by Ned Boulting
Ever since I have started to cover cycling, bad news has broken across its bows. But incessant attacks on its integrity, the most damning from within cycling itself, have done little to dull the growing popularity of the sport, particularly in the UK. The unravelling of reputations at the very highest levels has coincided with the emergence of a generation of British cyclists able to compete with the very best in the world and, in the case of Mark Cavendish, thrash them. So even if the Tour has never had it so bad, we, in our British bubble, have never had it so good.
That’s not the only ambiguity that has defined my evolving attitudes to covering the race. In fact, there’s not much about the Tour that isn’t ambiguous. Therein lies the fascination.
A colleague once told me that the only way to follow the Tour is to use the same technique that Inuit people use when faced with the blinding whiteness of the snow. They look at it ‘with an off-centre gaze’.
Here are my off-centre thoughts.
Ned Boulting
June 2011
LEWISHAM HOSPITAL: PART ONE, AUGUST 2003
‘Who won the Tour de France?’ This is what they were asking me.
A difficult question: a slippery customer, alive with Gallic guile. It would take some thinking about. But thinking wasn’t that easy any more.
I was drawn to the sight of my knees. They, at least, were recognisable. The scars still there from my countless childhood scrapes, but hidden now by straggles of hair. In fact, the whole length of my shins and calves down to my ankles were hairy – something that, while it didn’t directly puzzle me, seemed strangely ill-fitted to the moment.
Above the curvature of the kneecap there was a flourish of scarlet, not blood, but something odd and out of place. Elastic. Red elastic, tight too. The red trim of a pair of shorts whose shiny black expanse seemed both utterly alien and entirely familiar.
Cycling shorts. Lycra. Where had they come from? Who had put me in a pair of Lycra shorts?
I jerked my head upright, urgently scouring the antiseptic environment for clues. A tray of metallic bowls. A curtain. Posters of diseased lungs. Nothing informed me. No help at all as my heart and mind raced, chasing after an explanation. Understanding trickled away like sand through my fingers. I returned my gaze to the sight of my shorts, torn slightly on the left thigh. This time I contemplated them with sullen resentment.
I was, I could only conclude, ever so confused.
‘Ask him again.’
‘Who won the Tour de France?’
A SIMPLE MISTAKE
July 2003. What was I doing in Paris?
I had slept fitfully in the Best Western alongside the old cavalry stables in the Avenue Duquesne. All night long a storm had crashed around, banging the spindly branches of a plane tree against my window. If my sleepless night had been a scene in a film, they would have angled the camera on its side. I would have opened an eye. The clock on the bedside table would slowly have come into focus: 5.40 a.m.
I got up to see if breakfast was being served.
A bitter coffee, a beautiful croissant and several hours later, I sat in the plump comfort of the driver’s seat in a brand-new Renault Espace. It was an early summer’s day. Paris was enjoying a morning of blazing contrasts. Lumpy clouds rumbled across the city throwing down shafts of deep shade. Otherwise, the sky was painted the brilliant blue of a kid’s bedroom. It was two days before the Grand Départ of the Centenary Tour. I was struggling with two new life experiences. The first of these was satellite navigation.
The second was the Tour de France.
A month or so before this moment of solitary fear in a Paris side street, I had been fiddling nervously with a teaspoon in a Soho café, sitting opposite Gary Imlach. He was the seasoned presenter of the Tour de France; I had just been told that ITV would be sending me out to work on it as a reporter. Gary, in between tiny bites of his minimalist Italian biscuit, was doing an extraordinary job of hiding his concern, not to mention alarm, at my lack of preparation. To fill the silence, I opted to speak.
‘Lance Armstrong. He’s the American cancer bloke, isn’t he? Keeps winning it,’ I said, feeling that I’d got off to a flyer.
It wasn’t long though before I’d exhausted my scant knowledge and was out of my comfort zone. Gary had suddenly started to talk about the team time trial.
‘They have teams?’ I offered, genuinely surprised. ‘I didn’t know that.’
