On the Road Bike

by Ned Boulting

  Now he’s talking about his ambitions to sponsor a Tour de France team. ‘We’re on the outside. If we were right in the heart, imagine what we could do?’

  What indeed? I have no idea what he means really, but it sounds very exciting. Or at least it’s exciting to witness how exciting it is for Simon Mottram to imagine it.

  Then the penny drops. I wonder if he’s about to sponsor Team Sky. I had heard rumours that Sky was thinking of dropping Adidas. I am putting two and two together. I sit up on the couch, take a sip of espresso, and mentally sharpen my pencil. A question has formed of its own volition. Hell, this was exciting stuff. This was pure investigative journalism. I was onto something and I wasn’t going to let it slip out of range.

  ‘Is James Murdoch one of your devotees?’

  ‘Yes. James Murdoch is a customer.’

  Ha! I think to myself. I very nearly say it out loud, which would have appeared amateur and not at all sleuth-like.

  ‘Did you have talks with Sky?’

  He pauses. Choosing his words carefully. I’ve got him now.

  ‘I know Brailsford.’

  ‘Was it ever mooted? Did you talk about it ever?’

  ‘We’re friends. You know. We talk.’

  Ha!

  ‘I want the sport to be the most popular sport in the world. I think it should be because it’s the greatest sport in the world.’

  Is Simon Mottram a madman? The thought crosses my mind that I may be in the presence of a megalomaniac empire builder who will stop at nothing before he’s got the whole world dressed in minimalist retro snug-fitting soft and durable sweat-wicking fabrics. I consider making a run for it, before he presses a button under his desk and I drop into the Rapha crocodile pit in the basement, and have to fight my way out armed only with a micro-pump and a tub of bottom cream.

  But instead, I just left. And I didn’t see him again until a succession of chance encounters threw the Rapha story back into my life.

  The first of these occurred at the Adidas headquarters at the Olympic Park. I say, at the Olympic Park, but what I really mean is Westfield Shopping Centre. I was just on my way out from hosting a press conference with David Rudisha, the winner of the gold medal in the 800 metres the night before. But as the lift doors opened, Dave Brailsford and Shane Sutton emerged. Sutton shook my hand briefly and headed straight into the inner Adidas sanctum. Brailsford collapsed on a couch in the lobby, and muttered something profane about Sutton dragging him from pillar to post. I sat down next to him.

  He was more relaxed than I had ever known him. The track events had finished a few days previously and he was contemplating heading home for a day before flying to Spain for the start of the Vuelta. After all, as he told me, he still had his suitcase from the start of the Tour de France in the athletes’ village. It had been that sort of a summer.

  He started, unprompted, to talk about the future of Team Sky, the improbability, or possibly even the inadvisability, of retaining the services of Mark Cavendish, as well as telling me off the record all the riders he’d already signed for the following season. And in the middle of it all, I stopped and wondered what he was doing there, anyway? Then I went out on a limb.

  ‘Aren’t you finished with Adidas?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘It’s Rapha, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yup’.

  Ha!

  The next day, I was filming an item about commuting in London by bike. We passed by the new Rapha Club just off Brewer Street in Piccadilly Circus. As I stood on the pavement outside with the film crew, Simon Mottram suddenly appeared in front of me.

  He gave me a brief guided Tour of his brand-new café/clothes shop. He told me how they’d celebrated its opening by throwing a party for the riders after the Olympic Road Race. Mark Cavendish, understandably, hadn’t shown up. But David Millar had, and by all accounts took full advantage of the free refreshments. Until early in the morning. Someone had a picture of Millar sprawled across the bonnet of a car with a bottle of claret in each hand.

  Then I congratulated Simon on the impending deal.

  ‘When’s the announcement?’

  ‘What announcement?’ He grinned impishly.

  ‘OK, then. If you had anything to announce, what day might you choose to announce it?’

  ‘I would have thought that the first of September might be a good day for such an announcement, if such an announcement were planned.’

  ‘Excellent. Will there be a party?’

  ‘Yes. Here.’

