about it and get back to me. Our game of poker was reaching its final stages, but I had just played a duff hand. When he phoned me back, he said: ‘It’s strange, Chris, because I spoke to the owner of The New Bike Shop, and he said he didn’t know anything about the job he’s offered you …’
The only consolation was that this conversation was taking place over the phone, because my face turned bright red. I spluttered something in response, but Mr Recycling just laughed and said: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll give you £3 an hour.’ I think he was quite impressed that I was sticking up for myself, even if my negotiating technique had been a little dubious.
I didn’t waste a minute of that summer in 1994. I would work all day at the bike shop, and in the evenings I would be picked up to go rowing, or else went training on my bike, either on the road or at the nearby Meadowbank Velodrome. At the end of the summer I travelled to Leicester for the national track championships, and from there went straight to Ireland for the Junior Tour.
Leaving Leicester, with my dad at the wheel, we were late getting to Holyhead for the ferry, which meant catching a later one and arriving at the race HQ, a school hall in a village, at around four in the morning. It wasn’t a disaster – I slept in the car, which is something I’d got down to a fine art 10 years previously on our travels through Europe for the BMX races – but the race started at 9 a.m. the next morning, which was far from ideal.
The Junior Tour of Ireland is one of the most famous, and toughest, stage races for juniors, and it has proved a breeding ground for some top road riders, including the great Irishmen Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche. Not only did it last nine days, with stages as long as 65 miles each day, but the roads in Ireland were renowned for being tough – they were rarely flat, always undulating, and the surfaces in many places left much to be desired. I had never attempted anything like it before, but I felt reasonably confident I could hang on during the flat stages and then have a chance whenever a stage was decided by a mass bunch sprint.
As we got under way, though, I remember feeling great relief. The peloton of around 120 eager juniors showed very little urgency, and ambled along. True, the roads were a little bit rougher than the wooden boards I’d been riding all week at the velodrome in Leicester – and in places bore a closer resemblance to the tracks I’d tackled on my mountain bike – but I could handle the pace. It was as if the riders had agreed a pact; that the race was so long, and so hard, that it would start in civilized fashion.
I’d overlooked one thing: the race hadn’t started. Here I was, riding along thinking, ‘Phew, this is OK; I think I can handle this,’ totally oblivious to the fact that the flag hadn’t yet dropped.
To my surprise, after about an hour we stopped en masse. Most riders peeled off to the side of the road to answer the call of nature, while I wondered what was going on, and how everyone except me seemed to be in the know. I soon found out. When the calls of nature had all been answered, we lined up again. This time a flag appeared, and someone shouted ‘Go!’ The race was on.
And it really was on: it was flat out from there to the finish, 65 miles away. That first hour, I discovered, had been the neutralized zone, which would be another less than welcome feature of the Junior Tour of Ireland. In order to get around the rule that juniors could only race for a maximum of 65 miles in a day, they had these huge ‘neutralized zones’ – sometimes as long as 25 miles – taking the total distance for the day up to around 90 miles.
When the stages started, the entire field would be strung out in a long line for most of the day, a sign that the bunch was going flat out. It was aggressive racing, too, with the Irish riders the main protagonists, and all eager to leave their mark on their national tour. It was a struggle to hold your place in the field, not least because of another rule that applied to juniors – the fact we were only allowed a maximum gear of 93 inches, which corresponded to a 52-tooth chainring at the front, and a 15-tooth sprocket at the back.
The purpose of this rule was to encourage younger riders to spin small gears rather than push big ones; it was designed to protect joints and improve suppleness. A fine principle, and it shouldn’t have been a handicap in Ireland – after all, we were all using the same gear, so we were all in the same boat …
Weren’t we?
I started to wonder. Especially when I saw some of the Irish riders driving on the front all day, their legs seemingly turning a lot slower than mine, which were almost spinning off just trying to keep up. There were gear checks at the end of each stage, and at one of the gear checks the Irish got pulled over. A couple of guys had blocked off their gears, meaning that they had bigger gears on their bike, but couldn’t access them. That wasn’t allowed, but they weren’t disqualified – they were relegated to last on the stage, and allowed to carry on.
After a few days of the Junior Tour I was on my knees. I was the Scotland team’s sprinter, expected to be up there at the finish, but I woke up each morning wondering how I’d make the start, never mind the finish. There were other challenges, too. The diet was decidedly ‘old school’, with our team manager insisting that we start each day with an enormous plate of pasta and beans. ‘Get it down you, boys,’ he would say, and it was interpreted as a sign of weakness if you couldn’t manage it all. Loss of appetite is one of the signs, on a stage race, that someone has gone beyond their limit. But the reality was that the pasta and beans combination was so disgusting, especially first thing in the morning, that it was a struggle to eat it no matter how hungry you were.
The Junior Tour of Ireland exposed me to other aspects of cycling culture. Put a team of 17-year-old boys together in a stage race and there will inevitably be some shenanigans, even if they are focused on what they’re doing. One evening, about half-way through the race, our manager, who was also acting as soigneur (masseur), and whom we secretly christened ‘Wee Nutter,’ was addressed by one of the riders by this moniker. He flipped and it prompted a semi-light-hearted wrestling match between the two, which ended with our manager/soigneur hurting his thumb quite seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he couldn’t give us massages for the remainder of the race, which was quite a drawback in terms of helping our recovery for the next day. Another feature of the Junior Tour – which we riders didn’t experience – was the legendary ‘night stages.’ For many of the managers and mechanics these seemed more of a priority than the day stages – i.e. the races – and acted as an excuse for them to drain Ireland of its supplies of Guinness.
As for the racing, it was like groundhog day. The painful legs when you woke up; the ordeal of breakfast; the long neutralized section; and then balls to the wall racing for three hours. I remember one stage in particular – 60 miles long, and covered in not much more than two hours. Our average that day was 29.6mph – you don’t get many stages of the Tour de France run off at that speed.
Despite all that, I did manage to force my way into the top 10 on three stages, my best placing being fifth in one bunch sprint. But on stages where there were hills I had no chance – having had a growth spurt in my late teens, I was bigger than most other road cyclists, who tended to be small and wiry – and it turned into a massive test of endurance and willpower just to finish. By the end there were three of us left in the Scottish team – the other two having abandoned – but I did finish, which gave me a lot of satisfaction. The 1994 Junior Tour of Ireland also gave me the answer to one question that had lurked at the back of my mind, as it does with any young cyclist.
Would I ever ride the world’s most famous race, the Tour de France?
No. Definitely not.
It
