Wednesday 29 July, 1992. A 23-year-old carpenter from Wirral crouches arms outstretched over the handlebars of a sci-fi bicycle waiting for the start of the 4,000m pursuit final at the Vall d’Hebron Velodrom near Barcelona. He is unemployed, broke, married with two children, crippled with nerves and firmly believes he has no chance of winning the gold medal. Around the world, an estimated 62m viewers gaze with curious expectancy at their television screens, patiently waiting to see what will happen next. The clock counts down. The flag drops and the race begins. With a grimace, the cyclist starts to pedal.
“Even when I was sitting on the start line and I’d won the rounds previously, set the fastest times, done a world record in training ... I never actually thought I was going to win it,” says the successful businessman that is the Chris Boardman of recent times, addressing an audience in a clip located somewhere on the outer reaches of YouTube. “I am naturally a pessimist. I am a glass-half-empty kind of person. It’s something I came to terms with a long time ago. But I learned to manage it. I learned to harness it and it really happened at the moment of that gold medal, quite literally a few seconds before the start. I thought sod it, I’m just going to be as good as I can be and when I cross that line I’ll look at the board and see where it got me.”
As it turned out, Boardman didn’t cross that line, his new philosophy ensuring he didn’t need to. In pursuit cycling both participants start the race at opposite sides of the 250m track, with the objective being to ride the allotted distance in the fastest time, or for one competitor to win by reeling in their opponent. In this particular final of Olympic track cycling’s blue riband event, the stopwatch was rendered redundant as the out-of-work chippy from Merseyside arrowed past the reigning world champion with a lap to spare, winning Britain’s first track cycling gold medal since Thomas Lance and Harry Ryan had pedalled to victory on a tandem in Antwerp 72 years previously. But while Boardman’s may have looked a heroic solo effort, nobody who saw it was under any illusions he’d had plenty of assistance.
As peculiar a sight as Lance and Ryan must have looked on their bicycle made for two in 1920, Boardman became the talk of Barcelona when he first pitched up at the Velodrom two days previously on an extraordinary looking machine made by an eccentric self-taught engineer in Norfolk. A keen amateur cyclist, Mike Burrows made his living manufacturing packaging machines, but had spent over a decade banging around his workshop trying to figure out how to maximise his own speed in the saddle.
Realising that over 80-90% of a cyclist’s energy is expended overcoming air resistance, Burrows hit upon the wheeze of manufacturing the lightest racing bike frame possible out of something other than the traditional diamond-shaped wind-unfriendly tubing, using a one-piece shell that would hold both rider and wheels in the optimum position to minimise drag. Once his prototype was tailored to his specific requirements, he sent it off to the local car factory with a request that they pimp his ride.
“With Lotus in Norfolk on my doorstep, one of their chaps, a keen cyclist and a friend, Rudy Thoman, took my bike into the workshop and said ‘Let’s have a look at what Mike’s done,’” an exultant Burrows told the Guardian in the wake of Boardman’s win. “And it clicked, of course. They tested it in their wind tunnel there and said ‘Hey! What the heck have we got here?’”
What they had was a bicycle that, upon being given a final spit and polish over 12 months at great expense by the engineers at Lotus, would become known as Chris Boardman’s iconic Lotus Superbike or Windcheetah: a peculiar sleek, black, feather-light cantilever design fashioned from carbon fibre in the “monocoque” style, rounded off with unaligned wheels (one disc, one tri-spoke) on the same side and extended handlebars that allowed its rider to sit hunched forwards with arms out, elbows resting and fingers interlocked, not unlike a particularly introspective drunk hunched on the counter from a bar stool that’s a bit too high.
Boardman was the ideal candidate to ride this new machine, which he would go on to cite as the difference between him winning gold and bronze in Barcelona. Having begun his cycling career by turning up for what he describes as “a tiny little 10-mile time trial” in Chester at the age of 13, he quickly became hooked and kept “going back week after week getting slightly better until I eventually ended up in the British team”. Unlike the veritable peloton of successful male and female British cyclists who have since followed in his wake, representing the UK was not an achievement that seemed to instil much pride in Boardman. “We weren’t winning anything at the time and just even being in the British team was not a great thing,” he would later recall.
Left undisturbed to go about his business without encountering distractions such as acclaim, Boardman was so meticulous in his attention to detail and preparation for races that he earned the sobriquet The Professor. His field of expertise stretched to studying hi-tech data regarding pedal revs, power output and heart-rate while putting the hammer down on a stationary bike attached to a laptop in the spare bedroom of his terraced house in Hoylake.
“The thing I used to enjoy about time trialling is that you got out of it what you put in,” he said. “It was measurable, it was quantifiable and you were in control of your own destiny. I was fascinated by going to a race, having a performance and then going ‘Right, what did we want to happen? What actually happened? What was the gap? How do we close the gap?’ It sounds a bit cheesy but it wasn’t about trying to win, it was about trying to be better. It was a fascinating process that led on to bigger things.”
First it led to the Lotus factory, where Boardman and Burrows convened with assorted engineers who knew nothing whatsoever about cycling to test the prototype in the car manufacturing plant’s wind tunnel and decide on the most aerodynamically efficient position for the cyclist to perch on his futuristic machine. Today such gatherings of cyclists and clipboard wielding eggheads constitute the kind of passé workaday grind Mark Cavendish and other top-class bike riders might mention in passing on their Twitter accounts, but back then such attention to detail was practically unheard of.