  ‘Good. Can I come?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ned.’

  So Rapha and Mottram have reached the top. The brand so beloved of London’s chattering elite, so embraced by moneyed Scandinavia and Euro-culture-hungry Japan and North America, has muscled its way into the big league.

  It is a curious echo of that sponsorship deal between a sugary alcoholic drink and an ex-cyclist from Clermont-Ferrand: forty years later, the name Rapha (shorn of its fuller version) will once again be worn on the roads of the Tour de France. But to get there it had to go via London. And it took this man from Sheffield to make the match.

  And for Mottram’s project itself, it marks something of a crossroads. His desire to grow the brand has to be cross-referenced against the appeal of its exclusivity. In a way, its not dissimilar to the growth of cycling in this country overall. The more the secret’s out among the wider population, the more alienated the cognoscenti will feel. They yearn already for the days when nobody understood them.

  Mottram, for once, is in tune with those British cycling fans who feel that something has been ripped from them by the relentless march on ever-greater popularity, their otherness.

  ‘I think of my Dad. He hated things that everyone else liked. He liked to be his own man. I liked being the only cyclist in the office. I liked being weird and different. So part of me doesn’t like the fact that it’s become everybody’s favourite sport. And yet, I’m all about making it everybody’s favourite sport.’

  He bites his lip and looks pensive. But it’s not without great satisfaction that he says, ‘It’s a classic dilemma.’

  And, as I write the last sentence of this chapter, I am left wondering whether another box containing an item of Rapha couture will ever come my way again. And if it does, what then?

  Should I wear it?

  CHAPTER 12

  TWO TOMMY GODWINS

  I WAS ABOUT to find out that the history of cycling on these shores boasts not one, but two Tommy Godwins. They were both remarkable, in their own ways.

  There are few more upstanding names. In fact, if I were called upon to design a name for a British cyclist of yesteryear, I would choose Godwin (subliminal references to deity and victory), and offset it simply with Tommy (subliminal references to pinball wizardry).

  The first Tommy Godwin, born in 1912, had a job as a young boy delivering groceries by bike. One day he rode, and won, a twenty-five-mile time trial on his delivery bike, having carefully dismantled the parcel tray from the front. Getting rid of that, I reckoned, must have been the earliest recorded marginal gain in British cycling history.

  The second Tommy Godwin was born eight years later, in 1920. He too got a job as delivery boy for a chain of grocers. It seemed, at the time, the natural career path. He rode this heavy contraption up and down steep hills, laden with groceries. It made him strong.

  Two greengrocer’s boys, then. Two legendary riders. Two Tommies.

  How British is that?

  I just wish I’d known beforehand. But I didn’t. And so, with unspeakable predictability, I brought about a moment of considerable embarrassment during an email exchange with Tommy Godwin’s daughter.

  One day in May 2012 I had spent a few sunny hours in the company of ‘Tommy Godwin 2’, the gentleman who had been born second, in 1920. Several weeks later I tried to get in touch with him again: there were a few lines of enquiry that I wanted to follow up, and a number of biographical details I needed
to check. Like a fool, at the time of our meeting, I had quite forgotten to get a phone number for him, so I was reliant on others to help me get in contact. Someone had very helpfully given me an email address for the daughter of Tommy Godwin, a lady called Barbara Ford. So I duly wrote to her.

  Hi Barbara,

  I do hope you are well. I had the great honour of meeting your dad at Herne Hill a month or two ago. We had a long and fascinating chat about all sorts of different things.

  I wanted, as a result, to get hold of his book. Do you know how I could go about it?

  I hope he is well. Please pass on my regards.

  Best wishes,

  Ned Boulting.

  A little while later, I received a reply.

  Hello and thank you for the email,

  Sadly my father Tommy Godwin the World Mileage Endurance Record Holder died in 1975. He is still very sadly missed by us all.

  You obviously met the ‘other Tommy Godwin’.

  However if you would care to know more about our Tommy Godwin just input ‘Tommy Godwin 1912’ into any search engine and be prepared to be blown away!

  Regards Barbara Ford (née Godwin and very proud)

  I had just informed a total stranger that I had spent an afternoon chatting to her dead father. I sent a fulsome apology by return, and then did just as she suggested, and I looked up her dad.

  ‘Tommy Godwin 1’ was indeed something of a phenomenon.

  The record he set in 1939 was so extraordinary that the people at the Guinness Book of Records (yes, it still exists) are refusing to ratify any more attempts to break it. Their reasoning is that it is ‘too dangerous’. That makes it harder than Felix Baumgartner’s 2012 jump from space, which, I think we can all agree, fell into the category of ‘highly risky’. Besides, it seems to be a remarkably difficult record to verify. Indeed, when a rider called Ken Webb appeared to have broken it in the 1970s, the verification of the distances he rode was brought into question, and his achievement fell (perhaps unfairly) into disrepute. So Godwin’s septuagenarian record still stands, to this day.

  The lunatic, bloody-mindedness of the man!

  He rode, in one calendar year, 75,065 miles: more than two hundred miles every day. Even as I type it, I find Tommy Godwin 1’s powers of endurance hard to comprehend. In pictures he appears brutishly strong, bent over quaint handlebars, which gave their name to the voguish moustaches of the era, not that Godwin had any need for such fripperies as facial hair. The only accessory he sported was a milometer that he had fixed to his bike, which seemed to have been ripped from the cockpit of a Hawker Hurricane. His trademark pose is ‘knackered’, his head on one side, open-mouthed as he gulps in British air and metabolises it.

  The record itself had been set and broken repeatedly since its inauguration in 1910. In the same way that in France L’Auto newspaper had established a bicycle dash around the country in order to boost its flagging circulation figures (a race that still exists, it’s called the Tour de France), so its British cousin Cycling established what it called the ‘Century Competition’. The winner of this prize would be the rider with the ‘greatest number of complete 100-mile rides in 1911’.

  The French idea, I’ll confess, has enjoyed a little more durability in the public imagination, but the ‘Century’ was big news for a while.

  A Frenchman (wouldn’t you just know it) claimed first prize. Marcel Planes, who ensured that his ‘checking card’ was signed every day by a local official (to prove that he’d ridden as far as he claimed), pedalled for a verified 34,366 miles in a year. That record stood for twenty-one years, presumably while everyone else admired its utter pointlessness from a comfortable distance. Besides, the First World War served as a pretty considerable distraction, and by the 1920s everyone had discovered jazz and cocktails, both of which seemed much more fun than riding a hundred miles every day on a cast-iron bike.

  Then, in 1932, the competition reignited. The magnificently named Arthur Humbles spent a year riding out of North London as far as he could along the Great North Road, and then turning round and heading back home for his tea. After twelve months of this, he’d clocked 36,007 miles. He had set a new record.

  Other holders came and went. And not all of them were British. Not by a long way.

  In 1933, a Tasmanian called ‘Ossie’ Nicholson took unfair advantage of Australia’s better-than-it-ought-to-be sunshine quotient to set a new standard of 43,966 miles.

  Three years later, on 6 January 1936, a one-armed, teetotal vegetarian named Walter Greaves set off from Bradford on a specially adapted bike (he had a single brake lever for both wheels, and a twist grip gear changer all on the same side of the handlebars). When he finally came to rest, on New Year’s Eve, outside Bradford Town Hall, he’d amassed 45,383 miles. To this day, he remains the only one armed, teetotaller from Yorkshire to have held the record. But, interestingly, not the only vegetarian.

  In 1937, Ossie set out to reclaim his record. At exactly the same time an English resident, a Frenchman of Scottish descent (I am not making these people up) named René Menzies launched his campaign. Ossie prevailed, riding a staggering 62,657 miles, beating Menzies by just 1,096 miles. Intriguingly, although scarcely of any relevance, Menzies, who had been decorated for valour in the First World War, went on to become Charles de Gaulle’s chauffeur during the next war, a bizarre biographical detail which, by now, probably won’t surprise you.

