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Chris Boardman

2 July 1994. Prologue: Lille

7.2km. Flat

‘At the 1994 Tour, everybody went for a three-week race,’ says Chris Boardman. ‘I went for seven minutes.’

Chris Boardman was, and remains, unique. In the history of the Tour de France, at least since the prologue time trial was introduced in 1967, he is the only rider ever to go there specifically, and exclusively, targeting the hors d’œuvre to the race, the prologue.

Like some other hors d’œuvre, the prologue time trial is an acquired taste. ‘As pageantry goes in so beautiful a sport, ho hum,’ was the verdict of the American journalist Samuel Abt. ‘No long lines of riders flashing by, no desperate early breakaways, no sprinters tearing for the finish line, no climbers struggling to drop one another as the road rises.’

It isn’t even a proper stage – that is the whole point. The prologue was conceived as a way of adding an extra day to the Tour without falling foul of the regulations governing how many days the riders were allowed to race. And the motivation for its inclusion was financial. Don’t hold that against it, however, because in this it is no different to the race itself, set up to market the newspaper L’Auto. The Tour has always been nakedly commercial. But the commercial imperative intensified after 1962, when Félix Lévitan was appointed co-director, alongside Jacques Goddet. Goddet and Lévitan, both journalists, remained in charge until 1987, with Goddet looking after the sporting side, Lévitan responsible for the money. After Goddet and Lévitan, there were two short-term replacements, Jean-François Naquet-Radiguet, a cognac salesman, and Jean-Pierre Courcol, a former professional tennis player. Each lasted only one Tour before, in 1989, it passed once more into the safe hands of another journalist (and former professional rider), Jean-Marie Leblanc, who in turn handed it on to another ex-journalist, Christian Prudhomme, in 2005. In 110 years, the Tour de France has had only seven directors. And five of them have been journalists by profession.

The latest incumbent, Prudhomme, is no great fan of the prologue. For the first time since 1967, he opted not to include one in 2008 – then did the same in 2011, 2013 and 2014. It isn’t just a question of taste: this is also commercial. Prudhomme (formerly a television journalist) points to statistics that show the television audience is at its lowest when the Tour opens with a prologue time trial. It might be better for those who are there to watch – with the action spread over many hours, and the chance to see the riders individually and up close – but there is another and increasingly important audience to think of: TV. Like Sam Abt, and arguably most others, they prefer the spectacle of a road race.

Lévitan’s motivation for adding the prologue was to increase the Tour’s earning potential. Back then, the main source of income was the money paid by cities and towns along the route. They paid to host a start, even more to host a finish, and so Lévitan began to add what he called split-stages: more than one stage in a day. On occasion, he even managed to squeeze three stages into one day. The riders hated it.

The prologue time trial was a marginally more popular innovation than split-stages, and it was Lévitan’s way around the rule, from cycling’s world governing body the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), that stated a race could not last more than twenty-two days. Just as an hors d’œuvre is not considered a proper course in a meal, the prologue, which must be less than 8km, does not count as a proper stage. Thus it exploited a loophole in the UCI rules. And yet the first prologue, on a Thursday evening in Angers in 1967, was not actually called a prologue. It was called stage 1a (1b followed the next day). Two years later, the name ‘prologue’ was adopted.

That first one was won by an unheralded Spaniard, José María Errandonea, who held the yellow jersey only until the next day. Including stage 1a, the 1967 Tour comprised twenty-five stages over twenty-three days and 4,780km (the 2013 race was 3,400km over twenty-one stages). But the 1967 Tour is mainly remembered for tragedy. This was the Tour that saw the introduction of a new, short stage to add another day’s racing to an already packed schedule, and which saw the death of a rider, Tom Simpson, on the barren slopes of Mont Ventoux. If the two events were linked, little heed was taken – the Tour was again run over twenty-three days and 4,684km in 1968.

* * *

There are fans of the prologue, too. Thierry Marie in the 1980s, Boardman in the ’90s, Fabian Cancellara in the 2000s. Its appeal lies in its simplicity: it’s as pure a test of speed as you can get in professional cycling.

The prologue to the 1994 Tour de France was a classic. Held in the centre of Lille over a pan-flat 7.2km course, with wide boulevards and only a few sweeping bends, it was the perfect test. It was perfect in other ways, too, since it served up a tantalising confrontation between two masters in quite different fields.

It pitched the three-time Tour winner, Miguel Indurain, against a novice, Chris Boardman, whose only experience of the Tour had been as a spectator twelve months earlier. In terms of their background, they couldn’t have been more different. Indurain was steeped in the traditions of road racing on the continent, slowly ascending the hierarchy of his team until emerging as leader in 1991, the year of his first Tour victory. The twenty-five-year-old Boardman had arrived on the continent fully formed, as the finished article – but a complete contrast to Indurain, given that he came from a very different tradition. His apprenticeship was served in the obscure backwater of British time trialling.

