On the Road Bike (26 page)

Then, our hero, Tommy Godwin, admiring Ossie's record from his home in the Potteries, decided he would win it back for King and Country. So, he duly set off in freezing conditions on New Year's Day 1939 from outside his sponsor's bike shop in Middlesex. It was reported that so many people turned out to see him off that the police thought there was a riot and called for back up.

He averaged more than two hundred miles a day, through an appalling winter, and even overcame the minor inconvenience of the outbreak of war in September. The introduction of rationing affected his vast dairy-based intake (Tommy, like Walter, was a vegetarian), and the blackout meant he could no longer use his lights to ride in the darkness. He had to wait for a full moon, and clear skies.

He did it, though. 75,065 miles. Then he carried on, just for fun. By Whitsun he had ridden the fastest ever 100,000 miles. It took 499 days, on each of which he averaged more than two hundred miles.

Eventually, he did settle down to the rest of his life. He was called up to service, but by now wasn't any good to the army. All those days in the saddle had changed him for ever. His heels wouldn't touch the ground, and his hands remained slightly curled. So he served out the war for the RAF and started a family.

That was when Barbara was born. She was the lady I'd emailed, erroneously claiming to have spoken to her dead father.

I get back in touch with her, and ask her what she recalls of her dad. Incredibly, she grew up with no idea of what he had achieved.

‘The most amazing thing about him was he never boasted about his world records,' Barbara, who is nearly seventy years old herself, writes to me. ‘I was sixteen years old before I knew. It was my headmaster who asked if my dad was the famous cyclist. I said I didn't think so, though he had a bike and he belonged to a cycling club. When I got home that afternoon I asked Dad if he was famous, his reply was “Who's told you that rubbish!”

‘He was the most wonderful man, a fabulous dad and a devoted husband. I do know without a doubt why he was such an achiever, some say he wasn't “wired” like other athletes, and I think that is true.

‘Dad gave everything away, trophies, cups, medals, anything to make someone else happy.

‘I wish you could have known him.'

Tommy Godwin died, seemingly as do so many cyclists, having returned from a ride with friends. He was just sixty-three.

Some dedicated soul, in a noble effort to preserve his place in the public imagination, has set up a twitter feed to commemorate his achievement. Each day, they tweet his mileage. The astonishing totals read like the mad wall scratchings of a man in solitary confinement. Here, at random are four days in the summer:

18 July: Tommy Godwin rode 333 miles today in 1939

19 July: Tommy Godwin rode 308 miles today in 1939

20 July: Tommy Godwin rode 348 miles today in 1939

21 July: Tommy Godwin rode 235 miles today in 1939

And then this:

22 July: Tommy Godwin rode 255 miles today in 1939

On exactly that same day, 22 July 1939 and probably not very far away, the other Tommy Godwin won his first race, on a track in the Midlands.

‘I was eighteen,' he tells me. And, though ‘Tommy 2' is now ninety-one when he tells me this, I can scarcely believe he was born just two years after the end of the First World War. He is so strikingly well, so rudely healthy, that it's almost a bit unsettling. Has the man lied about his age? Or has he been locked away in some cryonic chamber? What's his secret?

‘On 22 July 1939, I won my first ever prize in open competition. I was handed a note inviting me to take part in the Olympic trials.'

Tommy Godwin beams with pride, his manicured fingers play over the polished surface of a wooden box that sits gently on his immaculately creased trousers. We are sitting side by side in the stands at the Herne Hill Velodrome, as a procession of young riders takes to the track. We have time on our hands, as the afternoon drifts on; the racing is over-running somewhat. And so Tommy talks freely and warmly about a lifetime spent in pursuit of speed on a bike, a life whose pinnacle was reached at the very place we've met.

He is a remarkable man, a living connection with the London Olympic Games of 1948. But it isn't his longevity that makes this Tommy Godwin every bit as extraordinary as the other Tommy Godwin. It's simply being a Tommy Godwin that does that.

Where else but Herne Hill would have been so fitted to the moment, to the man? The location, and the man, were perfectly aligned.

A date in my calendar had been fixed for months. It was the Inter-Schools Championship Day at Herne Hill. An enthusiastic, extremely well spoken, young teacher from nearby Dulwich College (a palace of Victorian brick and expensively honed values) had asked me, and Tommy Godwin, to attend. I liked the idea of schoolkids using the track. I was reminded of stories I'd heard from a number of London riders, who'd told me how their first experience of cycling had come when their schools had taken them down to ride at Herne Hill. Most of South London's secondary schools would have sent kids to the track. It had been a treasured local resource, before it slipped into anonymity and decline, only recently to be re-animated a little.

It was a perfect early summer's day. I rode down to the track, this time on my own. Again, I locked my bike to the railings and made my way towards the stands.

It wasn't quite the meeting I had thought it would be. Handed a programme, I glanced down the list of competing schools. Far from being drawn from the velodrome's natural constituency of comprehensives, they were all private schools and from as far afield as Bedford. That was where I had been educated, where my dad had been a teacher; my old school had sent a team down to London! I caught on a breeze the particular strains of self-confident boys' voices that had once been so familiar to me. My childhood seemed a very foreign place.

There, sitting in the stands, was Tommy Godwin. He was unmistakable.

A small collection of men and women clustered disciple-like on the rows beneath him, so they sat at his knee level, their heads inclined towards him and angled slightly to catch his every word. Tommy sat in their midst, occasionally gesticulating. He looked twenty years younger than he actually was, his hair smashingly parted and fulsomely silver, his glasses framing eyes of steely blue. He wore a blazer, a club tie, a pair of English brogues and some mathematically pressed slacks. He was holding court. Even from a distance, as I approached, and took my seat to listen, I could tell he was on a roll.

