On the Road Bike (14 page)

It's meant as fun, and Maurice is rightly, if not universally, held in high esteem by the London cycling community. But, the more I ask around the white establishment which still sits at its heart, the more I get the sense that the issue has never been truly addressed. It's easier not to.

Once when I go and see Maurice at his shop, he keeps me waiting for a long time. A customer has come in who is parting with a significant sum of money. Maurice has his priorities and at times like this, understandably, I am not one of them.

I have no objections to this hiatus since it grants me an opportunity to mooch around his shop, glancing at the bits and pieces on display, as well as the dozens of images covering all the walls. There are old posters from his racing days in Belgium, faded photographs of Maurice snarling over his bars in numerous close finishes. There is a framed shot of him on the podium that day in Leicester, smiling at his detractors.

Every now and again, a famous name jumps away from the print and catches the eye.

Maurice Burton raced with Bradley Wiggins's late father Gary Wiggins in Belgium. He knew him well. When Bradley was born, he had held him in his arms within a few days. Back in London, long after the dissolution of the Wiggins' turbulent marriage, Maurice maintained sporadic contact with Bradley as he grew up. He watched him with a distant associated pride. In the most recent picture of the two of them, Bradley looks young. He is wearing the red and blue of the national champion, his hair betraying some ill-advised experimental blond highlights. He is standing next to Maurice and grinning awkwardly. In British cycling, it seems, you are never more than one or two removes away from champions.

There are pictures of Maurice's son, Germain. There are spaces on the wall for more, although he has been allocated a narrow corridor towards the rear of this shop. He's the boy on the time-trial bike, the boy winning the hill climb, the boy on the podium; the sixteen-year-old prodigy.

But, in flesh and blood, he's also the boy behind the till who's just left school and now works in a bike shop. Maurice Burton's two sons (Robert is a couple of years younger) are highly rated prospects. They are good, exceptional even, in their age groups, and both have been talked about as potential future champions, although getting their stoical father to admit that is a near impossibility. He's far too cautious, modest and inscrutable.

I talk to Germain while I wait for his dad to finish. He sits at a high stool, the cash register in front of him, occasionally serving a customer. He thinks hard about what he says before he says it. He has his father's slow, deliberate delivery. He tells me how he is devoted to the road, and has no experience of riding on the track. It's the opposite from his father's persuasion. But strangely it is having similar repercussions; he has ended up racing in Belgium. The junior scene there is flourishing, and fast; the average speed of their races often equals or exceeds the best amateur races back home.

He sits at the till, casually letting drop the names of Belgian towns, races, teams and riders. There are not many South London teenagers, I imagine, who can differentiate between West Flanders and Antwerp. Germain Burton can, just like his old man could.

In 2012, Germain was selected to ride for Great Britain in the Junior World Championships, and finished strongly in the main field. His potential seems boundless. But his father is always there to demand more, to warn of the potential pitfalls, and to put on a firm handbrake when ambitions shoot too far ahead of application.

‘Right, Ned. Sorry to have kept you waiting.' We break off and I follow Maurice back into his office. He's reading a freshly printed invoice as he goes.

‘That looked like a good bit of business, Mo.'

The customer has left the shop. He was a well-dressed man in his early fifties at a guess, tall and slightly out of context for Norbury. Maurice tells me he is high up in Lloyds Bank in the City. ‘What was his final bill?'

‘Eight thousand pounds.' Maurice barely registers any emotion. ‘That man's come to me because he doesn't want to go to Evans or wherever. He wants to come to me. I know a bit about what I'm selling.'

I suddenly think about that bike he ‘half-inched' from the front garden. He's come a long way. From Catford, to Norbury, via Belgium.

Quickly, we are back in the seventies.

If any fragile bond had existed between the rider and the country of his birth, the experience of being booed on the podium of the National Championships had broken it.

‘They just didn't like me, I think.'

It's hard to know what the reality of the selection was. But after a solitary trip to the Commonwealth Games in 1974 in Christchurch (from which he returned without a medal), Maurice Burton never represented his country again.

‘I felt like I was a foreigner. I didn't feel like I was British. It was like I was in no-man's-land.' And so, it was only fitting that it was the original no-man's-land that drew his attention. Flanders.

It was Christmas Day 1974 when Maurice Burton arrived in Ghent. He headed straight away for the Kuipke, the legendary velodrome. Here, under this canopy, and around this vertiginous track, was the beating heart of the sport north of the Alps. This was always the starting point for a generation or two of the hopeful, the misguided and the tenacious from Britain and Australia trying to make it on the Continent. And what's more, the night he arrived, the place was in full cry.

Christmas Day racing was a tradition, the track, beery and smoke-filled. Already he was very far away from his home in Catford where his family would be quietly celebrating Christmas. The scene laid out before him was cacophonous, unruly, thrilling, a far cry from the reserve with which the sport was ‘enjoyed' back home.

He sat in the stands and watched Eddy Merckx and Roger de Vlaeminck win a Madison race, drinking in his fill of these stellar names in action. In theory, this was supposed to be a two-week holiday from the apprenticeship he'd half-heartedly started, mostly to appease his parents. At least, that's what he'd told people. But he knew what was really going on.

‘I had two weeks to decide what I was going to do with my life. I'm either going to be a bike rider, or I'm going to be an electrician. You can't do both.' He pauses. ‘I never went back to work.'

At the end of the racing, he went off in search of the one contact at his disposal: the extraordinary Rosa De Snerck. Rosa and her husband Marcel ran the Plume Vainqueur bike shop in Ghent. She had become well known in the Anglophone scene for her helpfulness towards this shambolic trickle of hopeful immigrants. If she herself could not offer some temporary lodging for them, then she'd find somewhere else for them to sleep. Unfortunately, this occasionally meant they'd be sleeping at the ‘Butcher's Shop'. This was the rather ghastly nickname for a rather ghastly place.

