On the Road Bike (8 page)

Each day, and for good financial reasons, the Tour of Britain highlights show is contractually bound to include a short sequence of shots from whichever region we are in. After all, the local authorities put up a good deal of money, and want something back for their sponsorship. These thirty-second clips, it goes without saying, are an onerous obligation, both for viewer and for presenter. They invariably include shots of a clock tower, a pedestrianised shopping centre, a church, a canal, someone flying a kite, eating al fresco in a pub garden, and riding through a park with some kids. That kind of thing.

When I first started on the Tour of Britain, I tried to distance myself from these clips by being a smart-arse. In my voice over, I'd concoct arch little phrases, and sarcastic little quips to accompany the stream of touristy schmaltz being paraded across the screen. ‘Gosh, windsurfing!' Or ‘Oh look, a horse!' I did this in order to withdraw myself from the process, a knowing wink, a post-modern nod to an audience that I imagined felt similarly uncomfortable with being force-fed the mantra of a regional development agency.

It didn't endear me greatly to the Tour direction, the men charged with raising the money from the regions to get the race on.

I couldn't keep it up, though. I started to bore myself. Year on year, my metropolitan knowingness gave way to a nobler intent, until I reached the point where I now happily embrace the simple, wholesome script I've been handed. I have become their mouthpiece. I am happy to sell you any county you care to mention. Insert the name of your town into the paragraph, and off I go:

‘Dating back to the sixteenth century, the town of XXXXXXXXX has always enjoyed a thriving town centre. Its peaceful parkland and thriving town centre offer the perfect location for a weekend break or a family holiday. First-class recreational facilities, and a thriving town centre mean that there's never a dull moment. XXXXXXXXX's thriving town centre blends traditional values with a modern, thriving town centre.'

The race does its best to get around the country in the eight days allotted to it. We've variously been to Norfolk, Devon, Liverpool, Gateshead, the Borders, Wales, Somerset and Essex during my years on the race, and many more places besides. The locations vary in their characteristics, as much as cloud follows sun, follows cloud, blown horizontally across the island by September's prevailing westerlies. The quaintness of the South-West with its painted cottages and rose gardens couldn't be further removed from the South Promenade at Blackpool (another perennial favourite), out of season and underpopulated. But all these strips of tarmac make up the tapestry.

Local hills come to prominence, and are spoken about with reverent hush and awe, as if we were invoking the names of deities. Constitution Hill in Swansea, Gun Hill near Stoke, Shap Fell in the Lakes and Caerphilly Mountain. I have learned that in the hearts of the British cycling community who pound up and down our lanes, these carry as much mythical significance as the Tourmalet does to the French.

People often come up to me, and without a word of introduction, but with an evil glint and a head cocked to one side, they'll say things like ‘Bar Hatch'll sort them out, I reckon.'

Will it? And, have we actually ever met?

The Race Manual testifies to these obscure, sometimes unloved locations, putting down in black-and-white print the extraordinary banality of the race route. The epic, unmasked for what it is; just a humdrum sort of place.

‘2nd Intermediate Sprint: 68.2 k, opposite ASDA.'

‘3rd Intermediate Sprint: 97.4k, between Harvester Pub and ESSO Station.'

Even the signage suffers from an identity crisis, borrowing language from the Tour de France and translating it straight into English. Red signs, hanging from lampposts, point the way the team buses and other Tour traffic should follow so that they can park up at the stage start, or ‘Depart' as it is called on these signs. Not ‘Départ', you understand, the French noun with its acute accent. The English word ‘Depart' is the imperative form of the verb ‘to depart'. It's an order, and rather an abrupt one at that.

One man sits at the helm of all of this. Mick Bennett. He is the race director, the man who decides who races and what the race looks like. Every day you will see him stalking the finish line in a hi-vis jacket, ensuring the barriers are perfectly aligned and that the press are marshalled to within an inch of their lives. He rules with absolute power.

I had no idea, when we were first introduced, that he'd been a talented rider, that he'd represented his country, that he'd won an Olympic bronze medal in the Team Pursuit at the Munich games of 1972, and again in Montreal in 1976. At first, I took him for a cantankerous curmudgeon who just happened to be in charge of the Tour of Britain. What I least expected was that he and I would become friends, which, via a circuitous route, is what we've become.

