On the Road Bike

by Ned Boulting

  Ron and I remember how the crowds turned out in unprecedented numbers every day to catch a glimpse of their idols, who didn’t always give too much love back.

  ‘Without doubt, Sky is resented. By the way they turn up with the best bus, and the best cars. They are resented.’

  ‘Everywhere you went it was “Cav! Wiggo! Cav! Wiggo!” You couldn’t get near Wiggo for minders.’

  ‘I’ve known him a long time,’ says Ron Keeble, as we head out to retrieve my bike. ‘Me and him are the only two London medallists.’

  That had never occurred to me, I tell him.

  ‘But I’m the only one born and bred at Herne Hill.’ He laughs, and his face splits into a wide, wide smile. Then he turns to go back inside. There is packing to be done. The next day Gill and he are flying off for a short break at their place on the Costa Blanca.

  The next time I see him he asks me if I have stopped ‘bleeding from my arse’.

  I think I now know a little of who Ron Keeble is.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE MAYOR WHO HATED CYCLING

  THE LAST TIME I saw Ken Livingstone, he was buried up to his nose in a megaphone and almost no one was listening to him. That must be very difficult for a politician. Like watching everyone dry retching at the tables of a Michelin-starred restaurant, if you happen to be the chef.

  I’d quite liked him, unfashionable though that might be to admit. I had no hard political convictions to base this on. It’s just that his final period in office coincided with my reinvention as a cyclist, and also with London’s reinvention as a cycling city. To some extent, I had credited him with this, and had subconsciously invested considerable emotional stock in the man. I had taken an interest.

  That day, I had rather forcefully persuaded my nine-year-old daughter to ride with me all the way from Lewisham to Central London along the north bank of the river. She adored riding her bike, and I had just given her a spanking, shiny little kids’ ‘racer’, in which she took appropriate delight. But this particular ride, truth be told, had been a little tiresome. The Thames Path was made to be walked, not ridden, and we kept on having to dismount and stop for pedestrians.

  Arriving, slightly irritable, at Charing Cross station, our final destination from where we planned to catch the train home, we pushed our bikes past a clump of people holding banners, and a man in an old-fashioned mackintosh, droning on nasally about five-year investment plans. It was Livingstone, approaching the fag-end of an election campaign that had stalled badly amid allegations of tax avoidance. He was holding an ‘impromptu’ rally, flanked by his party faithful. Not many of them appeared to be listening to him. They were mostly whirring double-thumbed over BlackBerry keypads.

  ‘Do you know who that is?’ I asked my daughter, who had stopped alongside me to watch the curious spectacle.

  ‘It’s Ken Livingstone,’ she said. I was surprised she knew his name. It sounded strange to hear her say it, dragging up a name from the early 1980s and grafting it into the here and now. She seemed so young, standing there with her gleaming aluminium bike – and he with his old mac and megaphone, preaching the creed, seemed unchanged in large measure since first he stepped into office. I would have been about her age then.

  Too young. Too old. The gap between their two lives, their two Londons seemed suddenly unbridgeable. I occupied some sort of space in the middle.

  We pushed our bikes off towards the station. The sound of his campaigning faded as we walked.

  ‘I loved that ride, Dad.’ I couldn’t help smiling. ‘Can we do it again?’

  The word ‘Cycling . . .’ drifted across the concourse towards us. I didn’t catch the rest.

  It was all Livingstone’s doing that on 7 July 2007 I got a parking ticket on Pall Mall. I dropped it on the ground, in broad daylight, in front of witnesses, and as bold as you like. I never paid it, because it was ethically, morally and culturally misjudged.

  On the odd infuriating occasions when I have found a plastic-pouched fine nestling under my windscreen wiper, I curse in as strong an expression of outrage as my middle-class parentage will allow (Oh for God’s sake!), pocket the paper with the intention of appealing to the Supreme Court of Petty Injustice, and then forget all about it until time has almost run out, when, after fourteen days, I suddenly remember that the bloody thing is about to jump from £40 to £80, and I rush to the nearest computer to pay online, clutching my credit card, and repenting all my sins by entering the sort code, the account number and the three digit security code. £40 down, I may be free of further prosecution, but am left with a surfeit of smouldering indignation.