And that's where Maurice Burton ended up spending the first few bitter weeks of his cycling career abroad. Many British riders made the same harrowing acquaintance with the landlord of the Butcher's Shop. He was a curious man called Jan Vermeeren, or Jan ‘The Papers', as Australian rider Alan Peiper remembers in his autobiography,
A Peiper's Tale
. Unwashed and hirsute, he trawled round Ghent and collected old newspapers all day, which he then brought home in a hand-drawn pony cart. Some of them he burnt in the stove (the only source of central heating), but mostly he just stacked them in huge piles throughout the otherwise unfurnished premises.

‘The rumour was that Jan was rich and owned many houses,' writes Peiper. ‘He just lived like a hermit, on the edge of society. He found his food in the dustbins at the back of supermarkets and I would often see him eating rotten fruit in the kitchen.'

Maurice Burton lived there at the same time as Peiper. He too remembers his esoteric landlord with a mixture of horror and fascination. ‘He was a Seventh Day Adventist. He never washed and never shaved, and he used to sleep with his boots on. He never washed out his bowl, he'd just put the next food in it and eat away.'

‘Welcome to Belgium?' I suggest to Maurice, as I try to imagine what this boy from Catford made of Jan Vermeeren.

‘You'll soon find out whether you're going to make it as a rider in Belgium. You'll soon find out.'

Within a year Maurice was a professional, and within four weeks of turning pro, he'd earned enough money to pay cash for a brand-new Toyota Celica. Already he was earning upwards of £2,000 a week during the winter months of the ‘Six-Day' scene. He stuck at it for the best part of a decade, too, most years pulling in £35,000 or thereabouts. This was big money. At the same time, his father retired, after a lifetime's hard work on a wage that coughed up little more than £150 per week. On this score, at least, his son had emphatically won the argument.

But the track scene in Belgium, with all its showbiz connotations was complex and draining; each rider's role in it was pre-ordained to an extent, and his membership of its elite always in the balance.

The racing itself was, more often than not, a high-speed charade, albeit a murderously hard one. As in the wrestling, so beloved of his father back in London, the winner was frequently pre-determined, and the exact manner of his victory choreographed. That isn't to say that the best riders didn't routinely carry away the spoils; there was no way that a weaker member of the group would ever be allowed to dominate. It's just that the races were more like almighty ballets. Attack would follow attack, all of them pre-decided, until eventually the winner would ‘thrillingly' reel them in and prevail. The aesthetics of the win were every bit as vital as the win per se.

Maurice remembers getting his instructions on a nightly basis.

‘The boss would tell you how many laps you'd take. If it's your lap, and they're all riding at fifty kilometres in the hour, then you've got to be doing fifty-three kilometres an hour to ride away from them. So you've got to have it in you in order to do it. It only becomes a problem when you start to take one more lap than you're supposed to take, and that's when they start to get a bit heavy on you.'

It was demanding, from the start. First of all, to join the elite, you had to be good enough, and your face had to fit. With so much at stake, the competition among amateur wannabees was brutal.

‘Once in Ghent, some Australians and British amateurs ganged up against me, and one of them tried to put me over the rail.' As he remembers that frightening assault, Maurice notes that in 2006 a Spanish rider named Isaac Galvez had been killed when he rode into exactly that rail.

‘I knew what was happening. Afterwards I went down into one of the massage cabins underneath the track.' He was seeking out his assailant. ‘I wrecked the cabin with him in it. I just went in there and turned him off the table. I wrecked it.'

There was, as Maurice recalls, a nucleus of fifteen or so riders who earned the big money. He was one of them. But they constantly fretted about their membership of this fraternity and were wary of newcomers. They also doped, routinely, casually, daily. Alan Peiper describes the scene. ‘It was a joke, it was fun, a buzz, no different from a beer or a coffee. That was the attitude; it was as commonplace as that, just like naughty kids experimenting with beer or cigarettes in the park.'

Maurice Burton, with the benefit of hindsight, and having seen a number of his peers meet premature deaths, sees it differently. Less of a joke, all in all.

He is glad, in many ways, that a broken leg in 1984 put an end to his racing career. Had that not happened, he suggests, his health may well have shelved off steeply. Although he is no mood to talk about this in detail, he leaves me in no doubt that the drugs were endemic, omnipresent and consumed without the slightest thought for the consequences. The rewards for this rarefied gladiatorial existence were clear enough: fame, money, status, and thrills. But it was a hard, insecure and corrupt affair too.

And then there was the colour of his skin. The sniggers and whispers and boos which formed the white noise of his education on a bike in Britain had been silenced when he emigrated. But the issue had not gone away. It had just morphed into something more marketable.

Once again, I am reminded of Major Taylor.

‘I was something different [in Belgium]. They liked that. They never used to say I came from England. They used to say I came from Jamaica. It sounded better. I just let them.' A shadow of a smile passes over Maurice's weathered face. ‘Whatever it took, you know.'

Sometimes it took extreme tolerance, on Maurice's part. It was an unreconstructed world, in many ways lawless, or at best making the rules up as it went along. The velodromes of Germany, Milan, Switzerland and Belgium echoed to some strange sounds indeed.

Horst Schütz was one of Maurice's contemporaries. By nature a sprinter, he had also been, at one time, the motor-paced World Champion (following in the pedal-strokes, some eighty years previously, of Major Taylor himself). Schütz, it is said, had a highly particular way of geeing himself up before a race, which he at least had the common sense to keep hidden as best he could.