Triumphs and Turbulence by Chris Boardman

Author:Chris Boardman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

CHAPTER 12

The Beginning of the End

It was 4.30 in the afternoon, 12 December 1997, and I was sitting in our office in Meols with the two Petes. We’d gathered for our annual post-season debrief and planning session, and we weren’t far into it before I had a realisation.

For the first time since turning pro – since I’d begun racing – there were no suggestions on how to progress, be better, move forward. It was all about aiming to repeat successes of years past. None of us could identify any areas for significant improvement, any ‘stretch goals’ that would see me advance as an athlete. These gatherings were supposed to be our councils of war, identifying new fronts to attack. Now my team seemed to think the best I could manage was standing still. It was at that moment I lost interest in being a professional cyclist. Because I agreed with them.

We sat and plotted, but without the enthusiasm and passion of previous years. Pete Keen already had a new role as Director of Performance for British Cycling and his energy was now being channelled into setting up the World Class Performance Programme with the new Lottery funds that were flowing into the sport. I couldn’t blame him (although I did at the time). He’d started to think of life after Team Boardman and so had I.

The 1997 season had been our all-out effort – in fact, an unacknowledged last-ditch attempt – at turning me into a real GC contender. The main goal had been a high overall finish in the Tour de France, with all my preparation aimed at being able to stay with the favourites in the mountains. In order to do that I needed a higher power-to-weight ratio, and since my power was pretty good to start with that meant losing weight. To provoke my body into a fat-burning response I’d spent the first half of the year on a relentless programme of low intensity, non-stop rides of eight hours or more.

For a week in May I set off around the country to make the all-day jaunts more palatable, with Sally driving ahead to meet me in obscure places for dinner. We wound our way through the Lancashire hills, across the Yorkshire Dales and the Lakeland lanes. Each morning I’d get up early and ride off towards the next destination, often 150 miles away.

Weight loss was supposed to be a means to an end: the missing element that might help place me on the podium in Paris rather than just in the prologue. Instead it became an obsession, something I could seize on and be in control of in my otherwise unpredictable and high-pressure world. I weighed myself three times a day and monitored the calorific content of every morsel I consumed. On one occasion, after six and a half hours in the saddle, I finally pitched up at the Eureka café near Chester, the local cyclists’ watering hole, only to see the readout on my SRM computer screen showing 4940 calories burned.

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