How I Won the Yellow Jumper (6 page)

‘Mr Boulting. Hello, it's Olympic Gold Medallist Chris Boardman here. Just ringing to remind you that it's your son's birthday.' I imagined my dad standing in his kitchen a thousand miles away, frowning at the receiver in puzzlement, before hanging up.

Nothing fazes Chris. He exudes the kind of absolute certainty that surely only comes with having been the best in the world. He generates a kind of density of purpose in his dealings with you, which is matched only by the density of his actual body. Although he is no longer at his racing weight, Chris has by no means gone to seed, and in fact he's in very good shape. He stands perhaps an inch shorter than me. One day on a ritual run, I asked him how much he weighed, guessing it was a little less than my weight.

‘Eighty kilos.' I was amazed. It was eight kilos more than me. I looked at him disbelievingly. ‘I'm just very dense,' he explained. He opened up a little sprint, and left me for dead as we turned for home. The man has lungs like wheelie bins.

Certain things are immutable though. Phil Liggett is one such thing. A silver-haired, silver-tongued supremo in shorts. It has taken me many years to grow used to the sight of a man of some considerable years who routinely shaves his legs.

Frankly, on that first Tour, I was still at the stage where the shaved-leg thing was making me writhe with mirth and misunderstanding. I would chuckle at all those smooth-skinned men in shorts all over the place, and I was troubled by visions of them all in their bathtubs, wreathed in bubbles in the style of a Camay soap advertisement, stretching their legs skywards as they glided their razors down their shinbones. I was reminded of a passage in Matt Seaton's excellent book
The Escape Artist
, in which he ponders the practicalities of leg-shaving. The question for Seaton was not so much why as where to stop. How high should the shaved area extend? Should it stop as soon as is necessary, at the line of the shorts, creating a hairy-trunks effect? Or should it perhaps extend much higher, possibly even incorporating, well, everything?

As is clear, I was still scarcely able to conduct a conversation with a hairless-legged man in shorts without inadvertently glancing at them. I'm over that now, except when I am talking to George Hincapie, whose varicose veins at the end of a day
in the saddle look as if a family of vipers has crawled under his skin and begun to feed on his calf muscles. They are among the Tour's greatest sights and, like the twenty-one switchbacks of Alpe d'Huez, will one day be numbered for posterity and given plaques bearing the names of famous domestiques who never wore the yellow jersey.

But Phil with hairy legs is unimaginable. He paces around the race with a huge, bouncing gait, easily straddling five feet with each stride. He is known by all, and spends his days flitting from truck to truck, servicing the English-speaking world with its cycling commentary requirements. From Perth to Pennsylvania, Cape Town to Carlisle, the Tour de France sounds like Phil Liggett. With his partner Paul Sherwen they have a cult following in the USA, the size of which would make Marilyn Manson proud.

It took years for Phil to remember my name. Years. I was first introduced to him back at the Permanence in Paris in 2003. I have to confess that his name meant nothing to me, just as mine meant nothing to him. He was a ball of enthusiastic energy. Snapping up my accreditation he studied it closely and, seeing to his satisfaction that it had the requisite number of stars and special stamps, his first words to me were, ‘Have you got yours yet?'

I had no idea what he meant. He took me, almost literally by the hand, to the other side of the vast hangar where the Tour's administration had set up shop, and, pushing through a phalanx of oddly dressed Belgian journalists, led me to the front of a queue, where a nice lady gave me a plastic bag emblazoned with the Crédit Lyonnais logo. Phil patted me on the back and smiled. ‘There you go, Ben.'

And with that he vanished, lost in a sea of cycling correspondents. It would be days before our paths crossed again. I looked in the bag. It contained a limited-edition wristwatch commemorating the centenary edition of the Tour. I still have it, unopened, in mint condition. My youngest daughter was born that year and I have it in mind to pass it on to her, so that she can put in on eBay when she's a student. She might get enough for a few pints and a curry.

I suspect Phil must have boxes in the attic full of such tat. I wonder if he ever takes it all out and gazes at it with nostalgia and pride. I doubt it.

The most striking thing about Phil though, and this is what marks him out as uniquely adapted to the role of cycling commentator, is the way his brain works. Freudian psychology hypothesises the existence of the Über-Ich, the super-ego,
which acts as an inhibitor to the expression of our id, our most primal instinctive drives. Without this facility, we would be wildly prone to acts of self-expression, which would mean that life would be unlivable. We would give vent to every passing impulse, no matter how much we would be better served by keeping our thoughts to ourselves.

It's safe to say that Phil's Über-Ich is not very high functioning. At best, its batteries need changing. At worst, I think the whole thing needs ripping out and replacing. He operates seemingly without any interface between what is thought and what is expressed. In most of us, this would be catastrophic. But Phil is a benign man, and the worst that his unconscious can throw at us is a mild expression of concern that the weather might be about to turn a little cooler than he had anticipated.

The great benefit to him of this slight malfunction is that he can talk. In the beginning was the Word, but before that there was Phil.

You'll see him at breakfast commentating his way through his choices at the buffet table.

‘Marmalade perhaps today or some honey maybe no had that yesterday it'll be the jam today and maybe a croissant but not a chocolate one had too many of them for tea and besides need to watch the old waistline ah hello Ned how you doing son Ullrich for today I reckon pass us the butter . . .'

Sometimes you're not sure whether he's talking to you, talking on the phone, thinking out loud or actually commentating. You have to study closely the nuances to determine whether these are musings or actual communication.

‘Going to be hot today yup for sure Armstrong to make his move bloody iron couldn't get the damn thing working and the sat nav packed up last night reckon that final climb'll splinter them today had too much cheese last night woke up bloody thirsty in the night too think Hushovd'll edge it today
don't you Nick, er Ned. Ben. Morning all.'

Morning, Phil.

Yet, even on those early Tours, his voice was bedding itself into my unconscious. Accompanied by Paul Sherwen, the pair of them go through the gears as the stage reaches its end. As the bunch chases the break, the algebra narrowing, the equation of the inevitable catch holding steady, it's Phil's voice that will rise to prominence, and which signifies, more than any other sound, July and the Tour de France.

There's a section of the show in which Phil and Paul answer viewers' emails. The office in London filters the best ones, and faxes (yes, faxes!) them through to our truck parked in a field somewhere in France. (If they could find a way of installing a telex machine in the truck, we'd be using that instead of laptops.) The two commentators, sitting side by side in a ridiculously cramped studio, gaze up at the camera, read out the questions and answer them. In doing that, one of them has to pull off one of television's trickiest feats: the art of looking pleasantly interested in what the other person is saying while not actually looking at them.

Occasionally these sections will be illustrated with some expert opinion. Men like Rolf Aldag, Graham Jones or Laurent Fignon, while he was still alive and working for French TV, will be consulted. Sections of their interviews will then be dropped into the coverage in answer to a particular enquiry. There came a time on the 2009 Tour when a viewer asked for my opinion.

I had written in a column for the ITV website at the beginning of the Tour that Lance Armstrong had no chance of winning it. But after a week's racing and a succession of things going his way, that prediction looked far less secure. I was being asked if I still stood by my statement.

Phil read out the email, and threw it over to me, posing the question like this. ‘Well, let's find out the answer. Ned, what do you think? Can Lance Armstrong still win the Tour?' I had recorded an answer in which I concluded that, no, he couldn't, and wouldn't win it. Then, in the final edit the answer was grafted on to Phil's question, and the show then went on its course.

It was an important moment for me though. My opinion had been sought and had been deemed worthy of voicing. And what's more, I was right. Armstrong couldn't win the Tour that year, and he didn't. It wasn't perhaps the hardest call to make in the history of sporting predictions, but it was a start. It had taken me the best part of a decade to muster the self-confidence to make a major judgement I could justify.

Phil had even got my name right. Someone must have written it down for him in his notes.