How I Won the Yellow Jumper

by Ned Boulting

  Yes, the yellow jumper. That’s what I said.

  BEING ON AIR

  Before sitting down to write this book, I had assumed that my first-ever cycling broadcast had taken place in 2003: that ill-fated live update on David Millar. Now, thanks to my sister Emily, I have found out that I am quite wrong. And, as older sisters tend to be, she is right.

  In fact, my cycling pedigree predates that awful moment by some twenty years. In 1984, aged fourteen, I was at home one day in the Easter holidays revising for my exams. This involved a lot of worrying blackheads with tweezers, wobbling backwards on the rear two legs of my chair, rewinding cassettes by spinning a pencil (to save on the Walkman batteries, you understand) and occasionally reaching for a silver spray-can to daub some poetry on my bedroom wall.

  Accompanying this teenage idling was the background noise of my late childhood, known as 96.9 Chiltern Radio. It was the sound of Bedford, Dunstable and Luton. On that particular afternoon there was a phone-in: ‘The State of Bedford’s Roads’. As if local radio in that early afternoon slot wasn’t already dreary enough, they had summoned up a debating point with a stultifying lack of potential.

  Quite why I decided it was time to phone in, I have no idea. Boredom is the only explanation I can offer. Boredom, with perhaps the added spice of fiddling with my brand-new Marantz stereo cassette-radio player in an attempt to record my broadcast debut. I unpeeled a brand-new TDK C-90 cassette, and slid it into position, then closed the door and pressed the record and pause buttons simultaneously. Now I was ready and I could phone in the station.

  To my astonishment, I was put straight through to the studio, where they kept me on hold. Once the production team had established that I was simply a precocious little twerp who meant no harm and was unlikely to swear in the middle of the afternoon to the Chiltern Radio audience, I was told to stand by. I clutched the receiver, sweaty palmed with anticipation (a frailty that still affects my microphone hand).

  The music faded down. ‘OK, that was Daryl Hall and John Oates,’ said the DJ. Probably.

  ‘Now, what about the roads in Bedford?’ he went on. ‘What about the state they’re in? And just what is the council planning on doing about it? That’s the topic for the phone-in this afternoon, and we’ve got a caller on the line. It’s Ned, from Bedford. What have you got to say, Ned?’

  The roof of my mouth went suddenly very dry. ‘Hi,’ I struggled to get the word out. A displaced feeling started to overwhelm me, as if I was watching myself from a perch on the ceiling. From this elevated position, I looked down upon myself about to make my first broadcast. This is perhaps the only time that Chiltern Radio has ever been known to replicate the effects of LSD.

  ‘What do you think about it, Ned?’

  A fatal, short, and very telling silence. Then I recovered, and began.

  As soon as the telephone conversation was at an end, I hung up, and sat cross-legged in my bedroom, my white Solidarnosc T-shirt hanging loosely over a heart still beating hard from the stress of the encounter. After a minute or two, and feeling my pulse return to something approaching normality, I was able to rewind the cassette, and play it back.

  It was horrifying. I wince to remember it.

  The only other time I can recall a similar feeling was the moment I first discovered the size of my ears. On that occasion, I had been taken for a haircut at the Italian barbers in Foster Hill Road. The comforting hair flaps which, in keeping with the spirit of late seventies boyhood fashion, had kept my ears hidden for a decade were about to be hacked off by an indifferent middle-aged Sardinian barber, wielding a sharp pair of scissors in one hand and a John Player Special in the other. I was struck dumb by the sight of a mildly pornographic calendar and the proximity of a box of condoms. This was a man’s world, and I was about to receive a man’s cut.

  It was only when I got home that I dared to study my reflection in the mirror and analyse fully the extent and significance of this new, extraordinary fact: I had really quite large ears. Things would never be the same again. I could now see me as others saw me.

  And so it was when I first heard my voice played back to me. The shock of hearing yourself as others hear you! My voice astonished me; odd, and at the same time intimately familiar. What was indisputable was that I desperately needed my voice to start to break. Dave Taylor’s and Jim Briscoe’s had gone two years ago, while I still sounded like someone doing an impersonation of my mother. It was humiliating.