‘I was a good all rounder. I could rough it up. I could sprint. I could ride pursuits, team pursuits, kilometres, time trials . . .' Suddenly he was interrupted.

‘Go on, Tommy!' a passer-by yelled at him, clenching his fists and smiling.

‘Oi! I'm talking about you!' Tommy fired back, with a dash of a Brummie accent like a drop of Worcestershire sauce. The passer-by laughed back, clapped loudly, and walked on. Tommy beamed delightedly. And then, seamlessly, he carried on with the point he was making, the point to which he often returns, the touchstone of his ethos.

‘You must have respect for people. You must behave yourselves. You gotta have ambition and determination. You've got to be prepared to make sacrifices. Listen to your elder people who've got the experience, because you might think you know it all, but the people who've been through the sport can tell you where you're making the mistakes, and you must listen and you must get the work ethic into your mind. You will only get out of life what you put into it.' He does not draw breath.

On he goes. ‘The work ethic is absolutely the essential thing in any walk of life. If your kid's going to be a musician or a doctor, they've still got to work hard in everything they do. You've got to be dedicated and be prepared to make sacrifices.

‘And I do live this life. I live it absolutely to the minute.'

He rapped his fingers on the wooden box, and resettled his glasses on his nose.

‘Amen!' we all wanted to shout, cultishly. At that moment, we, his disciples, would have gladly packed our bags and followed Tommy to wherever he wanted to lead us: to a lakeside in the Caucasus, a mountain top in Kenya, a hide-out in Wyoming. Or, perhaps more realistically, to Herne Hill, where we had come as pilgrims. We would sit up straight. We were the Godwinites.

‘Look at those two, buggering around, now.' Tommy suddenly broke the spell, and drew our collective attention to two schoolboys whose sprint had just started. They were playing at being Chris Hoy and Grégory Baugé, standing virtually motionless on their pedals, the one in front of the other, looking each other in the eye.

This thrilled Tommy. ‘Isn't that bloody marvellous. Oh! Priceless. They've been watching too much of that on the telly. Go on lads!' he hollered at them, and sat back chuckling to watch the race unfold.

No two riders are the same, just as no two Tommy Godwins are the same.

Though outwardly the epitome of the English gentleman, he had actually been born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. His father Charles, originally from Birmingham, had sought a better life in New England (Old England had simply delivered a murderous regime of breaking pig-iron for smelting; a job he'd started at the age of thirteen).

In America in the 1920s, things were hard, but wholesome. Schooling was in fact pretty good, and young Tommy grew up sledding, skiing, boxing and even golfing. Charles was seized by the notion that his oldest son should be a sportsman. Stumbling back drunk from a party one night he woke up his son and made him promise he'd compete in the Olympics one day. Young Tommy agreed to the request, presumably so he could roll over and go to sleep again.

In truth, inseparable though they were, Tommy and his dad were very different characters. Charles was a bit of a rogue. He hung out with the odd gangster. He set up a moonshine operation during the years of prohibition, roping his kids into the illegal distilling trade and getting them to deliver the whisky to his Italian friends in exchange for their equally illicit wine.

Certainly he was no angel. Yet, in everything that Tommy recalls, his approval is sought. Through him, and throughout his life, Tommy looked for affirmation.

‘My father was a very disciplined man. He laid down a strict code of listening to him. Do what he says. “Don't do as I do, do as I say.” He was a drinker, a smoker and a gambler. But I had to be the gentleman. I had to behave myself, respect people, show my appreciation to other people. “Civility is cheap,” he said.'

But the Depression put paid to their American dream. It was time to return. Tommy recalls in his autobiography,
It Wasn't That Easy,
the moment at which his dad knew it was over.

‘During 1932 my father, rightly or wrongly, made a decision after seeing some children searching for food in a garbage can while on his way to work one morning. His decision was, that, as a patriotic Englishman who refused to swear an oath against the King to obtain American citizenship, he would return to England, the place of his birth, and infant nurture.'

On the track, a bell rings to indicate the final lap of a sprint. One boy is a hundred metres ahead of his rival, who comes panting past us in the home straight, quite hopelessly beaten. We all watch on. Tommy shouts a few words of encouragement at the kid who's been vanquished, and then mutters a much more honest assessment of the boy's potential under his breath. ‘He's not got much, that lad. Sad to say.'

Herne Hill is still playing out these little dramas. For Tommy Godwin, they are viscerally real. As he remembers racing, the words trip and tumble, overlap and catch up with one another. He can't get them out fast enough. The emotion is far, far ahead of its expression. Every now and again, and very suddenly, he will start to cry, recovering with a smile just as quickly. Such a torrent of memory and regret is exhausting to witness. It must be much harder still to be feeling it.

‘Oh dear. I'm living it too much . . . Yes . . . I'm living it too much. I'm going through it all again. My life. Oh dear. Oh dear.'

After all, we are right where the ley lines intersect, right at the scene of his greatest moment. It happened at Herne Hill.

In 1948 he picked up an Olympic bronze medal in the Team Pursuit and another on his own in the 1,000m time trial, the ‘Kilo'.

That race went off at 9.30 at night in horrendous, blustery conditions. Dusk had fallen prematurely. There was no lighting at the track, only the yellowish spill from lamps in the pavilion and other official buildings showed the way. He reckons he lost over a second on the home straight when the wind got up and pushed him backwards. This is what track riders call a ‘Hard Straight'. But he got that medal he had dreamt of.

Winning the Team Pursuit bronze was also a considerable achievement for the decidedly ramshackle British team. They were, according to Godwin, just ‘buggering about'. From start to finish, they were riding with hope and desire, guts and pluck. Science didn't enter into it.