On the Road Bike (27 page)

‘It was all strictly amateur. You rode for watches and clocks and things like that. You worked forty-eight hours a week on whatever job – I was working on concrete floors, climbing ladders, working in polishing shops, working with all the dust around me, or the next day in a breaking shop with all the fumes. It was all no good for bike riding.'

He breaks off to applaud another winner, coasting around on his lap of honour. ‘He's done well, him. Looks all right on a bike, too. Good lad.'

Then, in a flash, without skipping a beat, he's spun back the clock again.

‘There was no real training. There was no understanding between ourselves. There was no anything, you know.'

But they were up against seriously well-prepared French and Italian specialists. That lack of preparation, that lack of seriousness was poison to the meticulous-minded Godwin. After retiring four years later, he went into coaching. He was determined to try and change British cyclists' dilettante attitudes towards training. But it didn't stop there. Long before Brailsford's marginal gains, Godwin was leaving no stone unturned.

‘The most comfortable chair? A straight-back dining chair. You slip the small of your back in it. You sit upright, and you never feel tired. And when you eat, you must chew for a count of twelve and you must get your food down to a pulp. Thirty-six times. I chew my food very well, before I put it into my system so my system doesn't have to work that hard to digest it.'

I put it to Tommy that he has aged considerably better than the old pavilion behind us. He glances over his shoulder at it, crumbled, flaking, and unloved, and then he launches into a passionate sermon. He invokes the rhythm and the vernacular of a charismatic preacher, measuring his words with increasing conviction and unshakable faith, and it starts very simply.

‘Even of a morning, a glass of hot water first thing. One glass of hot water to clean the system out.' He looks at me acutely. I can see that he doubts the healthiness of my regime, and I feel a little uncomfortable. But now, he's warming to his subject.

‘Bran flakes and muesli. A bowl of fresh fruit at the start of every week, with apples, oranges, kiwi fruit, grapes and a cut banana. Then I have three rounds of wholemeal bread, two with either pâté or cheese or a boiled egg. And one with honey on.'

He goes up a gear, as we head towards the lunch and then the evening meal.

‘Even now, as a ninety-one-year-old man I still cook sea bass, salmon. If I do a meat meal like pork, I do apple sauce, sage and onion stuffing. I do spinach, carrots and potatoes. I do three vegetables for a main meal.'

Diet, and its consequences, became a feature of his coaching career. ‘One rider had an iron deficiency. We put him on a diet of Japanese dried fish and Guinness.'

He was, in many ways, ahead of his time. He coached the British National team at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and he set up a training camp in the sunshine and mountains of Mallorca for the British squad; an island base still used by British Cycling's Olympians and by Team Sky and Bradley Wiggins himself. He started the first track course at Lilleshall, where he did a deal with local greengrocers to ensure the kids had a proper diet.

‘I had friends in the fruit market that used to provide an apple, an orange, a banana every morning. I got the Milk Marketing Board to buy us a pint of milk a day. I got Horlicks to supply us. They wanted chips and egg butties and all this sort of thing. I said you're having what I'm telling you.'

He enjoyed successes as a coach, too. He trained Hugh Porter to repeated national titles. He trained Graham Webb to the British Hour record. He trained Mick Bennett, who also went on to win two bronze medals at the Olympics.

Listening to him recall his innovations, and even allowing for a margin of exaggeration, I am struck by his attention to detail. It seems to me that his work fitted the template that has made the current generation of British coaches the envy of the world.

And yet, thinking back, I do not recall his presence at that British Cycling gala dinner that first sparked my interest. I ask him if he was there. He tells me he had not been invited. I have touched a nerve.

‘And you know, I've never once been invited along to Manchester, under the present scheme. With all the work I've put in. I've never been asked to see a training session. I feel very bitter almost with British Cycling. They've never had the decency to say, Tommy would you like to come and spend a few days?'

I find myself wondering if there is a reason for this. I can see, mixed into the chivalry and the charisma, a wilfulness in Tommy Godwin. But whatever the reason, it is uncomfortable, neglectful even, that the sport that gave him his purpose, and to which he dedicated so much of his life, now has so little room for him. Instead he sits here, on a plastic seat, talking to me about it all instead, talking to a virtual stranger.

‘You would have loved the science of it all now, wouldn't you?' I put to him.

‘Oh, I would have loved it.' He looks up and away, across the track. It seems like he's imagining an alternative version of the past.

‘So, in a way, do you think you were born into the wrong generation?'

I have barely got my question out, when he interrupts loudly, and almost angrily.

‘Yes. Yes. Exactly. That's exactly how . . . you're the first person to ever realise that. You've greatly complimented me by saying that. And I thank you.'

And, with that, he bursts into tears. Which wasn't what I had intended.

During the course of that long afternoon, and before Tommy and I are finally called upon to walk down to the middle of the track and make our speeches, we are regularly interrupted. People want to see the medals.

Every time he is asked, Tommy Godwin delights in opening the little wooden box to reveal them, dark brown and serious, nestling in the kind of green baize normally found on snooker tables. They are fine medals, but they are shaped by their age; unelaborated, gloomily tarnished, smallish. If you saw them in the window of a charity shop, propped up against a
Shoot!
annual, a teapot and a defunct ZX Spectrum, you would think nothing much of them. Like the man, so the medals. Unassuming.

‘I'm very strict with the control of my life. I've never had any envies or jealousies for anyone. I live a very modest life.'