  I can remember with surprising clarity the gist of the phone call, and there’s one phrase in particular, which I can recall verbatim. My sister can too, and she still takes some pleasure in reminding me of it.

  ‘I get around quite a bit . . . by bike.’ Like a young Don Johnson from Miami Vice. I get around quite a bit. Honestly. In my mind’s ear, I can almost hear the DJ quietly restraining his urge to snigger or resign, or both.

  ‘And I was riding along Tavistock Street yesterday, and I hit a pothole, and I nearly fell off.’

  ‘OK, Ned. So you think the state of the roads is terrible, do you?’

  ‘Yes. I do. Really dangerous.’

  ‘Because of the potholes? Are they a real problem for you on your bike?’

  ‘Yes. I think something should be done.’

  ‘Right.’

  Pause.

  ‘OK, that’s Ned from Bedford, who thinks something should be done about the potholes. Next up, it’s Supertramp, and “Breakfast in America”.’

  That episode should have put me off any notion that I might one day make a living from talking on air about cycling, in any form. But, quite incomprehensibly, here I am, doing just that.

  One summer, I think it was in 2004, Kath, my partner, delighted in showing me a TV review in which I was described as the ‘Monty Don’ of cycling: determined to ‘dumb everything down’. This was a bizarre piece of criticism, given that I really don’t think I look much like the wizened gardener, and would also consider him to be an expert in his field (literally). But it made her laugh wickedly and with just a hint of scorn, which you wouldn’t normally expect from a supportive family member.

  Prior to this engagement, I had worked almost exclusively on football programmes, with a brief foray into the extraordinarily forgettable world of women’s golf. (Not forgettable, I hasten to add, because it’s played by women, but because it’s golf. The 2002 Oslo Open is a week that will endure in almost no one’s memory.)

  Football, though, was a game I had learnt how to read and write. Phrases such as ‘overlapping wing-backs’ and ‘playing off the shoulder of the last defender’ formed part of a language I could not only understand, but also express with cliché-strewn abandon. I could talk a passable football, even if I still couldn’t play it.

  But initially in this shrill, garish, bullet of a race, I couldn’t move without a grammar book, a primer, a dictionary and a babelfish stuck in each ear. For a long time the language of cycling remained stubbornly foreign to me.

  As the dust settled on my first Tour, I had vowed never to return to cover the race. I reflected in a lengthy debrief with our producers that the work I had produced over the month of July 2003 had been the worst of my career. I would still stand by that assertion. What made that admission still worse was that they agreed.

  By the end of the first week, when the Tour had delivered us up to the very top of the Alps, I was sick of the sound of my voice. The problem was a collapse in my self-belief, the illusory arm bands that keep the TV reporter afloat. Quite when, or how, I started to learn to swim, I am still not sure. And even after eight years, I have the odd moment where the old sinking feeling returns.

  Talking to the camera is a strange business. What you see on the screen only tangentially relates to reality. Even though it may be our words and our mouths that articulate them, at the same time there is a confidence trick being played by presenters. It may be our faces that we stick in front of the lens, but we are just pretending to be us. It’s like being a ventriloquist’s dummy wh
o looks strikingly like the ventriloquist; a clone almost, manipulated by the original from which it was cloned. Less Rod Hull and Emu. More Rod Hull and Rod Hill. All presenters have to create a fictional persona, which is close enough to the truth for them to feel comfortable, and yet different enough for them to be able to carry out the functions required of them without being shambolic. The end product that pops up on the telly is a fairly true-to-life version of the person whose name appears in the caption below.

  A ‘real’ report, from a ‘real’ me, would be peppered with unacceptable amounts of fumbling around and lapses into linguistic disarray. These are the bits that, generally speaking, have to go when you’re a TV presenter, even though they are often the bits that make you most human. Over the years I have tried to allow these back into my delivery, like letting weeds take seed in lawn to lend it a more natural look. But you don’t want to overdo it.

  Likewise, the ‘real’ Gary Imlach might be tempted to close the show by simply, bluntly speaking his mind, rather than using the wonderfully spiked baroque constructions that are his trademark.

