Callin’ the Shots

Words: Johnny Green Photo: Offside/l’Equipe

“What is needed here in professional cycling is a benign dictator”, said The Brief. I had bumped into him on the train. Brandishing a newspaper, he was fresh back from the law courts, sending criminalised ruffians from the hulks to the colonies. His wig was carefully powdered ‘n’ packed away in his brief case. I caught his drift.

A leader to head the parade and call the shots. A man such as Henri Desgrange. One who brooks no nonsense. One who walks the walk as well as spieling it. He invented Le Tour and ran it ruthlessly until his demise during the Second World War. Young Henri had given notice of his attitude as a young Parisian office clerk in the latter days of the nineteenth century. He was a pioneer of the pedals, cycling to work in plus-fours with no socks. His bare calves shocked women pedestrians. His boss told him to cover up or shave off. Desgrange quit. Ain’t that cool? His racing mores were ‘men not the machines’. He led from the front and took no bullshit.

“It is always easy to obey if one dreams of being in command”
Jean-Paul Sartre

In these difficult days, it would seem that cycling is run by committee men. No difference here now from all those other sports controlled by bug-eyed sponsor-sponging bureaucrats. I warn my kids to beware of men in bland bespoke suits wearing those frameless glasses of the psychopathic Nazi dentist played by Larry Olivier in Marathon Man. Such men as we possess fail to inspire and uplift. Praise for the sport emits as a muddled apology, time after time. What is needed at the top is a hero to represent our dreams to the unknowing. A towering figure to fit the bill. Just like John Wayne.

“Walk tall. Walk straight,
And look the world right in the eye.
That’s what my Mama told me,
When I was about knee high”

Val Doonican, the loveable Irish country artiste with the remarkable knitwear, sang that. But it was written by Don Wayne. Not John (no relation), but it could well have been. The Americans have, of recent years, buttoned on to the importance of a strong, charismatic, fabulous looking leader. Why, Ronald Reagan, he of the superb quiffage, got his feet under the desk in the Oval Office of the White House. And Arnold Schwarzenegger got the gig as Governor of California. Yep, even George W. Bush pulled the top job because folk tagged him as a fun guy to go for a beer with. For a maybe moment, I even had Lance Armstrong figured as a wannabe Capitol Hill politician. Not so sure, right now.

Yet are we here to do the bidding of despots? Or do we quite like, on the quiet, being shoved around and told what to do? I am tired of the fluff and drivel. A strong icon to persuade the world that all is golden in the land of the bicycle is attractive. I’m not lookin’ for a Führer; I’m only referencing the cycle game here.

“We don’t need this fascist groove thang”
Heaven 17

Jacques Goddet as a supreme organiser in tough times is a wonderful memory. In khaki suit with a pith helmet, he stood through the sunroof of his motor, looking every inch the tank commander. Jean Cocteau called him “The last of the troubadours”. Goddet said, “It’s necessary to keep the inhuman side to Le Tour. Excess is necessary”. Loud ‘n’ clear, Jacques!

Jean-Marie Leblanc, resembling a pork butcher from Lille with impressive jowls, certainly knew his cycling chops. He spoke from the heart to save us all from ruin but was short on glamour. These days, image is everything.

I just want to be comforted, inspired, driven by beautiful determination and certainty. I would consider Mario Cipollini as pres, because a winning smile and a great barnet go a long way. What matter a little flakiness around the edges? It can prove most endearing.

Status is conferred by achievement; gravitas is arrived at through painful experience; diplomacy gained by always thinking about the other guy. One man towers above all-comers, residing in a stratosphere of his own creation. Would we not trek to the ends of the earth and the Izoard in unity with such a man? That man can only be Eddy Merckx.

“Don’t follow leaders;
Watch the parkin’ meters”
Bob Dylan
Subterranean Homesick Blues

Extract from issue 39, out now

Storming the Stelvio

Words: Ian Cleverly Photos: Jason Cardillo/Dain Zaffke

A pair of Englishmen sat exhausted outside their hotel, staring into the distance. Not so much a thousand-yard stare as a 155-kilometre one. Or the 4,058 metres of ascending equivalent. Rarely have I witnessed such wasted humanity where alcohol was not involved.

