Great British Cycling by Ellis Bacon

Author:Ellis Bacon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448171125
Publisher: Transworld

11

THE SECRET SQUIRREL CLUB

WHEN CHRIS BOARDMAN won gold in the individual pursuit at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, he reignited a passion for cycling in Britain that had not been seen since the post-war years, and which has steadily increased ever since.

He didn’t even have to go the full 4,000-metre distance; when Boardman caught his German opponent, Jens Lehmann, with a lap to go, he ended the duel by default, and pumped the air with his fist in celebration.

Boardman was the perfect British cereal-box hero: all outward confidence and German-beating, aboard his futuristic-looking carbon-fibre Lotus super-bike. He turned professional with three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond’s Gan team the following year, then won the prologue time trial at the 1994 Tour to take the leader’s yellow jersey – only the second Briton to do so, after Tom Simpson in 1962.

When he subsequently appeared with annoying puppets Zig and Zag on The Big Breakfast on Channel 4, his yellow jersey from winning the prologue at the Dauphiné Libéré standing in as a Tour yellow jersey (to my annoyance at the time) well, then he’d really made it.

Prior to the ’92 Olympics, Boardman was already well known within the British cycling fraternity as a member of the all-conquering Manchester Wheelers cycling club: a four-time winner of the national hill-climb championships, a three-time national pursuit champion and, by 1993, a five-time 25-mile championships winner.

Riding for England at the Commonwealth Games, his results included bronze in the team pursuit in Edinburgh in 1986, and another bronze four years later, in Auckland, again in the team pursuit, as well as in the team time trial on the road.

The rider who became his greatest rival – the Blur to his Oasis – was Scotland’s Graeme Obree, who was just as well known on the national time-trial circuit. The pair soon battled on the international stage, too, while representing Great Britain, alternating victories at the individual pursuit world championships: Obree winning in 1993 and 1995, Boardman in 1994 and 1996. But it was their Hour record attempts that really captured the imagination of the press and public, although there were few of either at Obree’s quiet 1993 attempt to beat Italian Francesco Moser’s 1984 figure of 51.151 kilometres at the velodrome in Hamar, Norway.

That first attempt, with Obree in his trademark arms-tucked-beneath-his-chest ‘praying mantis’ position, was on a bike that had been built out of carbon-fibre by Mike Burrows: the man behind Boardman’s 1992 Olympic Lotus bike. But, having failed to take the record by 461 metres, Obree went for it again the next day, this time on his own bike, which he’d built himself and which had appropriately been christened Old Faithful. This time, he recorded 51.596 kilometres, beating Moser’s record by 445 metres.

Less than a week later, Boardman took to the track in Bordeaux, ready to better Obree’s record time. Cleverly planned to take place on the day that stage 18 of the 1993 Tour de France finished in the city – with its resulting media coverage – Boardman did it, recording 52.

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