  But here, I knew I was right. You see, I had the moral heft of a hundred years of acquired culture on my side. I was working for le Tour. Henri Désgranges, Lucien Petit-Breton, Fausto Coppi and Jacques Anquetil (not, sadly Jan Ullrich, as he was serving a ban at the time) were all at my side, in a highly abstracted spiritual sense, when I said to the traffic warden while holding the weather-proofed penalty notice between my fingers, ‘What’s that?’

  He looked wearily at me.

  He had just clamped the fine to the window of our French registered Renault Espace, and was probably about to clock off and go home. It was about seven o’clock on a Sunday evening. At the back of the car, the tailgate was open and Woody and Liam were stacking all their TV kit into the boot. Drifting over from the Mall a hundred yards away, we could hear the sound of fork-lift trucks growling over the tarmac while they dismantled the Tour de France.

  ‘These are double yellow lines,’ he offered, explaining our infringement. But the traffic warden, a put-upon man with a West African accent and a whole bunch of pouches and keypads strapped to his waist, betrayed a fatal lack of self-confidence.

  ‘No, no. That’s not how it works!’ Liam chimed in with the kind of Glaswegian grin that can veer very quickly from the charming to the grievous bodily.

  ‘That’s true.’ I intervened, hoping to sound commanding. ‘It’s the Tour.’ I pointed at the accreditation sticker on our windscreen. The whole area had been closed to public traffic and only accredited vehicles had been allowed in for the last twenty-four hours at least. I think he was gradually becoming aware of the error he had made.

  He hesitated. He was just indecisive enough for us to know that we had won. He lost, and the Tour won.

  It had been a moment though. Not any old moment, but A Moment.

  We had lived in sunshine and carbon fibre and huge crowds and yellow jerseys. We had turned the Mall into the Champs-Elysées. London had not so much embraced the Tour, as taken it out for dinner, taken it for a walk along the river, then taken it home and seduced it wholly. It had been a Tale of Two Cities without the revolution. For me, in my fifth year of covering the race, it was a chance to show the folk back home what I’d been banging on about all along. I had entered some sort of halcyon half-world. I had quite forgotten where I was, so befuddled was I by its charm.

  So that’s why the parking ticket was wrong. It didn’t fit.

  When the Tour de France came to London in 2007, I made a little film about riding in London. The idea came about at our regular production meeting in the spring.

  ‘Shouldn’t we do a little thing about cycling in London?’ I asked hesitantly. I was still at the stage where I had little confidence in my ideas, born from the empirical evidence that they were often extremely weak. This was especially true when they deviated from covering the race itself.

  Steve Docherty, our producer, looked at me despairingly. ‘Go on, then.’ I tried not to look surprised.

  The executive producers were sent into a tailspin. The problem was insurance. I intended to ride my regular route, in rush-hour traffic, from Woolwich into Central London, accompanied by a cameraman standing up and facing backwards on a motorbike, Tour de France style.

  I received an email. ‘Our insurance does not allow for any filming in the traffic on open roads. You may, of course, film “pass-by” shots from a static roadside position, but on n
o account should you risk filming from the back of a motorbike.’

  I acknowledged receipt of the email, and promptly ignored the content. This was entirely consistent with the wishes of the show’s producers who were expecting me to do just that. By sending me the email, they were simply covering their own backs. Now all the risk was on my shoulders.

  That wasn’t the only thing on my shoulders, either. I carried a rucksack crammed with batteries, linked by cables to cameras rigged all over the bike, and a radio transmitter, connected to a microphone on my collar to record my words. I bristled with aerials. I emitted a personal electro-magnetic field powerful enough to jam police signals and change the phasing of traffic lights. I looked, in those post 7/7 years, like a genuine Central London menace.

