on his lips. ‘After Bordeaux, he says that half the peloton could break the hour record. And next year, I catch him for a minute …’
Leblanc gives Boardman a target to aim at in the final kilometre: a big, 44cm-wide, off-the-peg bike-shaped target, hair billowing in the wind. Now it is impossible not to be struck by the contrast. Leblanc is a diminutive climber but he looks twice the size of Boardman.
Boardman aimed for his back wheel. ‘The straight was long, and seeing Leblanc allowed me to change strategy slightly.’ This was where the answer to the question always in his mind – ‘Can I sustain this effort?’ – went from ‘maybe’ to ‘no’. But it didn’t matter. It would be over soon. ‘When you see something coming up and think, “I can push on a bit more and get a ‘reward’ before the end…”’ The reward being the catch. ‘That helped quite a bit.’
Leblanc, riding up the right-hand gutter, becomes aware of the Exocet missile behind him, turns around to glance over his shoulder, then moves over as Boardman, who had seemed to be toying with which side to pass him on, rockets up the inside. The time to beat is 8 minutes, 13 seconds, by Armand de Las Cuevas. Boardman speeds through the line: 7:49. The fastest time by 24 seconds. And at 55kph, the fastest time trial the Tour has ever seen.
Boardman already knew it had been a good ride. ‘It was one of the very few moments in my entire career where I could not have done anything differently. It was perfect. They don’t hurt, you just can’t go any faster.’
He looks a little wistful as he adds: ‘I never got those conditions again.’
There’s no time to linger on Boardman in the aftermath of his ride; we see him freewheeling into a mass of bodies and disappearing. The camera flashes instead to an expressionless, yellow-jerseyed Indurain in the start house. Three seconds later, his countdown begins. Eight seconds after Boardman finishes, he starts.
Indurain, the last of the 189 riders, hammers around the course. His time trialling had let him down at the recent Tour of Italy, where he finished second to Evgeni Berzin. But now he looks formidable. Whereas Boardman was compact and bullet-like, Indurain is a blunt instrument: he bludgeons his way through Lille’s broad boulevards. He gets out of the saddle: a rare sight. His mouth is open, gasping for air: also a rare spectacle. He’s usually so cool, so impassive. Finally he appears, swinging around the final bend, on the brink of his third consecutive prologue victory – or is he? The clock reads 7:40. ‘It’s a long, long way to go, Miguel,’ Liggett’s voice crackles with emotion.
The clock counts on: 7.44 … 45 … 46 … 47 … 48 … 49 … And still Indurain powers up the finishing straight. Liggett again: ‘Boardman is the leader of the Tour de France! He’s done it!’
Indurain lunges across the line and the clock stops at 8:04: a full 15 seconds slower than Boardman.
Boardman remembers little of that eight-minute wait. ‘It’s a blur. You do something, there’s loads of noise, then people say: “You’ve done it!” And that’s the first time you start to have self-belief.’
Boardman is perhaps not as impassive as Indurain, but he is not exactly emotional, or sentimental. ‘I was happy,’ he says. Then corrects himself: ‘Relieved. That there had been this opportunity and I’d taken it. I had done what I came for.’
Classement
1 Chris Boardman, Great Britain, Gan, 7 minutes, 49 secs
2 Miguel Indurain, Spain, Banesto, at 15 secs
3 Tony Rominger, Switzerland, Mapei-Clas, at 19 secs
4 Alex Zülle, Switzerland, ONCE, at 22 secs
5 Armand de Las Cuevas, France, Castorama, at 24 secs
6 Thierry Marie, France, Castorama, at 29 secs
Bernard Hinault Leads Over the Pavé Early in the Stage
1 July 1980. Stage Five: Liège to Lille
236.5km. Flat, cobbles
The French call it pavé. It sounds exotic and benign – it could be a succulent cut of beef – but for cyclists it has a different meaning. It is the pavé that defines Paris–Roubaix, the ‘Hell of the North’ one-day classic that includes twenty-odd sections of cobbles, or pavé; hell because these cobbles are not the small stones polished by thousands of cars in a city, but large, uneven boulders planted in mud, arranged to run in narrow strips across the plains and fields of northern France and Belgium.
They are roads, but rarely used as such these days and hardly worthy of the name. Some are maintained purely for the purpose of meting out punishment once a year, around Easter time, to the cyclists of Paris–Roubaix.
Every decade or so, the pavé features not only in Paris–Roubaix but also in the Tour de France. In 2004 it was the pavé that destroyed the hopes of the Basque climber, Iban Mayo. In 2010 it did the same to another stick-thin climber, Fränk Schleck. On that occasion, even Lance Armstrong, who had capitalised on Mayo’s misfortune six years earlier, was a diminished figure, caught behind the carnage and reduced to chasing shadows, or younger, faster versions of himself, over the bone-jarring stones. ‘Sometimes you’re the hammer and sometimes you’re the nail,’ said Armstrong after the stage. ‘Today, I was the nail.’
Paris–Roubaix lends itself to great suffering and great quotes. Arguably the best is Theo de Rooy’s following the 1985 race, when he crashed, withdrew, and vented: ‘It’s bollocks, this race. You’re working like an animal, you don’t have time to piss, you wet your pants; you’re riding in mud like this, you’re slipping. It’s a piece of shit …’
‘Will you ride it again?’ asked the reporter.
‘Of course. It’s the most beautiful race in the world.’
It’s dangerous, the pavé. In 1998 Johan Museeuw fell in the Arenberg forest section during Paris–Roubaix and nearly lost his leg; in 2001 Philippe Gaumont broke his femur; in 2010 Fränk Schleck broke his collarbone. The weather matters. On dry days the dust kicked up by the bikes and vehicles fills lungs and leaves riders coughing for days. But when the rain falls, the challenge and danger are of a different order. A very different order indeed.
On 1 July 1980, it poured. It was a grey, bleak day as the Tour prepared to leave the industrial Belgian city of Liège, to head west to Lille. Five days earlier, the Tour had started in Frankfurt, then dipped into France, to Metz, before crossing another border to Belgium. Bad weather dominated those early stages. But the fifth stage, to Lille, looked set to be the worst of the lot. The rain was unrelenting. The wind blew hard across the northern European plains. ‘Thousands were by the roadside, sheltering under trees or huddled by their cars,’ as one report put it. ‘If stages two and three were purgatory, then stage five was hell.’
* * *
Few Tours have started with a bigger favourite than Bernard Hinault in 1980. Le Blaireau