  There’s a subtle difference. This is Gary Imlach being ‘Gary Imlach’. And frankly, no one will ever do it better: eloquence, precision and, most importantly, humour. As Gary grips the microphone, he does so with the archetypal iron fist in a velvet glove.

  When I was preparing for my second Tour, I spent two days locked in a little broom cupboard just off Piccadilly Circus, surrounded by boxes of tapes from twenty years of Tour de France coverage. Most of them stretched back to the years when it was Channel 4 who broadcast the highlights show. In those days, Gary did my job, with Phil Liggett fronting up the coverage.

  It was an education watching Gary’s contributions. Two features stick in my memory. In one he was riding a bamboo bike around some Dutch town. The act itself broke a long-standing personal vow never to allow himself to be filmed on a bike. It was delivered in Gary’s inimitable dry deadpan, and it dripped with irony.

  In another little film, he had stopped at some remote rural location, which was on the route of the Tour the next day. There, by whatever means, he found himself steering a pedalo out into the middle of the lake to help the mayor of a virtually non-existent hamlet attach a huge floating sign depicting the name of the village to a mooring. The sight of Gary sitting in a white plastic boat pedalling out into a murky lake set a benchmark for strangeness to which I still aspire.

  On the 2010 Tour, Gary was presented with a trophy from the Tour for twenty years’ service. Christian Prudhomme, the Tour director, appeared to have no idea who Gary was, since he’s not a very visible presence outside the confines of our truck. But it was a fine moment, rendered all the more amusing by witnessing Gary’s almost total discomfort with the proceedings.

  Gary eshews cliché. He has a style that is all his own. He stands wilfully apart. But the Tour provides a big enough canvas for his highly individual space to exist and still leave some blank room for others. With time, I realised that it was possible for Gary’s fine brushstrokes to sit alongside my Jackson Pollocks and have understood that our contrasting approaches may have nudged the entirety of the production in a new direction.

  You might argue that on my first few Tours I was trying too hard. What now seems self-explanatory to me, at first seemed deeply mysterious. My efforts often fell short of clarity. I shudder to recall some of them.

  My quest for ground-breaking TV once had me sitting outside a café somewhere in one of those hard-to-define areas in France’s vast interior, lining up nine sugar cubes into a paceline, and rotating them across the table so that each cube took its fair pull at the front. I was bringing the team time trial to sugary life. My enthusiasm for metaphor didn’t stop there. I had them in an echelon, too. Diagonally stretching out across the tablecloth, from saucer to ashtray, sheltering the other cubes from a notional sidewind.

  Stretching the conceit to a point way beyond the viewer’s patience, I discarded cubes one by one, as they were ‘dropped’ by their sugary teammates, succumbed to punctures or snapped forks. Then, with a brilliant flourish, I rounded off the epic by deliberately tipping the contents of my coffee cup over them all, soaking the white tablecloth on which they were arranged.

  This was high-pressure television, since for obvious enough reasons there could be just one take. Not only that, but once the grand crème was dripping from the margins of the table and we were hurriedly dismantling the camera equipment, we had to fend off a tirade of perfectly justified abuse from an understandably terse waiter. His moustache flickered disdain. I suspect the five-euro tip we left for him was taken out the back and shot. I didn’t dare ask him for a receipt so I could claim back the cost of the coffee.

  As I said, it was early days.

  At about the same time that I started to become a regular contributor, Chris Boardman also started presenting for ITV. Even if his world records, world championships, yellow jerseys and Tour de France stage wins meant that he was marginally better placed to talk about cycling than I was, he still had to learn about telly. He too has had to follow an arc of learning, especially in the uniquely cobbled-together world of ITV’s broadcast operation.

  Here’s a revealing picture for you. When Michael Owen was still playing for Real Madrid a few years ago, he was flown by private jet from Madrid to Liverpool and back again to sit in the football studio for a couple of hours as pundit on a Champions League match. By contrast, last summer on the Tourmalet, the former Olympic gold medallist Chris Boardman stood around for a couple of hours ankle deep in mud and wearing a bin bag to keep out the rain so that we could all help load up the truck at the end of the day. Like your dad packing the family car before a holiday, I suspect he even enjoyed it.