Gary mentally dropped his espresso cup. It had been an uncomfortable sort of meeting.
Deciding that the depth of my ignorance wasn’t going to subside overnight, I had embarked on a course of doing not a lot. I could have buried myself in research. But I had so much to learn that I decided anything I did this late in the day would have been quixotic, so I learnt nothing. It was a technique that had got me through school and university and I wasn’t going to abandon it now.
So I had hastily thrown as much clothing as I could into the biggest suitcase I could find, along with a passport, an iron and some leftover euros I found in a jar in the kitchen. Then I left for France.
Now the day had dawned, I stared slack-jawed through the windscreen as Paris came to life. A street cleaner power-hosed the grime from a petal-shaped grille at the base of a tree. Two American girls deep in gossip waltzed arm in arm. A thin man spat.
I fought through the sat nav menu options and tried in vain to change the language settings from French to English. I felt a sense of rising panic. This was not only my first experience of the Tour, it also would be the first bike race I had ever seen. And only now, with my accreditation swinging from my neck like a noose, did it dawn on me that I might just be the wrong man for the job. I started the engine and drove off, unsure of my destination.
‘À deux cent mètres, au rond-point, tournez à gauche.’
At least the sense of direction and purpose that navigating Paris gave me papered handily over the cracks of my fear. I had been instructed to head for what is known as the ‘Permanence’. An odd name this, since the ‘Permanence’ is anything but permanent. It is the Tour’s headquarters. Logistic and administrative officers, commissaries, media, medical staff, tailors and drivers all need somewhere to work. The Permanence is where this happens, normally situated at imponderable expense in the biggest place they can find. But since the Tour generally moves 200 kilometres every day, the Permanence shape-shifts and re-emerges in another exhibition hall on the outskirts of another town each time. Its permanence is relative.
Parked up and once again outside the comfort of the Espace, I made my way towards the cavernous hall in which I had arranged to meet my colleagues from ITV. Including me, the production team totalled twelve. Most had an average of ten Tours under their belts. Some were closing in on their twentieth.
I entered the brightly lit room, and at a stroke understood that the phoney war was over. Everywhere I could see actual riders with actual bikes spouting actual foreign languages besieged by people who actually knew what they were talking about.
Fighting shy of any encounter that might bring me into close contact with this alien world, I skirted the walls till I found some familiar faces. Gary Imlach was tap-tap-tapping into a Mac, looking useful, absorbed and in command. Sitting opposite him at a desk was my producer, Steve Doherty. He had a long list of stuff he needed to discuss with me. We left Gary to it and went off in search of somewhere quiet.
On the other side of the hall we found a space, which seemed to accommodate a thousand desks. We helped ourselves to a paper cup of nasty Grand’Mère café. It glowered up at me from its awful blackened depths (the Tour eventually inculcates a strong instinct for which freebies to exploit and which to leave, but this was my first Tour, and I had much to learn). Steve sat me down to talk through the first few days of the rest of my life.
Tall, blond and taciturn, Steve had, in one guise or another, produced and directed British TV coverage of the Tour since the mid-eighties. A man from the Borders with a love for Carlisle United, he balanced stro
ngly held beliefs with rare shows of enthusiasm and a deep understanding of cycling. He also came with a reputation for not suffering fools. And here he was, amid the clatter and clutter of the vast French carnival gearing up for action, clutching a Bic rollerball in one hand and a throwaway coffee in the other, facing exactly that: a fool.
He had in front of him a list. His neat handwriting, headlines in CAPS, underlining in red, revealed a portfolio of short reports that I would have forty-eight hours to generate:
NED FEATURES
Lance Armstrong: from cancer survivor to champion.
The Famous Four: Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault, Indurain. All five-time winners.
The Centenary Edition. A Hundred Years of the Tour.
The Tour Route, in facts and figures.
The Contenders: who can threaten Armstrong?
Steve shot me a glance across the table, which let me know that he didn’t expect me to succeed. The glance was superfluous. We both knew that I knew that I would not succeed.