Boardman felt like a fraud. ‘I felt like I cheated my way into this game,’ he says.

The Indurain–Boardman match-up was a little like the annual shinty–hurling international between Scotland and Ireland. They are essentially the same sport, but they exist in isolation, one quite separate from the other. When one tradition takes on another, there is always fascination and intrigue, in the same way that there might be with twins who are separated at birth and brought up in different families, in different countries. What, if anything, do they have in common?

Continental road racing and British time trialling appeared to have nothing in common, other than that both involved people riding bikes. One took place on the closed roads of Europe, often against the backdrop of the Alps and Pyrenees, and involved tactics, teams, courage and panache. The other was held in the early morning on fast, busy roads, against a backdrop of speeding lorries and cars, and involved calculation and pacing.

The British scene had never produced a champion able to convert his talent to continental road racing. But by 1994 Boardman had showcased his talent in shop windows more glamorous than dual carriageways in Britain; at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, where he won the pursuit, and then a year later at the Bordeaux Velodrome, where he went for the ultimate time trial, arguably the only one that resonated on the continent: the world hour record.

It was in July 1993 that Boardman took on the hour record in Bordeaux, 24 hours before a stage of the Tour de France finished in the French city. The timing was both deliberate and ingenious, because it allowed for a kind of cross-pollination. ‘The Hour’, already a big deal in the cycling world, became even bigger: it was amplified by its proximity to the Tour, not least because so many journalists were able to attend. At least one team manager was able to take it in, too. Roger Legeay, who ran the French Gan team, was more open to Anglophones than most, since his team, previously sponsored by Peugeot Cycles, had a history of having English-speaking riders, from Tom Simpson and Shay Elliott, through Graham Jones, Robert Millar, Phil Anderson and Stephen Roche, to his current star (albeit a fading one), the American three-time Tour de France winner, Greg LeMond.

Boardman had gone as far as he could in Britain. The only place for him to go now was the continent’s professional scene. Yet it was a step he was reluctant to take. ‘I was an outsider,’ he says. ‘I was a time triallist from Britain. The Olympics were amateur, so you either wait for someone to knock you off the top step, or you turn pro.’

The hour record that Boardman set out to break was held by the Italian road racing star of the 1980s, Francesco Moser. But by the time he came to tackle it, it no longer belonged to Moser. A week before Boardman’s attempt it was beaten by his domestic rival, the Scotsman Graeme Obree, on a track in Norway. ‘I’m disappointed not to be breaking Moser’s record,’ said Boardman at the time. He feared that Obree’s astonishing feat might remove some of the gloss from the record. He needn’t have worried. If anything, it raised interest. It meant Boardman had much to gain, but perhaps even more to lose.

He beat Obree’s mark, and with that, as Ed Pickering notes in his book, The Race Against Time, ‘The first part of Boardman’s PR ambush on the Tour was complete.’ The Tour reciprocated, staging their own ‘ambush’ as they invited Boardman to the podium in Bordeaux at the end of the next day’s stage, to share the platform with the man in the yellow jersey, Miguel Indurain, on his way to his third successive overall victory.

Tellingly, Boardman stood on the lower step, grinning like a schoolboy as ‘Big Mig’, in the yellow jersey, waved at the crowds with the bearing of a member of the Spanish royal family. It should also be noted that, although Indurain himself was gracious and humble, Boardman’s achievement did not meet with universal respect in the professional peloton. Luc Leblanc, the leading French rider, expressed his view that, if they put their minds to it, most members of the Tour peloton could better Boardman’s distance.

Less than a year later, in Lille, Boardman and Indurain met again, this time on the road. Indurain had built the foundations of his three Tour de France wins on his domination of time trials. He then rode defensively in the mountains, rather than with the attacking flair and panache of some previous Tour winners. If that didn’t fire the passions of many fans, it was impossible not to admire his prowess against the clock. He was a machine, most obviously in Luxembourg in 1992, when he averaged 49kph (30mph) over 65km and finished three minutes ahead of his closest challenger. ‘I thought I was having a good day and I lost four minutes,’ said a bewildered LeMond at the finish. ‘I thought for a moment I must have taken the wrong course.’ LeMond’s last Tour win had come in 1990; the speed of his decline, or Indurain’s improvement, or both, 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 spilled out his fears to John Syer. ‘What if this goes wrong? What if I can’t go fast enough? What if the other guy’s faster? What if I puncture?’

Boardman expected 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.’