Nine-and-a-half-hours in the saddle can do that to a man, or a woman, for that matter. Of course, the Stelvio was hard; the cold wind blew; banks of snow lining the road received another dusting as we neared the top; skiers took full advantage of the extended season on the peak.

But it was the Mortirolo that had done the damage to our pair of Londoners. The savage gradient in the final kilometres was bad enough. Throw in a serrated dog’s dinner of a road surface and there was (whisper it) walking to be done for the backmarkers.

“It was horrible,” they both agreed. “Truly horrible.”

They had, however, done what the Giro had failed to achieve nine days earlier – conquered the Stelvio – and judging by the vacant looks and slouched bodies sinking visibly into hotel furniture, it had been a testing day, to say the least.

I’d love to be able to give a first-hand account of the horror, but being eminently sensible and averse to prolonged suffering, I did the medio route, neatly swerving the Mortirolo altogether. Seeing these poor chaps confirmed it was the correct decision.

Highlights of the day: the ‘neutralised’ opening descent of the valley from Bormio, where one of our group clocked a maximum of 90kph; and possibly the finest cigarette I have ever inhaled atop the Stelvio before a chilling but thrilling descent back down to town.

Lowpoints: the grovel back up the valley road into a bastard headwind with no group to share the load; lack of fitness leading to being alone on the valley road in the first place. Time to stop smoking.

This is one of our gang, Aaron Gulley, from Santa Fe. He is fit as a butcher’s dog and finished with 30th best time which, when you consider he had to blast past the best part of a thousand riders to get up to the leading group, is bloody impressive. And, unlike most, he still had the energy to smile afterwards. Chapeau sir.

And below is another of our bunch, Melina Holzer. Being a recent convert to road cycling having taken employment at Easton Bell, she threw herself in at the deep end and stormed up the Stelvio – first time on clipless pedals, third road ride ever. Superb. And if you’re wondering what she is wearing, that’s a skort, I am reliably informed. 

If you fancy joining us next year, leave a line below and if there is sufficient interest, we’ll lead a Rouleur trip to the Gran Fondo Stelvio. There are three distances, so suffering for all, if suffering is your bag…

Many thanks to Easton Bell for the loan of some mighty fine wheels and Velo Veneto  for catering to our every need.

The Race Against Time

Words: Ian Cleverly Photos: Geoff Waugh and Offside

“I can tell you the exact point my career ended. October twenty-second 1996, around four p.m.”

Not that Britain’s most successful male cyclist – at that point – knocked it on the head there and then. It would be three more seasons before Chris Boardman called a close on what was, by most people’s standards, a glittering career.

During his annual debrief with coach Peter Keen, the Olympic gold medallist and Hour record holder was, for the first time, discussing how to repeat that year’s formula, rather than progressing as usual.

“I think we realised we’d looked under every stone. That was what we were going to get out of this body. That was it. In that one instant I lost interest in the whole thing.”

The man who had once famously admitted he didn’t particularly enjoy riding a bike, much to cycling fans’ dismay, had seen the writing on the wall and was mentally as good as finished. Boardman enjoyed the process, the challenge. What was the point in treading water?

Boardman’s story is, of course, one half of this gripping tale based around the respective Hour Record attempts of the two riders who elevated British cycling in the ‘90s, after decades on the fringes, to front page news, both home and abroad, and sparked the revolution that ultimately led to Bradley Wiggins and Team Sky, via the Olympic gold rush of Beijing and London.

Press attention at the time focused more on the contrasting machines used by Boardman and Obree than the men who powered them to world records: the sleek lines of the Mike Burrows-designed Lotus against the kitchen sink manufacturing of Old Faithful, washing machine bearings and all.

If the bikes were poles apart, so was the public’s perception of the contrasting approaches of the two protagonists – number crunching, emotionless Englishman versus shambolic, scatter-brained Scot. According to Keen, who worked with both, we had it the wrong way around.

“The Graeme Obree I saw and spent time with was absolutely a better scientist than most, in terms of asking questions and forming hypotheses, then testing them.

And with Chris we were very organised and structured in a relative sense, but what we were dealing with in terms of his life, was chaotic. He had a growing family from the age of eighteen, and his life was probably not much less chaotic than Graeme’s.”

What both men undoubtedly shared was a lack of income throughout the record breaking years, Boardman’s successful Hour attempt in Bordeaux run on a shoestring budget made just about viable by the loan of a truck from the Rolling Stones.

Obree would cash in on any money-making scheme going after setting his record in Hamar, often to the detriment of his cycling, but a living had to be scraped somehow.

Author Ed Pickering gleans insights from the major players in both riders’ extraordinary careers, including Doug Dailey – whose role in British cycling’s rapid development is often overlooked.

The coach (although Dailey makes it clear there was far more administration involved in the role than hands-on coaching) had identified timed track events as having the best potential for Olympic medals following Seoul in ’88.

And he had identified Boardman as his best prospect for gold, spending long days in the car driving his protégé from the Wirral down to Chichester for lab testing with Peter Keen – another of Dailey’s discoveries.

When Obree phoned the British Cycling coach in April 1995, having seen his radical tucked arms position banned by the UCI the preceding year, with news of further developments, Dailey backed the Scot where others may have scratched their heads. Or – quite reasonably – run a country mile in the opposite direction. The ‘Superman’ position was born…

Obree was duly crowned world pursuit champion for the second time in ’95, but that was the last time we would witness the Flying Scot in full flow. Again, the UCI stepped in and banned his radical riding position.

Boardman never seemed fully comfortable in his role as team leader with Gan and Crédit Agricole, and certainly did not struggle with retirement for one so young. Obree, fighting successive bouts of depression and mental illness, adapted less well, surviving a second suicide attempt in 2001.

Pickering identifies two men seemingly worlds apart yet strikingly similar in their approaches to being the best in the world: embracing short, intensive training sessions when mile-munching was the norm; the ‘marginal gains’, in both equipment and fitness levels, that became the buzzwords of Team GB under Dave Brailsford; and (not immediately obvious) the fear of failure that drove both Obree and Boardman to become record breakers.

For anyone wanting to understand the roots of British cycling’s recent triumphs, The Race Against Time is essential reading, and it is Pickering’s thorough research that makes it so.

 

 

The Race Against Time is published by Bantam Press.

Stelvio

Words: Richard Moore Photos: Gerard Brown

By common consent, 1994 was one of the hardest Giros in history (sceptics might suggest that this might have had something to do with the alleged prevalence of EPO).

For Britain’s Brian Smith, riding for Motorola, it was a baptism of fire with, thanks to the Stelvio, a dash of snow.

It was to be Smith’s only Grand Tour. But he finished it. And he survived the Stelvio.

“Of course I remember it,” he laughs. “How could I forget it? I was on it for ages. We had about 50km from the start to the Stelvio. It was a nice day, but I remember guys putting on tops, leg warmers, overshoes.

“There was a lot of discussion, but my Italian’s not great and I didn’t know what they were saying. In any case, I fancied myself as a hardy Scotsman, but then I started to wonder. What was I missing here?

“Andy Hampsten, my team leader, told me just after the start, ‘Apparently it’s snowing at the top of the Stelvio.’ We’d sent our soigneur up there with flasks of hot tea with honey and rain capes.

“But I thought I’d better be prepared. So I dropped back to the team car, got my knee warmers, jacket and overshoes.

“We rode piano initially, and when the climb started we were bunching up. It was okay. It was nice and steady. Everything was cool. I had my 39×23 on; I thought it’d be fine.

“The one thing I was concerned about was staying with a group. The Stelvio came early in the stage; we still had the Mortirolo and another climb after that, so you couldn’t afford to be isolated. If you got dropped, you weren’t coming back.

“Then Vona attacked and that set the cat among the pigeons. The group split to pieces, people were in ones or twos. I can’t even remember if I was in a group for much of the climb. You’re concentrating too hard on just getting up it. I can’t remember much about the crowd, either.

“The Mortirolo [the stage's final climb] seemed like a different race. I was back in short sleeves. And the last 500m I didn’t touch the pedals – there was a huge crowd and you just got pushed along.

“Only the hardiest, toughest tifosi had made it up the Stelvio. At the summit the road was clear, but there were 12ft snowdrifts by the side. I’d never seen anything like it. It was surreal: huge banks of snow lining the road.

“But when I think of the Stelvio I think mainly of the descent. I got up it okay; it was going down that was the problem. Although I’d been back to the car, I’d forgotten my gloves. And I didn’t want to stop.