  That was how the police saw things, too, which presented problems of their own. Since the feature involved riding past significant London landmarks, we inevitably aroused their suspicions. I passed Downing Street at least three times, for example, with my wired-up rucksack. And on each occasion, policemen, either uniformed or under-cover, stopped me and wanted to know ‘what the hell I thought I was doing’. Whenever I was stopped, the cameraman on the motorbike would disappear, and pretend he didn’t know me, which made my excuse for a story all the less convincing. My alibi had simply disappeared round the corner.

  Still, it was fun, documenting on film the particular nuttiness of cycling around the capital. We passed over Tower Bridge, swooped by St Paul’s cathedral where, to my delight, a purple-shirted bishop stepped out on the zebra crossing in front of me. What are the chances of that happening right on cue? God was willing this short film about cycling into being. We were obviously filming it in His image.

  I harangued motorists who’d thoughtlessly blocked the green zone reserved for cyclists at traffic lights. I ‘bantered’ with some scaffolders in a big beaten-up truck who offered me a can of Red Bull in Greenwich, before we raced each other to the Rotherhithe tunnel. I was cut up by a taxi, which stopped suddenly in front of me on the Embankment, and I narrowly avoided a speeding police convoy taking high-security prisoners from Belmarsh to the Old Bailey.

  I rode all morning, stopping, starting, repeating little stretches of road and doing mad loops of Parliament Square. Then, as we paused for a coffee near the National Theatre, John, the cameraman, suggested I rode home, and we did it all again. ‘This time, I’ll film you from the front.’

  It turned out to be a hell of a commute.

  The Tour de France was coming to London. It still didn’t sound quite right.

  I think I underestimated the importance of the occasion. Perhaps it was simply a function of the fact that the Tour itself was still reasonably new to me, that I had no real grasp of what it was that I was witnessing. But, with the passing years, it seems almost unreal to me that the Tour itself had passed along the Mall. Quite glorious, it was. And the fact that it will return again to London in 2014, two days after starting in Yorkshire, is a tribute to Britain’s sudden passion for the event and a reward for loving it before we were even any good at it.

  Mark Cavendish, with trademark acuteness, reminded us all of the scale and grandeur of the 2007 Prologue, when he stood on an autumnal podium in 2011, enjoying the applause of a huge crowd which had gathered to witness the Olympic Road Race test event.

  ‘Riders in the peloton who were lucky enough to start the 2007 Tour [it had, incidentally been Cavendish’s Tour debut] still talk about how it was the best ever. The crowds, the whole thing, it was just immense.’ And then he smiled into the crowd who couldn’t help but beam back at him. They delighted in Cavendish, and they were not a little pleased with themselves, too, for being in on the increasingly un-secret secret from the start.

  It is worth noting that the London 2012 test event itself was a triumph. Normally these things are simply a matter of protocol, a dry run for the technical side of the event, for the TV cameras and the finish line crews. The odd, very committed rider will turn up to recce the course, but they will ride it as part of an extended training session, watched by precisely no one. Yet, London turned out. Not just at the finish line on the Mall, but all the way along the course, and in great numbers on Box Hill and in Richmond Park. We were instantly into wild speculation about the numbers involved. There was no way of knowing, so people decided to make up figures of their own. The BBC went for 100,000, just because it sounded grand without being wildly inaccurate. Others, more excitably, went for 250,000.

  What is without doubt, though, is that those who did push up against the barriers to catch a glimpse of Cavendish and Co. almost certainly would have been there four years previously, when the Tour came to town. That sun-kissed moment would have provided their inspiration.

  Yet how much its gospel spread out among the wider population, in those pre-Beijing, pre-Hoy, pre-Brailsford, pre-Wiggins days, remains a moot point. The huge crowds, I would suggest, were the cycling support. That was it. Everyone and anyone who cared about the sport went to London, and stood there watching.

  We showed it on ITV1. It bombed. Not nearly enough people watched it for the race to justify its place in the schedules. So the Tour de France disappeared from the main network to its current home on ITV4, only to re-emerge in 2012, when Bradley Wiggins actually went and won it. It took something as seismic as that to convince the number-crunchers that cycling was good business.