“These are areas we wouldn’t have examined because we were blinkered by thoughts of what I was supposed to look like while riding a bike,” said Boardman. “It came from bringing people into the process who weren’t cyclists; who were completely ignorant of cycling but were expert in what they did. They looked at this problem of getting this person who is on two wheels across this distance as quickly as possible by making this person as aerodynamic as possible. It was just a wholly different set of thinking which revolutionised the sport and took it by surprise.”
Meanwhile in Scotland, another young, unemployed British amateur racer had been pottering away in the workshop of a friend’s bike store. The Rocky Balboa to his rival’s Ivan Drago when it came to training methods, Graeme Obree was an extraordinary bike rider who had also figured out that the proper marriage of cyclist and conveyance could drastically reduce wind resistance and increase speed. The man who would go on to become known as the Flying Scotsman had been experimenting with a variety of riding styles while simultaneously and unwittingly driving Boardman towards Olympic gold.
“Graeme was an eccentric guy who brought a completely different position to riding,” said Boardman, unaware at the time that Obree’s eccentricities would later be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. “He was a real oddity and from a personal perspective he was the only person in my early career that, pre-Olympic Games, could still beat me in a time trial when I was on top form. When I look back, I realise that moved me on. Without him I would have stayed where I was because the level of commitment got me the rewards that I wanted. But only by somebody being there to push me did I move forward again. So he was instrumental, ironically, in me winning Olympic Games and everything else.”
Everything else. After his Olympic triumph, Boardman would go on to enjoy success on the road, including multiple Tour de France prologue wins. But it was the hour record for the longest distance cycled in 60 minutes on a bicycle he craved. The holy grail of great cyclists, most of whom are too scared to even try it for fear of the repercussions failure might have on their professional careers, it has been held by Fausto Coppi, Eddy Merckx and Miguel Indurain among other titans on two wheels.
With nothing to lose and almost certainly motivated by envy at the success of Boardman, a cyclist he considered his inferior, at Barcelona 1992, Obree would go on to break the hour record as an amateur in Norway on a home-made bicycle. Six days later The Professor took Obree’s record, schooling the Flying Scotsman in Bordeaux’s Vélodrome du Lac and taking the record which both men would go on to break again. Indeed, it is still held by Boardman, and remains the personal highlight of the Wirralian’s career, even if it was his Olympic success that made him a household name and his fortune as a manufacturer of affordable and not so affordable racing bikes.
“I never really thought long-term about where I was going to go or what I was going to do,” Boardman has confessed in the past. “Twelve months was about as far ahead as I ever thought because that was a believable amount of time: I could see where I was now, I could see where I might be able to push forward too. I’d watched the Olympic Games on television, but as I only ever thought 12 months ahead I’d never really considered them. But it was two years out [from Barcelona] when we realised from a result at a world championship that the gap between where I was and the best in the world was small enough and thought ‘That’s possible.’”
Two years of intensive, hi-tech training, fine-tuning and tinkering later, Boardman and his backroom team of eggheads arrived in Barcelona to give the Lotus its first public excursion and the Briton promptly broke the world record, advancing to the quarter-final with a time of 4min 27.397sec. The following evening, he smashed his own day-old mark, seeing off Denmark’s Jan Petersen in 4:24.496 with a performance so impressive it prompted our own Frank Keating to record how “the aficionados ringing the intimate little boarded rollercoaster track cut into the scrubland hills above the old city sat spellbound in the evening sun at Boardman’s opulent dash, glinting spokes and a blazing saddle”.
They were spellbound again the following day as Boardman saw off Australia’s Mark Kingsland in the semi-final, meaning he would have to duke it out with the reigning world champion Jens Lehmann in the race of truth to the gold. Over to Steve Bierley, who was on hand to report the ensuing showdown for the Guardian.
“The goal was as certain as anything can be on wooden boards,” he wrote, “and the digital clock recording the split times suddenly ceased to function, almost as if to save the German further visual embarrassment. By the 13th lap Boardman sensed he could catch Lehmann and he duly did, punching the humid air as he swept in front. It was a marvellous moment.”
Not everyone thought it was marvellous. Guardian reader John Sturgis quickly fired off a missive to our letters page and can’t have been the only member of the public to think that, like the disgraced 100m sprinter Ben Johnson four years previously, Boardman “had a secret weapon that gave him a clear advantage over the rest of the field”. It was of course Boardman’s Lotus bike to which Sturgis was alluding, but if the vanquished Lehmann shared his view he hid it well. “On the day he was the better man,” the German said magnanimously. “I had the same problem when I won the world championships last year on a new German bike. Then everybody wanted to talk about it and not me.”
Having secured Britain’s first gold medal of the Barcelona Games, Boardman was understandably delighted. “I said before the Olympics that I was confident, but there was no point in me saying the gold medal was there for the taking,” he said. Curiously, his comments couldn’t have been more at odds with those he’d make some 20 years later about being the glass-half-empty kind of person who never actually thought he was going to win gold. Does it matter? Hardly. On those Barcelona boards he was as good as he could be.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion