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the
otherwise empty guard’s van — a proper old one lined with planks and many
generations of fag-jaundiced gloss paint — ZR3000 and I made our irregular
progress to Dover. Someone had left behind a copy of the Daily Telegraph ;
I got to the sports section as we rattled across the green belt and there,
staring out across some bleak-looking mudflats with his elbows resting on the
lofted saddle of a muddy-wheeled mountain bike, was a man I recognised as Mr
Christopher Boardman. Even in Britain the Tour hype had started already. Mr
Boardman, not a man given to hyperbole, described the forthcoming challenge as
‘physically very unpleasant’; to drum up something more appropriately dramatic,
the writer had introduced the interview with a quote from Greg LeMond, an
American who in 1990 won the last of his three Tours. ‘At the end of the first
stage your lungs are on fire, your legs feel as though they have been plunged
into molten tar, your arms burn, your chest, your shoulders, your back, are
aflame. Even your eyelashes ache. And ahead of you...’ We whooshed into a
tunnel and I stood there in the deafening dark, doing a couple of halfhearted
back stretches and picturing Greg wincing over his Fig Newtons as the Savlon
kicked in. We whooshed out again and the italics juddered before my eyes. ‘And
ahead of you lie another three weeks of Tour de France.’
    He couldn’t even bring himself to
give it a ‘the’. Without a definite article he’d made it sound like a ghastly
punishment: ‘I sentence you to three weeks of Tour de France.’ Imagining it as
a penal institution, I could understand why Chris Boardman had never fulfilled
his potential in the Tour. All the pictures I’d seen of the Tour’s greats
showed the kind of expressions you could imagine gracing the Daddy of C-Wing. Jacques
Anquetil, winner five times in the Sixties, had narrow, weaselly features and a
sarcastic sneer; baby-faced legend Eddy Merckx surveyed the world with a
terrible, blank-eyed froideur that helped earn him the nickname Cannibal;
Miguel Indurain, who dominated in the early Nineties, was a huge, silent
Terminator. Scariest of all was Bernard Hinault, winner five times in the
Seventies and Eighties. His nickname was Badger, which sounds a bit Wind in
the Willows unless you happen to have seen one in action against two Jack
Russells in a video seized by the RSPCA. Hinault’s default demeanour on a
bicycle suggested he’d just been told that some bloke up the road was prancing
around in a wedding dress singing, ‘Bernard, Bernard, je m’appelle Bernard’. It
was an unbridled, primal rage that one could quite easily imagine being sated
only by a fight to the death with a load of dogs.
    Chris Boardman, however, was just a
friendly bloke with a big nose, peering mildly into the Southport mist with an
expression that said, ‘On a clear day I can see me mam’s house from here.’ He
was an exceptional cyclist, but he was no Cannibal. If you had to give him a
nickname it would be The Grocer.
    Half-heard snatches of notably less
flattering epithets jeered down from French-exchange shoplifters on the sundeck
as I freewheeled down the gangplank at Calais. But with ZR3000 weaving
perilously through the articulated mayhem and on to French soil, I didn’t
really care. It had been a splendid crossing: I’d been the only cyclist on the
ferry, and had ridden in through the cavernous bow doors exhilarated by the
peculiarity of doing so, lashing my bike to a rusty railing beside those huge
trailers of whatever it was of ours that the French could possibly admit to
wanting. No less significantly, my mood had been lightened by the successful
realisation of The Daytrip Gambit: twelve-hour returns are invariably much
cheaper than singles, and I’d managed to blag the bike and me on to the boat
for a fiver. Things had improved further with the mid-Channel epiphany that my
logistical woes could of course be neatly resolved by hiring a car in