“I was never one to get scared on a descent. But coming down the Stelvio that day, with my hands freezing, having to close one eye for the tunnels, and then hope for the best once you were inside, is something I’ll never forget. I was petrified.”

Extract from Rouleur issue 7. Richard Moore is a writer and the author of ‘In Search of Robert Millar’. You can purchase a copy of Gerard Brown’s Stelvio print here.

The Accidental Death of a Cyclist

Words: Andy McGrath Photos: Offside

The English-language documentary about Marco Pantani is due to be completed in the next few months.

“The Accidental Death of a Cyclist” charts the tumultuous life and times of the late Italian star, using archive and contemporary footage, stylised dramatic reconstructions and interviews with Pantani’s family, close friends, former teammates and peers.

The film is a collaboration between director James Erskine and New Black Films, who previously teamed up for Italia 90-based One Night in Turin and cricket flick From The Ashes.

Erskine’s hope is that the Pantani film can approach the success of Senna, the 2010 smash about the mercurial Brazilian Formula 1 driver.

Last week, we sat down with Erskine to get the details on a film which could surpass anything that has come before in cycling cinema.

Why did you want to make a film about Marco Pantani?
I thought this was an extraordinary story with an extraordinary athlete, unique in that his story combines all the highs of contemporary commercialised sport and all the lows.

It feels to me that this was a story on the scale of Senna or Raging Bull, one about a human being and a human tragedy in the sporting world. And that’s what compelled me. It’s about getting to the heart of the man.

The Pantani story is really about someone who loves the bicycle. It’s ultimately about why someone becomes a professional in the first place. It’s about love and risk and adventure and seeing sport as an art.

I think that’s really important if you’re going to try and make a cinematic film. Senna was an artist behind a racing wheel, Pantani was an artist on a bicycle.

How do you frame whether or not Pantani doped?
I think we allow the audience to make their own conclusions. But I don’t think the aim of it is to force them into making any conclusions.

It’s about stripping away the doping scandals and looking at the real human being behind it. Is it more interesting to examine the question of whether Marco Pantani took performance enhancing drugs or to explore why he had such a tragic end?

If you decided that Marco Pantani took drugs, it doesn’t explain the ending.  If you decided he didn’t take drugs, it certainly doesn’t explain the ending.

What happens to a human being in that situation, one that has won the Giro d’Italia in spectacular fashion, everything that their life has been about, at the very peak of the mountain. That moment when the haematocrit test comes out [at Madonna di Campiglio in the 1999 Giro], he can never get back, he can never be untainted again, even if he was innocent.

How anyone could cope with that? It’s supposed to be about suffering going up the mountain. What’s extraordinary about Pantani is this suffering on the way down.

When did you come up with the title, which seems a nod to Dario Fo’s work The Accidental Death of an Anarchist?
Pretty early on. The nod to Fo was deliberate in the sense that this is the story of a man whose death no-one will take responsibility for, yet everybody is responsible.

Also it’s about a corrupt system. I think there’s no doubt now – you might have argued when we came up with the idea – that cycling in the Nineties was corrupt.

The relationship between Conconi, the IOC and the UCI indicates a system in which natural justice doesn’t prevail.

Does the film go from the beginning of Pantani’s life?
It starts from the age of sixteen, seventeen years old. Most of the archive footage came from the Italian national broadcaster, RAI.

It’s very much about mountains too: we went with GoPros and cameras to these places, like the Galibier, the Mortirolo, filming on empty roads.

What makes Pantani stand out is that he’s a climber. I don’t think the film would have anywhere near the impact if Pantani wasn’t already attempting to do something which is, by its very nature, visually terrifying.

Cinema is supposed to be about showing extraordinary people in extraordinary places. What could be more visually extraordinary than the Galibier, Alpe d’Huez, the Mortirolo?

Which other places did you visit?
God, we went everywhere: Alpe d’Huez, Deux-Alpes, the bit near Turin where he fell off his bike, Cesenatico, Rome, Aprica, Minneapolis, where Greg LeMond lives.

Who else was interviewed?
We talked to his mother Tonina, Pino Roncucci, Roberto Amaducci, Piotr Ugrumov; Marco Velo was good too.

One Night in Turin drew heavily on Gazza-mania in England. Can you compare Pantani to Gascoigne?
There’s an interesting symmetry. I think they’re artists of sport, that’s what makes them entirely memorable and makes a nation embrace them.

