defines Paris–Roubaix, the ‘Hell of the North’ one-day classic that includes twenty-odd sections of cobbles, or pavé; hell because these cobbles are not the small stones polished by thousands of cars in a city, but large, uneven boulders planted in mud, arranged to run in narrow strips across the plains and fields of northern France and Belgium.

They are roads, but rarely used as such these days and hardly worthy of the name. Some are maintained purely for the purpose of meting out punishment once a year, around Easter time, to the cyclists of Paris–Roubaix.

Every decade or so, the pavé features not only in Paris–Roubaix but also in the Tour de France. In 2004 it was the pavé that destroyed the hopes of the Basque climber, Iban Mayo. In 2010 it did the same to another stick-thin climber, Fränk Schleck. On that occasion, even Lance Armstrong, who had capitalised on Mayo’s misfortune six years earlier, was a diminished figure, caught behind the carnage and reduced to chasing shadows, or younger, faster versions of himself, over the bone-jarring stones. ‘Sometimes you’re the hammer and sometimes you’re the nail,’ said Armstrong after the stage. ‘Today, I was the nail.’

Paris–Roubaix lends itself to great suffering and great quotes. Arguably the best is Theo de Rooy’s following the 1985 race, when he crashed, withdrew, and vented: ‘It’s bollocks, this race. You’re working like an animal, you don’t have time to piss, you wet your pants; you’re riding in mud like this, you’re slipping. It’s a piece of shit …’

‘Will you ride it again?’ asked the reporter.

‘Of course. It’s the most beautiful race in the world.’

It’s dangerous, the pavé. In 1998 Johan Museeuw fell in the Arenberg forest section during Paris–Roubaix and nearly lost his leg; in 2001 Philippe Gaumont broke his femur; in 2010 Fränk Schleck broke his collarbone. The weather matters. On dry days the dust kicked up by the bikes and vehicles fills lungs and leaves riders coughing for days. But when the rain falls, the challenge and danger are of a different order. A very different order indeed.

On 1 July 1980, it poured. It was a grey, bleak day as the Tour prepared to leave the industrial Belgian city of Liège, to head west to Lille. Five days earlier, the Tour had started in Frankfurt, then dipped into France, to Metz, before crossing another border to Belgium. Bad weather dominated those early stages. But the fifth stage, to Lille, looked set to be the worst of the lot. The rain was unrelenting. The wind blew hard across the northern European plains. ‘Thousands were by the roadside, sheltering under trees or huddled by their cars,’ as one report put it. ‘If stages two and three were purgatory, then stage five was hell.’

* * *

Few Tours have started with a bigger favourite than Bernard Hinault in 1980. Le Blaireau (The Badger) had won the previous two, including 1978, his début. That year, although only twenty-three, he rode with such impressive authority, even leading a riders’ protest at the end of one stage, that an aura was already starting to develop. The timing was right. In the same year that the great Eddy Merckx retired, a new patron was needed, and here was Hinault, waiting in the wings, poised to stride confidently to centre stage.

He didn’t have to wait long. A year after his first Tour and first win, Hinault returned and dominated. To underline his superiority, he even claimed the traditional sprinters’ finish on the Champs-Élysées. To win there, in the yellow jersey, showed more than strength and speed. It showed panache and defiance. It was a two-fingered salute. And it was completely unnecessary. Hinault entered Paris with a lead of three minutes over the second-placed Joop Zoetemelk (which in the record books is thirteen, after Zoetemelk was subsequently docked ten minutes for a doping offence). His win in Paris was Hinault’s seventh stage of the 1979 Tour. He was at the zenith of his powers.

There was, from the beginning, more to Hinault than physical ability. Sean Kelly, the Irishman who emerged in the late 1970s as one of the best sprinters and one-day riders, is not given to exaggeration or hyperbole. Ask him about Hinault, however, and his admiration, even awe, becomes apparent. ‘He was the boss,’ says Kelly. ‘The patron, as they say. In the Tour de France especially he was very much the patron. When you had two mountain stages then a flat stage, he’d go to the front and say, “OK, today we’re going to ride slowly for the first 100km. Nobody attacks.”

‘If somebody did attack they would get a fucking bollocking,’ Kelly continues. ‘I’ve seen it myself: Hinault go after somebody and say, “If you do that again, you won’t ever win another race.”’

Graham Jones, who raced with Hinault, said that, in the main, he asserted himself ‘physically on the bike rather than verbally. He would occasionally shout a bit, but usually it was because he was on a bad day, like anybody. But I remember once at the Tour de Romandie, he was getting a bit annoyed early on and he went to the front for 20km and strung it all out and then he sat up and said, “Have you had enough?” That certainly quietened everyone down for a while.

‘He was the last patron,’ Jones continues. ‘Armstrong wasn’t a patron, because he didn’t ride enough races all year round to do that. A patron is there all year round. I can remember riding Paris–Nice or the Tour of Corsica where Hinault was there, riding to win.’

He was more than a caricature of a mafia boss, but like a mafia boss Hinault kept his friends close and his enemies closer. He could be generous to team-mates, helping them to victories in ‘lesser’ races, with the deal being their full commitment to his own cause when it came to the big ‘appointments’, to use his description. Hinault was not Merckx: his appetite for victory wasn’t as voracious as the Cannibal’s. He didn’t care about small races. He cared about big races, and he certainly cared about the Tour de France. It was always his main appointment.

Badger-watching has been an enduring fascination of the last few decades, from when he bestrode his sport like a colossus, to his annual berating of the latest current generation of French riders for being lazy and overpaid (as the last French winner of the Tour, in 1985, Hinault occupies a special, not to say important, position). In his late fifties, he has aged well. He is dark, handsome, brooding; a fearsome presence, prone to displays of the anger and aggression that were the hallmarks of his career. Yet he can also appear relaxed, calm and friendly; he smiles often, laughs regularly, and most of the riders he raced with now speak warmly of him. The overwhelming impression is of a man who is comfortable in his own skin, who doesn’t merely appear to not care for the approval of others, but is genuinely indifferent to either flattery or criticism. There is an authenticity about Hinault. For someone who seemed to race so often on anger, he doesn’t appear to be haunted by demons. He is refreshingly black or white and perfectly comfortable being Bernard Hinault, the Badger – the nickname given to him when he was a young rider by a fellow Breton, and which hints at his wild nature and fighting qualities. Just as he did when he was a rider, Hinault exudes confidence; he radiates certainty.

These days, the Badger’s job, when he has not been tending to his farm in Brittany, is to look after the podium at the Tour de France, supervising the daily jersey presentations. He is needed in this role, because on three occasions in recent years the podium has been invaded by protesters, and Hinault has appeared from off-stage, like a bouncer. Each time he attacked the younger, taller intruder (Hinault is a surprisingly diminutive five foot eight), forcing them off the podium, then glowering and snarling at the stricken figure, daring them to return. As if they would.