I drew sharply on the Grand’Mère, which by now had grown cold. Instead of swallowing, I swilled it around my mouth, feeling at once how it was staining my teeth black.
The rest of that day passed in a tailspin of activities, none of which were remotely focused or efficient. I scribbled fragments of script on notebooks; I tore them up. I recorded pieces to camera, only to have them scrutinised and rejected. I tried to gear up for what was to come; I failed.
And so it was that the following day, dressed in a poorly ironed shirt, I stood at the start of the Tour de France for the very first time. The streets were lined with people. The 2003 Prologue was about to get under way.
The first thing that I noticed was the noise. The speed came later. It sounded like the drumming of fingers, gaining in urgency. Disc wheels hammering up a cobbled road at forty miles per hour.
First off the starting ramp that day was, I think, some bloke from the Euskadi Euskaltel team (eight years on, and I still struggle to pronounce this team correctly, and normally find a way of avoiding it by referring to them as the ‘team from the Basque Country’ or some such). He flashed by me, my first glimpse of a racing bicycle. I checked his unofficial time over the 6.5km course displayed on the digital clock overhanging the finish line. I had no idea what to make of the information. I had no point of reference, it meant nothing to me.
One after one, I watched them finish. It was an odd sight, but exhilarating at the same time. Seen from the front, the rider, clad in his time-trial skinsuit, his back arched and head dipped, flew like a bullet towards me. His energy was pent up behind him in an ordered fuss of legs and lungs serving only to push that millimetre-perfect front wheel over the line. In that instant, an unseen cord unclipped and the cyclist’s spine crumpled down. His head snapped upright. His jaw suddenly hung loose to gulp in the restorative air. Each time the cyclist would have a split second of utter peace before the madness of the Tour and of the crowd descended on him.
Overcome by a sudden fit of journalistic diligence, I would occasionally contemplate running after a rider. But when I looked down the length of the road, he would be long gone. Literally, gone.
What an unusual event.
The day wore on. I anticipated the hunched blue of Armstrong flying past. He was the star attraction and would start last of all, with the number 1 on his back, denoting his status as the reigning champion. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. In the meantime the endless procession of cyclists ground remorselessly on.
I stood alongside the tall, keen figure of Matt Rendell, the writer who has worked for ITV on all the Tours I have covered. The poor fellow had been seconded to guide me through the proceedings. I looked to his every gesture for confirmation that I understood the grammar of the day’s events. He had plenty of gestures, including a quite uncontrolled throaty Hispanic holler. Every time a rider he knew personally flew past, he would let rip. I swear that at some point he screamed ‘Arriba!’ in some bloke’s sweaty ear as it fizzed past him.
I marvelled at his enthusiasm. The veins stood out in his neck. Nothing could deflect from his delight as some tiny Colombian climber pedalled over the finish line having posted the ninety-third best time of the afternoon. I could only dream of summoning up such passion.
But frankly, after a couple of hours, my first Tour de France had started to bore me.
Even now, I don’t much like time trials. Only occasionally do they throw up much drama but more often than not they just confirm what we have all expected. I sometimes think that they are there solely for the purists, and that I am still too new to the sport to understand the aesthetic. I lose track of the number of times I have been asked to film a guided tour of a time-trial bike. One day I might just blurt out, ‘Look, they’re very light, and very aerodynamic, all right? That’s it. That’s all there is.’
The rhythm of that first, long day was suddenly enlivened as we edged towards our ‘on-air’ time. We would be broadcasting live on ITV1, the big network! From a flat-pack set by the side of the finish line, Gary Imlach would thread together the denouement of the day’s events before crossing live to the coverage of the best riders who would all set off in the final hour. Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen would commentate. In that first year, Stephen Roche, the Irish winner of the Tour in 1987, was our occasional pundit.
My role would be limited to interviewing the winning rider. The hope, and indeed the expectation, was that this might be David Millar, a man I had never heard of and certainly never met. Apparently he was Scottish. Along with Armstrong, so I was told, he was one of the favourites.