  No, the wider populace almost certainly has no recollection whatsoever of the weekend that Britain’s capital city and France’s iconic bike race got caught in a compromising clinch, right under the watchful eye of Lord Nelson. And Ken Livingstone.

  My kids attended a primary school in South-East London at the time, which is located just the other side of a level-crossing from the route the Tour would take as it snaked out of London and into Kent. It was safe to say that, in the build up to the Tour’s grand arrival in SE7, very little was said or done that either informed, amused, excited or entertained the children about the significance of the spectacle.

  In fact, worryingly, it fell to me to inspire a generation.

  This was unfortunate, since there was little I dreaded more than having to execute any kind of public function in a school environment. I had been bullied, quite rightly, by Kath to go into Year Five and Year Six and talk to the kids about the Tour. Mercifully, for the sake of my own children, they were not in either of these classes, otherwise, I fear something permanent might have broken in our parent–child relationship.

  As I gazed at the rows of blank-faced nine-year-olds listening attentively enough, but with a complete lack of reference points, I realised, with a rush of panic, that none of them so much as had an inkling of what I was talking about. Their teacher, smiling politely at my attempts to keep her charges stimulated, looked discomforted, and kept glancing surreptitiously at her watch. Every time she did that, the kids noticed her doing it, and a little more concentration went with each gesture. Clearly, they were not among our most avid ITV4 viewers; the Tour de France was as foreign a concept to them as, well, France really. Or bicycles.

  Nothing that I was telling them about average speeds or time-trialling was inspiring much enthusiasm. With scarcely concealed anxiety, I upped the ante, and started to spill out all the overblown half-truths and hyperbole that often accompany well-intentioned idiots’ guides to the Tour.

  ‘In the olden days, at the beginning of every day, the riders all used to slip a beef steak down their cycling shorts, to cushion their bums on the saddle.’ Giggles. Nervous glances at the teacher to see if ‘bum’ was a word they could laugh about without getting into trouble. This was going better. ‘Bum’ was a good word. I made a mental note.

  ‘Then, after riding about four hundred kilometres.’ Back to blank looks. ‘That’s about two hundred and fifty miles. Like riding from here to York . . .’ (more blankness; time to improvise) ‘. . . or twelve thousand times around Charlton Park’ (a lie), ‘they’d get off their bikes, take the steak out from their shorts, all soaked i
n the salty sweat from their bums’ (one more for good measure), ‘and hand it to the chef in the hotel to fry up for their dinner.’

  ‘UUUUUUUrgh!’ Thirty delighted shrieks, and one relieved teacher, oblivious of the fact that her children had just been lied to. As urban myths go, this nonsense about sweaty steaks shows real staying power.

  For my final flourish, I told them how many calories a rider would burn on a mountain stage, and translated that into the visual medium of dozens and dozens of mini Mars bars, which I emptied onto the table in front of me. There was instant chaos. It was as if I’d tipped a load of mini Mars bars out into a pile in the middle of a room full of nine-year-olds. The teacher, shooting me a horrified look, did well not to stroll to the front of the class and land one on me, as the place erupted all around.

  I left, after that, and I have never been invited back by the school to speak on any subject. I thought I’d been rather good.

  A week later, as Stage One of the Tour de France got underway, I watched the live coverage coming from our stretch of road in South-East London, hoping to catch a poignant glimpse of Kath and my girls waving at the Tour (and, by extension, at me, off for another month apart), and I couldn’t help but notice how empty it was.

  It is an ugly stretch of road, the very same part that the BBC never show on their coverage of the marathon, cutting out the first five miles of Woolwich and Charlton: ‘Here they are at the start on Blackheath . . .’ And then, the next thing you see: ‘Oh, look, it’s the Cutty Sark.’

  It is a very deprived part of the Borough of Greenwich. The passage of the Tour meant precious little to anyone there, and not many of the kids had bothered to walk to the end of their road to witness the spectacle. Not even for the free Haribos that I’d told them would rain down on them, like a gelatine act of God. It was a shame.