We shake hands. I think about him all the way home.

Not long later, as the London Olympic Games approach, I hear that he has become very ill. His daughter, Kay (and this time it
is
his daughter), emails me.

Sadly, Dad is not at all well at the moment – he has been diagnosed with cancer, so that has come as a great shock to us all given that he has been so remarkable in the lead up to the Olympics. We hope he will attend the opening ceremony tomorrow and an evening of track cycling next week and then we can take life a little more gently.

I tune in for the opening ceremony. Sure enough, right towards the end, just as the torches are being passed to the children to light the flame, I catch a glimpse of Tommy, beaming. The director has framed the shot on Steve Redgrave and Kelly Holmes, but there, just in the edge of the picture, is Tommy Godwin. A few days later, he was trackside to see Great Britain take home the gold medal in his discipline, the Team Pursuit.

He was in his rightful place. Right in the thick of things. He'd made it.

Tommy Godwin passed away on 3 November 2012, two days short of his ninety-second birthday.

These two Tommies represent, in some ways, opposite extremes. The fact that neither man appears in British Cycling's Hall of Fame is surely a remarkable omission, given what they both achieved in their separate ways. The one, humble to the point of denial, dedicated to the lonely pursuit of records on frozen roads, day after day. The other, quicksilver, forthright, almost a bit natty, his heart shaped by the contours and the speed of the track and the application of science.

The two men never met, as far as anyone can tell. I wonder how they would have got on. Perhaps they might have had little in common. They might have had scant regard for each other's achievements. They might have rubbed each other up the wrong way, Tommy 1 could easily have found Tommy 2's volubility and propensity for emotion, a problem. Tommy 2 might have been dismissive of Tommy 1. Or they might have been soulmates. Who knows.

For now I prefer to close my eyes to the unpredictable and fractious reality of human relationships, choosing instead to read their stories as you might a favourite childhood adventure.

Their stories have both been published.
Unsurpassed
tells the story of the World Endurance Record holder, and
It Wasn't That Easy
recounts the life of the Olympic medallist.

The subtitles are subtly different:

The Tommy Godwin Story
, and
The Story of Tommy Godwin
.

I WAS STANDING
in the corridor of a well-appointed West London basement flat, staring at a picture of a naked man pleasuring a lady. I was surprised at how easy it was, in the course of researching a book about cycling, to end up leafing through a copy of
The Joy of Sex
with a management consultant.

Avril Millar was telling me about a book she wanted to write called
The Joy of Work
. It would be, she enthused, a user-friendly manual that would help people to re-engage with their work, an antidote to growing alienation, a balm for the schism she saw in people's lives between the family and the workplace. She was surprisingly passionate about it.

So that's how it came to pass that she and I were looking through those iconic pencil drawings from the original naughty 1970s manual, wondering what the copyright restrictions might be on using the same beardy man to illustrate
The Joy of Work
.

I have no doubt that, one day, this book will get published because Avril Millar is a force of nature. In fact, the home page of her website (avrilmillar.com) boasts just that turn of phrase, credited to George Bernard Shaw: ‘Be a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.'

She is just sixty, and has a long and varied career to her name as a very successful CEO of significant businesses, and latterly as someone whose advice is sought at the highest levels in the City. She is a deep thinker, with considerable verbal energy, firmly held beliefs and a broad vocabulary.

She is also the mother of the British cyclist David Millar.

She'd rung me up one July when she'd heard of a terrible crash on the Tour de France in which her son had been caught up. Could I tell her that he was all right? I promised to find out. Her voice had been edged with fear. She was his mum.

I put down my coffee. Through a window at head height, I occasionally caught a glimpse of a pair of heels or a booted ankle walking past at street level. It was one of those London basement rooms that you look down on as you pass: quiet, warm places.

Cocooned in such comfort, she tells me about their shared past, David's and hers. She begins to recall how she experienced, as a total outsider, her son's complete (and completely traumatic) immersion in the British cycling scene. Her account, it struck me, might help in my roundabout quest to discover the values at the heart of the country's changing relationship with cycling. As soon as she started to talk, I knew that she had spent half a lifetime amused, appalled, delighted and despairing of the hidden world that she had opened up so casually to her son.

It had all started with a simple phone call to the High Wycombe Cycling Club. This was, in itself, already an act of mild desperation. After her divorce from David's father Gordon, the summer holidays were characterised by a child-swap arrangement. Her daughter, Fran (of whom, more, later), would fly to Hong Kong to be with her dad for a few weeks. And David, in his early teens, would return to England to be with Avril. As the long weeks dragged by, sometimes she found herself at a loss. She didn't know what to do with him. Perhaps, she thought, cycling might offer a welcome distraction. And that led her to trying to find a club for him to join.

The voice on the other end of the line explained to Mrs Millar what to do. ‘The best thing is just to turn up on a Tuesday night. It's the Longwick Ten.'

That's exactly how Avril remembers the instructions. She laughs.

Her softish Scottish accent is peppered with a surprising number of profanities. Maybe it's just me being naïve, but I'm always a little shocked to hear people's mums talking like this.

‘When people are in cycling, they say things like that. And you're left thinking, “What the fuck is that?”'

After my experiences with Ron Keeble and others, I know just what she means. ‘I totally agree with you. If it's not the Longwick Ten, it's the Pocklington Challenge.' (I had been to an extraordinarily long prize-giving dinner at a cycling club in Yorkshire. The Pocklington Challenge was still embedded in my memory.)