  Watching him go about his day, you can see why he achieved everything he did. Chris has a habit of applying an aggregation of marginal gains to almost everything he turns his hand to: writing scripts, taking photos, running a multimillion-pound bike business or eating lunch (all of which he is prodigiously good at).

  He’s part of the team, although on the other hand, he obviously isn’t part of the team, since he’s actually done the stuff that the rest of us just talk about. He will only discuss his own career when asked and even then reluctantly. But despite this, he is still capable of the odd bold claim to his own prowess.

  ‘How many kids have you got, Chris?’

  ‘Six.’ A deadpan face looked up at me from behind his Sony Vaio laptop. ‘I’ve only had sex six times as well. I’m just extremely efficient.’

  It took me a while to be able to read his dry sense of humour. It might take my parents even longer. On my birthday in 2005, the ITV team were all enjoying a sun-drenched rest day lunch together in Courchevel. I was moaning about the fact that no one from home had contacted me to wish me happy birthday. Chris put down his beer, grabbed my phone, scrolled through my contacts list to one labelled Mum and Dad, and dialled their number.

  ‘Mr Boulting. Hello, it’s Olympic Gold Medallist Chris Boardman here. Just ringing to remind you that it’s your son’s birthday.’ I imagined my dad standing in his kitchen a thousand miles away, frowning at the receiver in puzzlement, before hanging up.

  Nothing fazes Chris. He exudes the kind of absolute certainty that surely only comes with having been the best in the world. He generates a kind of density of purpose in his dealings with you, which is matched only by the density of his actual body. Although he is no longer at his racing weight, Chris has by no means gone to seed, and in fact he’s in very good shape. He stands perhaps an inch shorter than me. One day on a ritual run, I asked him how much he weighed, guessing it was a little less than my weight.

  ‘Eighty kilos.’ I was amazed. It was eight kilos more than me. I looked at him disbelievingly. ‘I’m just very dense,’ he explained. He opened up a little sprint, and left me for dead as we turned for home. The man has lungs like wheelie bins.

  Certain things are immutable though. Phil Liggett is one such thing. A silve
r-haired, silver-tongued supremo in shorts. It has taken me many years to grow used to the sight of a man of some considerable years who routinely shaves his legs.

  Frankly, on that first Tour, I was still at the stage where the shaved-leg thing was making me writhe with mirth and misunderstanding. I would chuckle at all those smooth-skinned men in shorts all over the place, and I was troubled by visions of them all in their bathtubs, wreathed in bubbles in the style of a Camay soap advertisement, stretching their legs skywards as they glided their razors down their shinbones. I was reminded of a passage in Matt Seaton’s excellent book The Escape Artist, in which he ponders the practicalities of leg-shaving. The question for Seaton was not so much why as where to stop. How high should the shaved area extend? Should it stop as soon as is necessary, at the line of the shorts, creating a hairy-trunks effect? Or should it perhaps extend much higher, possibly even incorporating, well, everything?

  As is clear, I was still scarcely able to conduct a conversation with a hairless-legged man in shorts without inadvertently glancing at them. I’m over that now, except when I am talking to George Hincapie, whose varicose veins at the end of a day in the saddle look as if a family of vipers has crawled under his skin and begun to feed on his calf muscles. They are among the Tour’s greatest sights and, like the twenty-one switchbacks of Alpe d’Huez, will one day be numbered for posterity and given plaques bearing the names of famous domestiques who never wore the yellow jersey.

  But Phil with hairy legs is unimaginable. He paces around the race with a huge, bouncing gait, easily straddling five feet with each stride. He is known by all, and spends his days flitting from truck to truck, servicing the English-speaking world with its cycling commentary requirements. From Perth to Pennsylvania, Cape Town to Carlisle, the Tour de France sounds like Phil Liggett. With his partner Paul Sherwen they have a cult following in the USA, the size of which would make Marilyn Manson proud.