  Then, our hero, Tommy Godwin, admiring Ossie’s record from his home in the Potteries, decided he would win it back for King and Country. So, he duly set off in freezing conditions on New Year’s Day 1939 from outside his sponsor’s bike shop in Middlesex. It was reported that so many people turned out to see him off that the police thought there was a riot and called for back up.

  He averaged more than two hundred miles a day, through an appalling winter, and even overcame the minor inconvenience of the outbreak of war in September. The introduction of rationing affected his vast dairy-based intake (Tommy, like Walter, was a vegetarian), and the blackout meant he could no longer use his lights to ride in the darkness. He had to wait for a full moon, and clear skies.

  He did it, though. 75,065 miles. Then he carried on, just for fun. By Whitsun he had ridden the fastest ever 100,000 miles. It took 499 days, on each of which he averaged more than two hundred miles.

  Eventually, he did settle down to the rest of his life. He was called up to service, but by now wasn’t any good to the army. All those days in the saddle had changed him for ever. His heels wouldn’t touch the ground, and his hands remained slightly curled. So he served out the war for the RAF and started a family.

  That was when Barbara was born. She was the lady I’d emailed, erroneously claiming to have spoken to her dead father.

  I get back in touch with her, and ask her what she recalls of her dad. Incredibly, she grew up with no idea of what he had achieved.

  ‘The most amazing thing about him was he never boasted about his world records,’ Barbara, who is nearly seventy years old herself, writes to me. ‘I was sixteen years old before I knew. It was my headmaster who asked if my dad was the famous cyclist. I said I didn’t think so, though he had a bike and he belonged to a cycling club. When I got home that afternoon I asked Dad if he was famous, his reply was “Who’s told you that rubbish!”

  ‘He was the most wonderful man, a fabulous dad and a devoted husband. I do know without a doubt why he was such an achiever, some say he wasn’t “wired” like other athletes, and I think that is true.

  ‘Dad gave everything away, trophies, cups, medals, anything to make someone else happy.

  ‘I wish you could have known him.’

  Tommy Godwin died, seemingly as do so many cyclists, having returned from a ride with friends. He was just sixty-three.

  Some dedicated soul, in a noble effort to preserve his place in the public imagination, has set up a twitter feed to commemorate his achievement. Each day, they tweet his mileage. The astonishing totals read like th
e mad wall scratchings of a man in solitary confinement. Here, at random are four days in the summer:

  18 July: Tommy Godwin rode 333 miles today in 1939

  19 July: Tommy Godwin rode 308 miles today in 1939

  20 July: Tommy Godwin rode 348 miles today in 1939

  21 July: Tommy Godwin rode 235 miles today in 1939

  And then this:

  22 July: Tommy Godwin rode 255 miles today in 1939

  On exactly that same day, 22 July 1939 and probably not very far away, the other Tommy Godwin won his first race, on a track in the Midlands.

  ‘I was eighteen,’ he tells me. And, though ‘Tommy 2’ is now ninety-one when he tells me this, I can scarcely believe he was born just two years after the end of the First World War. He is so strikingly well, so rudely healthy, that it’s almost a bit unsettling. Has the man lied about his age? Or has he been locked away in some cryonic chamber? What’s his secret?

  ‘On 22 July 1939, I won my first ever prize in open competition. I was handed a note inviting me to take part in the Olympic trials.’

  Tommy Godwin beams with pride, his manicured fingers play over the polished surface of a wooden box that sits gently on his immaculately creased trousers. We are sitting side by side in the stands at the Herne Hill Velodrome, as a procession of young riders takes to the track. We have time on our hands, as the afternoon drifts on; the racing is over-running somewhat. And so Tommy talks freely and warmly about a lifetime spent in pursuit of speed on a bike, a life whose pinnacle was reached at the very place we’ve met.

  He is a remarkable man, a living connection with the London Olympic Games of 1948. But it isn’t his longevity that makes this Tommy Godwin every bit as extraordinary as the other Tommy Godwin. It’s simply being a Tommy Godwin that does that.