It’s the idea of that single figure who represents the emotions of a country at a certain time. Pantani unquestionably does that in Italy.

Think about his funeral, it was extraordinary, on that scale of Senna and Princess Diana. Tens of thousands turned up – more people than for Margaret Thatcher.

It’s a way of connecting emotional identity through sport. Televised sport is at the heart of it.

Has there been an Italian sportsperson since Pantani? I’d say not, and Italian cycling is searching for a similar hero.
Pantani is unique. As much as Coppi might be a hero, or Jacques Anquetil in France or Merckx, they’re sort of pre-television.

You need mass media to create mass celebrity. You’ve got to be able to see their faces, see the emotion. It’s emotion that gets people.

Pantani’s mother Tonina seems to feel that the media had a part in her son’s downfall. How did the family feel about the making of this film?
We’ve been talking to them for a long time and interviewed them. I’ve shown them some bits of the film, which they found moving.

They see that we’re not making a journalistic exposé, we’re just trying to capture the spirit of the man.

Is there a narrator?
If we needed to clarify any of the key propositions of the film and push the emotional moment, we’d have one. But I don’t think that we do.

Each race is a story of its own, commentators from all over the world tell it well.

A lot of it was stripping down races to the bare ingredients, the key battle and protagonists, be it Tonkov, Ullrich, Armstrong, Indurain, Buenahora… fortunately Pantani offers those pugilistic moments.

When will it be in cinemas?
Some time between now and the 2014 Tour de France. I hope it would premiere at a major film festival and get theatrically released…

To me, it feels like a film that could come out in the autumn. It has lots of beautiful shots of mountains that recreate the magic of cycling so perhaps cyclists might fancy getting on their bikes, going down to the cinema and seeing those things.

Rouleur 38 is out now, featuring Colin O’Brien’s piece on Marco Pantani. Buy it here – or get it free before May 20 with a Rouleur subscription.

Operation Dennis

Words: Andy McGrath

How did you spend New Year’s Eve? Watching Jools Holland’s Hootenanny round a warm fire? Down the pub having a few drinks with friends? Having a few more and dancing badly to brash nightclub music?

No bubbly or bad boogieing for Blanco rider Dennis Van Winden. The Dutchman was lying hazily in hospital after a third operation on his iliac artery, health and cycling career hanging in the balance.

“The nurses woke me up a little bit before midnight and said ‘this will be your last minute in 2012’. I remember I said ‘2013, from now on, it will be a straight line to the top. Because I can’t get any worse now’.”

How did it come to this for the Tour de l’Avenir stage winner who had even never spent a night in hospital before last winter?

It started when he felt a slight twinge in his right leg four years ago. Wanting to push on with his newborn professional career, Van Winden ignored it – till he could no longer.

At times last season, it felt like he was pedalling with one leg. “The right one was suffering long before the left started to a little. When you notice it, each time on the bike you’re thinking ‘am I feeling it right now?’ You’re not really enjoying riding.”

He had a problem with his iliac artery, which runs from the heart carrying blood to the leg, and can be put under pressure when cyclists bend forward to exercise.

It’s a common cyclist ailment: Tony Gallopin, Travis Meyer, Stuart O’Grady and teammate Theo Bos are among those to have problems with it. In bad cases, the cyclist undergoes a winter operation and returns to former strength, sans souci. Usually.

Van Winden went under the knife in mid-November. But three weeks later, he developed a fever. The wound had gone bacterial and was bleeding internally. “From that moment, it’s really dangerous. If you don’t do anything, you’d probably bleed to death,” he says.

After surgery at a specialist sports hospital in Veldhoven, he spent a fortnight there on antibiotics, mind addled. “As a topsporter, you know your body… if you overdo it in training or don’t eat enough, you know how it reacts because you do everything to make it stronger.

“After this operation, I couldn’t believe how my body felt. It was horrible: I had pain everywhere, I couldn’t stand up. When I tried, I almost fainted.”

He was discharged from hospital on Christmas Eve but six days later, he awoke in agony.

“I was home alone so I called my brother and said ‘you have to come and drive me to the hospital’,” he says.

“In the car, I couldn’t get a normal position. Thirty minutes from the hospital, I touched my leg with my hand, just the upper leg, and couldn’t feel it.

