On the Road Bike

by Ned Boulting

  He sat in the stands and watched Eddy Merckx and Roger de Vlaeminck win a Madison race, drinking in his fill of these stellar names in action. In theory, this was supposed to be a two-week holiday from the apprenticeship he’d half-heartedly started, mostly to appease his parents. At least, that’s what he’d told people. But he knew what was really going on.

  ‘I had two weeks to decide what I was going to do with my life. I’m either going to be a bike rider, or I’m going to be an electrician. You can’t do both.’ He pauses. ‘I never went back to work.’

  At the end of the racing, he went off in search of the one contact at his disposal: the extraordinary Rosa De Snerck. Rosa and her husband Marcel ran the Plume Vainqueur bike shop in Ghent. She had become well known in the Anglophone scene for her helpfulness towards this shambolic trickle of hopeful immigrants. If she herself could not offer some temporary lodging for them, then she’d find somewhere else for them to sleep. Unfortunately, this occasionally meant they’d be sleeping at the ‘Butcher’s Shop’. This was the rather ghastly nickname for a rather ghastly place.

  And that’s where Maurice Burton ended up spending the first few bitter weeks of his cycling career abroad. Many British riders made the same harrowing acquaintance with the landlord of the Butcher’s Shop. He was a curious man called Jan Vermeeren, or Jan ‘The Papers’, as Australian rider Alan Peiper remembers in his autobiography, A Peiper’s Tale. Unwashed and hirsute, he trawled round Ghent and collected old newspapers all day, which he then brought home in a hand-drawn pony cart. Some of them he burnt in the stove (the only source of central heating), but mostly he just stacked them in huge piles throughout the otherwise unfurnished premises.

  ‘The rumour was that Jan was rich and owned many houses,’ writes Peiper. ‘He just lived like a hermit, on the edge of society. He found his food in the dustbins at the back of supermarkets and I would often see him eating rotten fruit in the kitchen.’

  Maurice Burton lived there at the same time as Peiper. He too remembers his esoteric landlord with a mixture of horror and fascination. ‘He was a Seventh Day Adventist. He never washed and never shaved, and he used to sleep with his boots on. He never washed out his bowl, he’d just put the next food in it and eat away.’

  ‘Welcome to Belgium?’ I suggest to Maurice, as I try to imagine what this boy from Catford made of Jan Vermeeren.

  ‘You’ll soon find out whether you’re going to make it as a rider in Belgium. You’ll soon find out.’

  Within a year Maurice was a professional, and within four weeks of turning pro, he’d earned enough money to pay cash for a brand-new Toyota Celica. Already he was earning upwards of £2,000 a week during the winter months of the ‘Six-Day’ scene. He stuck at it for the best part of a decade, too, most years pulling in £35,000 or thereabouts. This was big money. At the same time, his father retired, after a lifetime’s hard work on a wage that coughed up little more than £150 per week. On this score, at least, his son had emphatically won the argument.

  But the track scene in Belgium, with all its showbiz connotations was complex and draining; each rider’s role in it was pre-ordained to an extent, and his membership of its elite always in the balance.

  The racing itself was, more often than not, a high-speed charade, albeit a murderously hard one. As in the wrestling, so beloved of his father back in London, the winner was frequently pre-determined, and the exact manner of his victory choreographed. That isn’t to say that the best riders didn’t routinely carry away the spoils; there was no way that a weaker member of the group would ever be allowed to dominate. It’s just that the races were more like almighty ballets. Attack would follow attack, all of them pre-decided, until eventually the winner would ‘thrillingly’ reel them in and prevail. The aesthetics of the win were every bit as vital as the win per se.

  Maurice remembers getting his instructions on a nightly basis.

  ‘The boss would tell you how many laps you’d take. If it’s your lap, and they’re all riding at fifty kilometres in the hour, then you’ve got to be doing fifty-three kilometres an hour to ride away from them. So you’ve got to have it in you in order to do it. It only becomes a problem when you start to take one more lap than you’re supposed to take, and that’s when they start to get a bit heavy on you.’

  It was demanding, from the start. First of all, to join the elite, you had to be good enough, and your face had to fit. With so much at stake, the competition among amateur wannabees was brutal.