I waited, and I watched. My earpiece crackled with Phil’s commentary. His was a voice that would provide me with the soundtrack of my summers to come. Yet back then, I barely understood a word.
An Australian called Brad McGee posted the best time. In the all-white skinsuit of Francaise des Jeux, he looked like a kinky time-traveller from a David Bowie movie. He crossed the finish line, and I saw him being marshalled to a holding area behind the podium. There he would have to wait while the final dozen riders threw down their challenges.
Then came a slight raising of the tension. The commentary in my ear spluttered something about Dave Millar starting. In a kind of makeshift tent at the finish line, I glimpsed the TV screen through the hordes of journalists. I saw Millar’s long ungainly form bowed to the frame of his time-trial bike, rounding the first corner, the camera mounted on a crane pulling higher and wider as it went with him, until the elegance of the Paris skyline filled the frame.
The split times came through. Millar was in the lead by a fraction of a second. Then, at the second split, the gap had grown. Somehow, viscerally, I knew this was important. He was approaching our finish line hard and closing in on victory and the first yellow jersey of the 2003 Tour de France. I dashed across to the barriers to watch, both delighted and terrified for him.
It was at that moment that my earpiece exploded with noise. Liggett’s excitable commentary was drowned out by the off-air expletives of Steve Doherty, Gary Imlach and just about everyone else on the production team.
On the final bend before the home straight, riding over cobbles, Millar’s chain bounced off his front ring. In a split second, his challenge was over.
I only found out later, he pulled it back on with his fingers and sprinted hard for the line, but crossed it one-tenth of a second down on McGee.
At that precise moment, every spectator on the route knew more than I did. Everyone on our production team, every viewer at home, was better informed than me. I scampered around, trying to look purposeful by intermittently sticking my finger into my earpiece and frowning. But who was I kidding? Something profoundly unexpected had happened and I had no idea what it was. Yet I was about to be cast in the role of Man-On-The-Spot. I ran back to the side of my cameraman, and stood poised to interview . . . someone. Anyone. About anything. I was ready to impart News, oblivious of the fact that I Had No Idea What To Report. Adrenalin simply plonked me i
n front of the camera.
Minutes passed. They were filled with tense, incoherent airtime, which Gary Imlach and Stephen Roche on the set had to bridge with talk of Millar’s unchaining. There is only so much that can be said about a chain coming off, except for ‘the chain clearly came off’, and there’s a finite number of ways of expressing that, even allowing for Stephen Roche’s bizarre Franco-Irish accent.
Millar had long since disappeared. Crossing the line at forty miles an hour, he had carried on at that speed, heading towards the Eiffel Tower where his Cofidis team car was parked up. Matt Rendell, long legs pounding away, had set off after him, shouting into the increasing distance, and with decreasing usefulness, ‘Dave!’
My ear crackled again. The voice of our director cut through. ‘Have you got anything for us, Ned?’
I didn’t know what to say. I think I might have said, ‘Yes.’ Just to appear useful.
‘We’re going to come to you in twenty seconds. Stand by. Gary, hand to Ned.’
Then, before I could adjust my collar and compose my thoughts (which pre-supposes that I had any in the first place), Gary Imlach handed over to me ‘for the very latest on the David Millar situation’.
The blind eye of the camera fixed me. The red cue light went on.
In the polished glass of the lens a couple of feet in front of me, I caught a glimpse, like the image in the back of a spoon, of ITV’s new cycling reporter, silent for a second, and then, in front of the reflected backdrop of ancien régime Paris, starting to talk.
What passed my lips must never be revisited. Some tapes are too painful ever to unearth from the archives. Even if the old adage holds true that one can learn from one’s mistakes, there are some mistakes that can break one’s confidence beyond repair.
I have been told though, by a friend who was watching in embarrassed disbelief in a house in Chelmsford, that I uttered words like ‘some sort of thing with his bike’. I followed this up, apparently with the killer line, ‘kissing goodbye to his chance of winning the yellow jumper’.