Friend is overstating it, perhaps. Mick and I seldom text each other; he is almost exactly twenty years my senior, and pretends not to understand things like mobile phones and emails. He has a certain amount of enemies or, more accurately, people with whom he has fallen out. It's hard to gain his trust. He's an ex-rider, and they're almost all a bit suspicious and, in Mick's case, pathologically defensive when it comes to the media. By nature, he's guarded. He has a well-founded reputation for autocracy. He can be off-hand, imperious, unreasonable, even ungracious. The race is his, and must run to his rules. He and I have crossed each other often enough. Or rather, I have crossed him.

But I like Mick a great deal.

The more I speak to British riders, whether they are from the online here and now, or from the black-and-white yesteryear, the more I detect a commonality. They tend to brood. Accustomed to passing endless hours trapped in their interior monologues, with only the whirr of ball bearings and the swish of rubber on tarmac to accompany them, they often betray the signs of a fundamental unease with their circumstances, as if reinventing their physiologies day by day at the coal face of a punishing bike ride will somehow release them from who they are and what they are faced with. From the cards they've been dealt.

This is not, perhaps, uniquely British. The badge of honour that suffering bestows on the professional bike rider is the minimum requirement for entry into their elusive club. To hurt is to be. That much is clear.

But on these islands our small clutch of pros have it harder than most. Even now, when the wider public has suddenly started to embrace the sport, they battle daily against ridicule, isolation, incomprehension and the occasional assassination attempt. It's not just the white vans and rogue cars that try to force them off the road (Bradley Wiggins and Shane Sutton), not just the tiresome puddles and potholes and the jostling for space at traffic lights. It extends beyond their lonely training rides, into their everyday world. The pro-cyclist, on admitting to his profession in the pub or at dinner with friends, will be counting down an internal clock until the inevitable question is asked, with a sneer and a chuckle. ‘Why do you shave your legs? Is it more aerodynamic?' They have their answers honed to perfection, and are scarcely aware of responding.

It takes determination, and a very thick skin to fly so obdurately in the face of the prevailing culture. Perhaps it also requires a particular sort of motivation.

I wanted to know Mick Bennett away from race day. So I made an appointment, went to his office, sat down opposite him and waited to see if I could find out what forces had shaped him; what motivated the motivator, or better still: what agitated the agitator?

I squinted at him. The sun shone through some slatted blinds directly behind him, so that I was not so much looking at the director of the Tour of Britain, as at a black-and-white cut-out of the director of the Tour of Britain.

I offered up my opening line of enquiry.

‘Mick, so many of the riders seem to tell me the same story, that as a child they got on their bikes to put distance between themselves and something that they wanted to run away from—'

I am interrupted. ‘Can I just stop you there. That's absolutely spot on.'

Our early years working together were characterised by a certain mistrust. He thought I was a bit of an upstart, and couldn't get a handle on my instinctive desire to raise an inquisitive eyebrow wherever I felt it needed raising. In 2008, for example, he'd invited Tyler Hamilton, who would later blow the whistle on Lance Armstrong, to come and ride for the Rock Racing team: a villainous assembly of dopers, ex-dopers and serial deniers, who traded heavily on their ‘bad boy' image. I wanted to ask Hamilton all sorts of difficult questions, Mick wasn't so sure.

Perhaps he's just given up on me. But for whatever reason, these days, he just lets me get on with it, and seldom interferes. Except where money is involved.

Once, during the 2012 Tour of Britain, I won a bet I had struck with him. I was staggeringly right. And he was appallingly wrong. I can see steam coming out of his ears as he reads this now. But if he examines his heart, he'll know I'm correct.

The previous day, trying to predict what time the race would finish (a very necessary skill, especially when it comes to TV schedules), I had shaken hands with Mick Bennett. I'd predicted the winner would finish at 15.05, and he'd gone for 15.10. We wagered ten pounds on the outcome, nearest time wins.