  ‘Once in Ghent, some Australians and British amateurs ganged up against me, and one of them tried to put me over the rail.’ As he remembers that frightening assault, Maurice notes that in 2006 a Spanish rider named Isaac Galvez had been killed when he rode into exactly that rail.

  ‘I knew what was happening. Afterwards I went down into one of the massage cabins underneath the track.’ He was seeking out his assailant. ‘I wrecked the cabin with him in it. I just went in there and turned him off the table. I wrecked it.’

  There was, as Maurice recalls, a nucleus of fifteen or so riders who earned the big money. He was one of them. But they constantly fretted about their membership of this fraternity and were wary of newcomers. They also doped, routinely, casually, daily. Alan Peiper describes the scene. ‘It was a joke, it was fun, a buzz, no different from a beer or a coffee. That was the attitude; it was as commonplace as that, just like naughty kids experimenting with beer or cigarettes in the park.’

  Maurice Burton, with the benefit of hindsight, and having seen a number of his peers meet premature deaths, sees it differently. Less of a joke, all in all.

  He is glad, in many ways, that a broken leg in 1984 put an end to his racing career. Had that not happened, he suggests, his health may well have shelved off steeply. Although he is no mood to talk about this in detail, he leaves me in no doubt that the drugs were endemic, omnipresent and consumed without the slightest thought for the consequences. The rewards for this rarefied gladiatorial existence were clear enough: fame, money, status, and thrills. But it was a hard, insecure and corrupt affair too.

  And then there was the colour of his skin. The sniggers and whispers and boos which formed the white noise of his education on a bike in Britain had been silenced when he emigrated. But the issue had not gone away. It had just morphed into something more marketable.

  Once again, I am reminded of Major Taylor.

  ‘I was something different [in Belgium]. They liked that. They never used to say I came from England. They used to say I came from Jamaica. It sounded better. I just let them.’ A shadow of a smile passes over Maurice’s weathered face. ‘Whatever it took, you know.’

  Sometimes it took extreme tolerance, on Maurice’s part. It was an unreconstructed world, in many ways lawless, or at best making the rules up as it went along. The velodromes of Germany, Milan, Switzerland and Belgium echoed to some strange sounds indeed.

  Horst Schütz was one of Maurice’s contemporaries. By nature a sprinter, he had also been, at one time, the motor-paced World Champion (following in the pedal-strokes, some eighty years previously, of Major Taylor himself). Schütz, it is said, had a highly particular way of geeing himself up before a race, which he at least had the common sense to keep hidden as best he could.

  His teammate Roman Hermann, (who went on to become the Minister of Sport in Liechtenstein) told Maurice how Schütz used to motivate himself by playing recordings of Hitler’s Nuremburg Rallies.

  ‘I think if he saw me now . . . poor guy. Last I heard he was selling brushes and eggs and things door to door, you know.’ There’s sympathy in his voice when Maurice tells me this, but there is the merest trace of schadenfreude, too.

  Then there was the matter of the nickname they gave to Maurice. Another German, the handsomely named Albert Fritz, one of the greatest Six-Day riders that country ever produced, came up with it and for a while it stuck.

  ‘At one point there was a nickname, yeah.’

  It takes Maurice a while to tell me what it was. �
�I didn’t like the name very much, you know. I don’t know why they called me that.’

  I have to push him a bit.

  ‘It was Bimbo. I don’t know why.’

  I am stunned to hear this. And Maurice, as if aware of my surprise, looks painfully embarrassed. There is no art to this nickname. No veneer of subtlety, nothing clever at all.

  It is a word that has no direct English equivalent, but its nastiness lies somewhere on a scale between ‘Sambo’ and ‘Wog’. That’s how it would have sounded to their ears, and that’s how they would have introduced ‘Bimbo’ over the tannoy.

  ‘Ned, it’s a hard world out there. It’s a hard world.’

  ‘You remember. You were with me. We saw him go past and he sort of stopped and I think he realised.’

