was staggering.
Boardman, meanwhile, had indeed been able to use his hour record as a springboard into the professional ranks, joining Legeay’s Gan team. ‘Roger had come to see the hour record and Pete Woodworth [Boardman’s manager] had spoken to him,’ Boardman tells me. ‘I wasn’t super enthusiastic or excited at the idea of turning pro. I was more intimidated ... No, trepidation would be the right word. We went to see him at the Tour of Britain [in August] expecting him to say, “This is the pro team; this is where you’ll fit in,” but instead he asked me: “What do you want to do?”
‘It was bizarre,’ Boardman continues. ‘I said, “Well, I’d quite like to go to the Tour de France, but only to ride ten days.” Roger just laughed and said: “First-year pros don’t often get to ride the Tour. But we’ll see.”’
Boardman guested for Gan before the end of the 1993 season, in a time trial, the GP Eddy Merckx. ‘I wore one of Greg LeMond’s skinsuits,’ he says. He won it. ‘I had no idea what to expect because you were segregated. Although I’d won an Olympic gold medal, the fact was that if you asked any pro bike rider who had won the gold medal at the pursuit in the Olympics, they possibly wouldn’t have known.’
The GP Eddy Merckx really offered few clues to Boardman’s potential. Although he was surprised to win, he was operating safely in his comfort zone in a time trial. The real test came the following year, with his induction to the peloton. Not that there was any formal induction: he was expected to know how to ride in a bunch, where to position himself, and be familiar with the unwritten rules and etiquette. Most riders graduated from the European amateur peloton, which operated to similar rules – but of course Boardman was different. He might as well have come from Mars.
‘It was always about managing my nervousness,’ he says. ‘I really struggled at first. For three months I thought, I’m not going to cut it. I don’t like it. It’s scary. It’s painful. It’s highly stressful.
‘In the bunch I was at the pointy end or the blunt end’ – the front or the back. ‘The problem with this is that at both ends you end up fighting: at the front to stay there, at the back to move up. It was terrible. Greg helped a lot, he gave me tips. Things like, “All you can see is a mass of riders in front of you, but if you’re going round a right-hand bend there will always be a space that appears on the left; so you can accelerate into a space that isn’t there yet.” Or, “Overlap your bars with someone else’s in the middle of the bunch and they’ll automatically want to move away.” Greg gave me tonnes of little tips that really helped. But it was all cerebral consciousness stuff so it was hard, hard work.’
Boardman made a breakthrough at the Tour of Murcia in March. ‘It used to be that people who were unfit or sick went to Murcia, while everyone else went to Paris–Nice. I won the prologue there and it was my first time in a leader’s jersey.’ It meant more than his Olympic gold medal or hour record. ‘The jersey was a passport to the front. I hadn’t experienced that before. It was a pivotal moment. If you were a neo-pro you got battered: you’re the softest target, people just push you out the way. But when you’ve done something in the race, you’ve got a badge. Life gets a bit easier.’
What most troubled Boardman was that all his old certainties counted for little. Up to now, his career had been built on calculation and measurement – to the nth degree; all that had mattered, through training and aerodynamics and working with his coach, Peter Keen, was making himself fast. Adding another 150-plus riders to the equation complicated things.
* * *
Boardman’s place in the Gan team for the Tour was still undecided when he rode the Dauphiné Libéré, the week-long French stage race, in late May. He guaranteed his selection by winning three stages, the haul including the prologue, the time trial and, more surprisingly, a road stage, on a 157km loop around the Alpine town of Chambéry. For that one he broke away alone – and time trialled to the finish.
But as the Tour got closer, he began to feel unwell. He suffered terribly with nerves, which led him to work with a psychologist, John Syer, in the run-up to the Barcelona Olympics. The stress would force Boardman to think himself ill, or falling ill, even when he wasn’t.
His preparation, after his triumphant Dauphiné, was typical Boardman – on the face of it, idiosyncratic, but meticulously planned and thought out. While his peers were doing warm-up road races in Europe, he rode and won a 10-mile time trial for amateurs in north Wales. Looking ahead from north Wales to Lille and the Tour prologue, he said: ‘The podium is a possibility. It’s difficult to know who will be up there. Specialists like Thierry Marie seem to be fading. Indurain has been very quiet … Rominger is lying low.’
‘Chris is very close to his best form,’ said his coach, Peter Keen. ‘He still has a slight problem with a chest infection that we’re trying to clear up. A sputum sample enabled us to find the type of microbe and he is now on antibiotics.’
Boardman kept talking about this illness, too. Now, however, he says he can’t remember being unwell. He thinks it might have been a case of getting his excuses in first. ‘I used to need mental crutches like that, like many athletes do. You’re hypersensitive to any sensation or the slightest twitch or anything. It’s a bit childish, but it’s a crutch, in case it goes wrong. You don’t just say, “I couldn’t go any faster and I wasn’t good enough.” You weren’t secure enough in those days to think like that.’
In the days before the prologue, Boardman carried on doing his own thing, as strange as it seemed to his team-mates. He had his routine for coping with the nerves. ‘What I used to do was read and sleep. They were my two escapes.’ To assist the ‘escape’ he liked science fiction – Iain M. Banks was a favourite. ‘It was a way to not be there, while you were still there. And I slept under pressure. A lot. Which is quite a handy trait.’
He didn’t do what his team-mates did, what professional riders had always done, which was to go out for easy rides in the week before the race, recce-ing the prologue course at a gentle pace to get a feel for it. ‘They used to go out and ride the course if it was open and have a chat,’ Boardman says. ‘I went out on my own and I could probably tell you now where all the grids were, where there was a bump on the road. I memorised it.’ Most importantly, he memorised it at the same speed as he would tackle it on race day. ‘They put the team car in front of me; I had to do it at race speed. So I had the car in front, it would take me up to speed, then get out of the way before the corners. I thought I could get round the whole course without braking, but that was the only way to find out. So I had it all mapped out. That was two days before. From that point forward, we got all the information we could.’
Boardman habitually uses ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, meaning his team – not his professional team-mates, who were mere colleagues, but his far more important support team, led by Keen. But Keen wasn’t there – he ‘felt like a fish out of water’, says Boardman, and rarely went to continental races.
Boardman’s wife, Sally, was in Lille. ‘I used to resent Sally being there,’ says Boardman, with a smile to suggest he is joking. Only, he isn’t really. ‘She used to have a good time, a party, and her friends came over. I’d see them, they’d come to the hotel, all in happy spirits. They were going to have a good day. And I’m thinking, I’m crapping myself here. I’ve got seven minutes that decide my salary for the next year. It used to, reasonably or not, make me quite angry.’
Did he dream of becoming only the second Brit after Tom Simpson to wear the yellow jersey? ‘I did, yeah. But you just go out there and try and win. That’s the beauty of the time trial. You do your thing. It was the psychologist who got me to realise that you can only do what you can.’
Prior to the Barcelona Olympics, Boardman