When Mark Cavendish eventually crossed the line in Blackpool, it was exactly 15.06.27. I know this. It is precise to the microsecond, because we cross-referenced a shot of him finishing against the time code in the TV truck. That ‘time of day' code is accurate to a tiny fraction of a second. It is the international standard.

You might infer from that, that I had clearly won the bet.

But the next day, Mick was still refusing to pay. He'd consulted the finish-line judge (an old mate from years gone by, no doubt), and between them, they'd concocted some bizarre calculation involving average speeds, the movement of the tides, the influence of Halley's comet and relative tyre pressures on Cavendish's bike, and produced a work of utter fiction, to which Mick was still clinging. (A little childishly, I thought. And told him.)

‘You've bloody colluded with the guys in the TV truck, Ned. Bloody conspiracy. He came in at 15.09, and you know he did.'

He was smiling, just. So I thought we were still ‘joshing'.

‘If I give you my sort code and account number, you can send it to me over the Internet, if that makes it easier, Mick.'

He looked sternly at me, and then broke into a very sudden, very unsettling attack of laughter. At the same time, he cuffed me ‘playfully' around the back of my head, nearly breaking my neck. I can still feel the bruising.

‘Ha ha ha ha,' he laughed at me, loudly and robotically. ‘You cheating bastard.'

He stomped off into Stoke, without paying up. And that was the last time I saw him that day.

And now Mick Bennett was pointing a pencil at me. It had been sharpened to a murderous degree. He's a trim, upright silver-haired man in his early sixties. He has an intense stare, and a cautious delivery edged with an accent that bears witness, just about, to his Birmingham upbringing.

Mick was born in 1949. ‘I'm from a very poor background. No hot water. No bathroom.' His story was not uncommon in that regard, but nonetheless remarkable.

‘Where did you grow up, Mick?'

‘Spark Brook.' That rang a bell. It was a curious sounding neighbourhood. Like Tower Hamlets, or Westward Ho!, it sounded like the careless working title that some junior draughtsman in the town planning department had dreamt up over a cup of tea.

‘I was given a bike by my next-door neighbour when I was young, and it saved my whole life. It was as if someone had gone, “There you are. That's changing your life.”'

Mick was miming someone handing over a gift, imparting a treasure, stretching his arms across the table at me.

Just then, his BlackBerry suddenly chirruped on the desk at his side. Without even minutely averting his gaze from where it was fixed across the space at me, he deftly reached out with his left hand, switched it off, and returned his outstretched arm to the point where his neighbour had just handed him his life-changing bike. I was transfixed, and very nearly reached across the empty space to receive the notional bike.

As he recalled his childhood, I saw a landscape of brickwork, gutters, washing out in the backyards; all the post-war clichés made poignant by the reality of their existence. And I saw Mick, out on his BSA bike, rattling over the cobbles. ‘One day I stopped this guy, this Graham Webb, and he said, “Come round to my house”, which was two streets away from my house.'

Graham Webb. So, half a century ago, Mick Bennett and he had been neighbours!

‘I knocked on his door. And I went into this “two-up two-down” like all the terraced houses were, and he showed me a laundry bag full of medals and he put them on.'

I pictured the two of them. Graham, maybe eighteen years old, proud of his haul, but modest enough to keep them bundled up in a laundry bag. Perhaps he would have found it hard to look for praise, for recognition among his peers. But maybe he'd discovered a kindred spirit. Mick, at thirteen, was still too young to be a threat or to pass judgement. And so here was an audience, his singular audience. In that upstairs room, the older boy could feel like the champion he was becoming, and the younger boy could soak it all up. It was a moment fitted to both needs perfectly. For every rider, embedded in the narrative of their careers, there is a definable Eureka moment. Mick had just experienced his.

‘This is what I want to be. This is what I want.'

What followed was, by the standards of almost all of us, quite exceptional.

He became a track rider. He was very good at it, winning races, and competing nationally and internationally at the highest of levels. Those two Olympic medals testify to that. But we judge men like Mick Bennett not in isolation, but against the achievements of others, unfairly perhaps, and he would acknowledge that he was not the greatest, and although he was conscientious, solid, dependable and valued, he did not tear up the record books.