  It’s my last visit to Maurice’s shop. We’re talking about his trip to the Champs-Elysées. It was true: Bradley Wiggins, having strolled past Maurice, who’d been calling his name, temporarily checked his stride. He didn’t come to a halt, but he did register something. Even by looking at the back of his head, as he walked away, you could tell.

  I wonder what it meant to Maurice Burton, this moment in time. I wonder which bit of him was touched by the spectacle, why he’d gone out of his way to be there: the flag-waving Brit? The Jamaican? The itinerant cyclist from no-man’s-land? The father to a cycling son?

  Perhaps it was just that it was Bradley Wiggins. Had it been any other rider, Maurice might not have made the trip. Born in Belgium, raised in cycling, never quite conforming. Another outsider?

  Wiggins turned and came back towards Maurice. He was being flanked by TV camera crews, recording the moment. Security dogged his every step. Mia fumbled excitedly with her iPad (and to her eternal regret, completely failed to press record). There was a brief smile, as he neared.

  The two men embraced over the barriers of the Tour de France. Not much, if anything at all, was said. Only later could Maurice put it into words, back in the chaotic calm of his office. ‘It was a wonderful experience. It’s a part of history. It’s a circle, it’s a full circle to me. I saw him when he was a little baby to winner of the Tour de France. To some degree I feel that I am part of that family now. More than I did. More than I did when I was younger.’

  ‘Have you changed, Mo?’ I ask.

  ‘I haven’t changed at all. The country has changed.’

  There’s one final pause. ‘What else do you want to know, Ned?’

  I tell him that I think I’ve got enough.

  CHAPTER 7

  ROMANTICS IN BRITAIN

  So true

  Funny how it seems

  Always in time

  But never in line for dreams

  IN 2011, THE Tour of Britain ended with a split stage. Mick Bennett and the race organisation had pulled a surprisingly wonderful rabbit out of the hat. There was a time trial in the morning, followed by an afternoon race around a spectacular route along Whitehall and the Embankment in Central London.

  Huge crowds packed the start/finish line, and spread out along the length of the five-and-a-half-mile course. Heavy showers were forecast for later, and would indeed materialise at precisely the moment that Mark Cavendish sprinted for the line to win the final stage of the Tour in a wet and windy London parody of his greatest Champs-Elysées triumphs. But for now, at least, as the riders rested between the two races, a warm sun beat down and the rain clouds bided their time over the horizon.

  To entertain the spectators during the two-hour hiatus between events, some sponsors had the idea of putting on a ‘celebrity’ time-trial competition, ambitiously called a ‘Hot Lap’. This being cycling, and cycling still being a minority sport, the calibre of celebrities they were able to sign up was modest at best (Dermot Murnaghan, for example, had promised to turn up but didn’t show on the day, depriving the race of perhaps its biggest star) and at worst, it was laughable. They asked me to take part.

  My pupils dilated instantly at the prospect. When else would I ever be cheered off a proper start ramp with a man counting down the seconds, and a proper machine going ‘beep, beep, beeeeeeep’? When else would I be allowed to ride as fast as I could along the Thames, sometimes on the wrong side of the closed roads and straight through red lights?

  I had my misgivings, of course, since the only other time I had ridden in a ‘race’ (a Brompton folding-bike thing), I had tumbled backwards through the field almost instantly, and was forced to dig so deep, just to avoid the ignominy of finishing stone last, that I felt faint for hours afterwards. The exertion and the humiliation had made me want to throw up. Racing bikes, I had established after just one outing, was an unutterably horrible experience.

  Nonetheless, the fragile ego of the very minor TV presenter left me very little choice. It dictated that I accept the prestigious offer to ride the Hot Lap.

  We were assigned teams, each of us joining three other riders who had bid extravagantly for the right to ride with us. The fact that the bidding was extravagant (or so we were led to believe) was not only embarrassing, but also demographically limiting. It meant that the winning teams were almost entirely composed of investment bankers.

  My team was called Schroders. They presented me with a rather smart blue racing jersey, with their company’s name emblazoned all over it. But my identification with the team went even further because, over the previous ten years, most of my pension contributions had disappeared down a black hole expensively administered by Schroders. I had a very real stake in the team, a fact that I took some pleasure in pointing out to my team captain who failed to see the funny side. Much like I did every month.

