Syer to offer words of reassurance. Instead, he said: ‘Yeah, well those things could happen.’ Boardman was puzzled. ‘I said, “Hang on, aren’t you supposed to be helping me here?” But he said, “No, this is the deal, mate – elation and despair are two sides of the same coin, in equal and opposite proportion. If you want the big win, you’ve got to risk the big low. So instead of trying to deny that, why don’t we stare it in the face?”
‘I sat on the start line at the Olympics and thought, fuck it, I’ll just be as good as I can. And when I cross the line I’ll look at the board and see what I’ve done. He taught me that you can’t affect what others are doing, or let them affect you.’
Now, when it came to the ‘others’, there was only really one. Indurain. ‘He was a brick,’ Boardman says. ‘However he did it, it was pretty amazing.’ He had never raced Indurain before the start of the 1994 Tour, so predictions were difficult. While Indurain had won the last two prologues, Boardman was the Olympic pursuit champion and hour record holder. Indurain might confirm what many suspected – that continental road pros were a different breed, even a superior species. Then again, Boardman, although he came from a small pond, clearly had a special talent. The contrast between the pair was striking in almost every way. Indurain was tall and rangy, six foot two and twelve and a half stone; Boardman was compact and stocky, five foot nine but solid at eleven stone. On a bike, the differences were more marked: Indurain was a jumbo jet, Boardman a fighter plane.
‘It was really, really hot,’ Boardman recalls of the day. He didn’t have a special routine before the race. ‘Most of it was having the courage to do nothing. I learned that from my pursuiting days. Because when people are nervous, they go out for a ride. We were staying in a hotel just out of town. On the morning I went out on my bike for an hour. Just really easy. The others went for a couple of hours. The days before, too, they went out, and said, “Are you coming?” I said, “No, I’m going out on my own with two sprints.”
‘My routine was worked back from the time of the start: I want to be on the start line with three minutes to go, so how far is it, to walk from the bus to the start house? When am I going to warm up – because that had to be really close to the event. Where’s the signing on? When am I going to put my numbers on? When am I going to eat? It’s incredibly detailed. But the day is mainly waiting, until it’s time to act.’
While Boardman’s day was ‘dialled’, others’ were more flexible – or shambolic. ‘I remember riders getting their time trial bikes and getting their tools out, adjusting their saddles and bars.’ It was inconceivable to Boardman that this would not have been taken care of in advance. ‘This was my office; this was where I went to work. You don’t plug in a new piece of equipment before the most important meeting, do you?’
Boardman’s bike, a new Lotus ‘Superbike’, essentially a road version of the machine he’d ridden at the Olympics, attracted attention. LeMond, always interested in equipment, was spellbound. He warmed up facing Boardman outside the Gan team’s campervan. ‘Greg was like, “Oh, a shiny new piece of kit!” He was genuinely fascinated, and he picked your brains about equipment a lot. He was like a very, very intelligent kid.’
As he waited to start his effort, Boardman tried to take his psychologist’s advice and embrace the challenge ahead – which meant embracing his fear. ‘I thought, right, this is going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And there’s no escaping that. There’s no pretending I’m going to have an easy day. It is going to be the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever done and I accept that.
‘It was quite liberating.’
The scale of the Tour was something new, even compared with the Olympics. ‘But I had to accept that all these people lining the road ahead of me, and the size of this event, and the millions of people watching. I can’t affect that and that doesn’t affect me. Put it to one side. It was all about my performance.’
Boardman was among the last starters, along with the young world road race champion, Lance Armstrong; finally, Indurain, in the yellow jersey as the previous year’s winner, would be the last man to go.
In the start house, Boardman was held up by an official and the TV camera lingered – the commentator Phil Liggett described it as ‘a tense but marvellous moment’ – before the countdown began, the official holding out five fingers and folding them over:
‘Cinq ... Quatre ... Trois ... Deux ... Un ...’
Boardman shot into a corridor of people: there was a huge crowd, six deep, lining the straight, pouring over the barriers, leaning into the road. Boardman sprinted, out of the saddle, before settling into his extreme position: arms stretching over the front wheel, head down, like a bullet. He remembers little of the ride. He doesn’t recall it being painful. ‘They tend not to hurt if you’ve got it right and you’re fresh, which I was.’
The rider who started a minute in front of Boardman was Luc Leblanc, who had been so dismissive of his hour record a year earlier. The contrast in styles was remarkable: the bare-headed Leblanc, his brown hair blowing in the wind, on a bike on which he didn’t look comfortable, shifting in the saddle, frequently standing up for more power – which, as Boardman knew, came at the cost of aerodynamics. Boardman had clocked Leblanc as he waited in front of him, ‘on a bike you could quite literally go and buy in [the sports shop] Decathlon. Probably 44cm [wide] bars.
‘Even if he’d been producing the same power as me, he’d have lost at least a minute …’
There was something else that Boardman knew, though he doesn’t say whether he derived any special advantage from the knowledge. Having the team car behind you could serve as an aerodynamic aid: ‘People don’t realise that having a car up your butt makes a bloody big difference. Because turbulence goes behind you and sucks you backwards, having a car behind you is beneficial. It’s 20 watts difference.’
All the riders had cars behind them, but perhaps Boardman’s was closer (it was certainly close the following year, when Boardman fell in the rain at Saint-Brieuc, and was almost run over, ending his second Tour within a few minutes of it starting).
In Lille, Boardman knew he was on a good day, but didn’t know how he was going relative to anyone else. For those watching on television, too, there was scant information; the action was mainly transmitted from a fixed camera on the finish line, which tracked the riders as they sprinted up the long, wide, gently rising finishing straight – all of them fighting, weaving from one side to the other in search of a smoother surface or the most sheltered spot, getting out of the saddle to try and generate more power.
Boardman was careful not to start too fast. He was wary of getting carried away by the occasion; the people cheering, the realisation that he was riding the Tour de France – the Tour de France! The knack to riding a good time trial is always the same: it’s all about pacing, judgement, calculation. Things that Boardman is good at. ‘The equation in my head, in any time trial, was: how far is it to go; how hard am I trying; is it sustainable?
‘And that changes depending on how far you have to go. If the answer is “Yes, it is sustainable,” then you’re not trying hard enough. If the answer is “No, I can’t sustain it,” then it’s too late.
‘So the answer you’re looking for is: “Maybe.”’
For the entirety of his ride, Boardman remains in his aerodynamic position: bum up, head down, only shifting slightly for corners. He knows where he has to touch the brakes, where he doesn’t. And as he enters the long finishing straight, he can see, in front of him, his minute-man, Leblanc.
‘Look at this!’ says Liggett on commentary.