  As my allotted time grew near, my nerves increased commensurately. We milled around, waiting for the off. I bantered briefly with Graham Bell, the ex-downhill skier turned TV action man. He was dressed head to toe in Team Sky clothing. There was Denise Lewis, the heptathlete, Amy Williams the snowy medal-winning Brit. There was Dean Macey, the former decathlete. He was my ‘thirty-second man’, which meant that he was the last guy to set off before I took to the start ramp.

  My knees actually started knocking against the frame of my bike as I sat on the saddle, held by a complete stranger, confronted by a sea of faces. I had no idea that knees actually ‘knocked’ when under duress, except in the Beano.

  Beep. Beep. Beep. Beeeeep. I remember thinking, rather abstractly, about the composition of the strange ungainly cast of the Bash Street Kids as I slipped unconvincingly off the ramp, and started to pedal in the direction of Trafalgar Square. And that was the last thought I had that wasn’t filled with the furious imperative to stop the pain from happening to me. By Northumberland Avenue, no more than about four hundred metres from the start, I was already at the limit. Underneath Waterloo Bridge, some five hundred metres further, I was perfectly poised on the edge of total collapse. To complete the next five miles at that speed seemed unthinkable.

  I recalled to mind, through the disorder of my distress, Chris Boardman’s scientifically perfect measure for determining effort in a time trial: you should ask yourself, ‘Can I sustain this to the end?’ If the answer is ‘No’, then you’re going too fast. If the answer is ‘Yes’, then you’re going too slow. But if the answer is ‘Maybe’, then you’re judging the pace just right.

  In my case the answer was ‘UUUrgghnngh.’

  I contemplated easing up, and allowing the remaining riders all to coast past me. I could showboat my way to the end, I thought, blowing kisses at the crowd, taking the piss, being shameless and losing all my dignity. Or I could continue to blow snot from both nostrils, groan involuntarily, suffer self-evidently, get soundly beaten and lose all my dignity.

  It was during these agonised deliberations that I caught sight of the athletic backside of Dean Macey. Yes, the former World Championship silver medallist, the heir apparent to the great Daley Thompson, a man of imposing physique and eight years my junior, was coming back towards me! I was closing in on him! I was catching a proper athlete! If my heart had been cap
able of skipping a beat, which by now it wasn’t, then it would have done.

  By Tower Hill, where the course turned around a hairpin bend and started to head for home, I was just a second or two behind him. It took me an age to close out that final tiny gap, but by Old Billingsgate Market, I had unmistakably, and at the full extent of my capacity, drawn level with him. Surprised by my sudden presence at his side, he glanced across. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘I must be really shit.’

  At that precise moment, a third rider appeared on the scene, hurtling from behind me, and ripping past us both on the outside.

  It was Gary Kemp, from Spandau Ballet.

  I remember thinking, ‘Wow! Gary Kemp, from Spandau Ballet’s really fast.’ I think Dean Macey was thinking the same. Either way, his athletic self-respect was affronted by the sight of a New Romantic lead guitarist and sometime backing singer trouncing him. The knock on effect was that there was no chance of him letting himself be overtaken by a minor sports presenter as well. With an imperceptible acceleration Macey started to pull away from me again in pursuit of the rapidly vanishing Kemp.

  I was powerless to do anything about it, and by the time we reached the finishing straight outside Downing Street, neither man was visible.

  For the record, I actually completed the time trial a little faster than Dean Macey, but somewhat slower than my Schroders teammates, one of whom was clearly in his mid-fifties (and no doubt had a substantial and well-funded pension plan to look forward to when the day came for him to retire).

  But neither he, nor I, nor Dean Macey were anywhere near as fast as Kemp. I had been humbled. Later on that afternoon, I was more formally introduced. In fact, bewilderingly, he introduced himself to me, rather than the other way round. I don’t think he actually said, ‘Hello, I’m Gary Kemp from Spandau Ballet’, but in my imagination, I rather wish he had.

  This was a man who had written the songs to my adolescence, to those long nights staggering around at the back of the Chiltern Radio Roadshow, taking crafty little swigs from warm cans of Colt 45 lager instead of actually talking to girls.