 The top nerves were shut down. I thought ‘oh fuck, this is really bad’.

“When I arrived, I remember the doctors asked me ‘Dennis, you know the drill, number the pain from one to ten. One is no pain, from six to ten is unbearable’.

“I said ‘well doc, I’m not pushy, but if you give me a saw or a knife right now, I’d cut off the leg myself because I can’t live like this’.”

His doctors hadn’t seen a case like this. Having had the original injury repaired twice, the same surgery wasn’t an option.

After operation number three, they told him there was the possibility he might not be able to be a professional cyclist again.

How did he react to that? “The thing is, my condition was so bad, I think I didn’t realise what was going on. My body was in survival state.”

Van Winden was weak, jaundiced and skinny from weight loss. “I had no energy, my blood values were really bad. My haematocrit was 17, my haemoglobin was 4.1 for a week. That’s really low,” he says.

“I didn’t look in the mirror for the first five days afterwards – friends told me not to. When they walked in, they looked scared. But I always said ‘it would be fine’ and I really believed it. I’ve never been scared.”

Van Winden reckons his optimism was a key part in his recovery process.

“In the hospital, you get to know the doctors and nurses. They were saying ‘it’s incredible how your mind is working. From the moment you got here, you never had a bad day. Not even a bad minute. The day they brought you in, you were always fighting to get better in your mind.’

Once discharged from hospital in February after a six week stay, he had another operation on his hands: return to full fitness on the bike after four months off it.

He didn’t wear his new Blanco kit till early March, even then only going for hour-long coffee rides.

The enforced time off gave Van Winden a renewed appreciation of life. He went hiking in the hills around his Girona home and felt the bond of his Blanco brethren.

“Cycling is a beautiful sport. Like now, when I’m riding the bike with friends and colleagues, it makes me happy.”

“A day hasn’t passed without speaking with a teammate, director, soigneur or mechanic. I think we’re a close team, the Dutch guys and the foreigners… they really want to know how I was doing.”

The weight loss had him thinking he’d return as a climber. No chance. “They put a lot of sugar water in me. When I got back home, I gained ten kilos and I couldn’t even enjoy it, like if they’d given me a couple of chocolate bars every day. I was just lying around, doing nothing. You almost can’t see the lost kilograms anymore.”

Now the wheel has turned fully. On Sunday, a little over two months after getting back on his bike, Van Winden is set to pin on a number and returns to racing at the Rund um Köln.

Maybe this upped pain threshold will give him an edge. “Right now, I can do the training efforts real easy. No pain, no gain they say, but after this, pain is not difficult,” he says.

Blonde-maned Van Winden is your typical workaday professional, winless in his first three years in the ranks. For all the support and sympathy he received over the winter, the harsh reality is that he now has half as long as his peers to secure a contract extension – if Blanco finds a sponsor, that is.

Still, he’s ready for the fight. Van Winden had a last word to about his career-threatening ordeal too.

“Every surgery has its danger, even getting your ears pierced. This was an option to enjoy riding the bike as a professional cyclist again. I’d be lying if I said I was happy with the outcome, it’s been a very hard time, but I don’t regret having this surgery.”

Podcast: Issue 38

At 260 pages long, issue 38 is being cursed by sore-backed posties up and down the nation. The accompanying podcast is a big ‘un too, nudging the hour mark. Joining host Jack Thurston for a feast of Italian cycle sport, the Bath Road 100, and much else besides are assistant editor Andy McGrath and writer Michael Breckon.

Issue 38

The Rouleur podcast is brought to you by Mosquito Bikes, London’s custom made bicycle specialists. New into Mosquito bikes are frames from Daniel Merenyi, Dario Pegoretti’s only apprentice. His frames ooze the knowledge Dario collated making Marco Pantani’s race bikes. Available in custom geometry made from the latest Columbus lightweight steel – Hungarian bikes with a dash of Italian flair. Mosquito is at 123 Essex Road, London N1 2SN or on the web at mosquito-bikes.co.uk.

Poetry In Motion

Words: Ian Cleverly

There is something about a team time trial that I find endlessly fascinating, a match for any mountain stage in my book. Raw power; pure speed; precision; teamwork at its finest – lest we forget, cycling is a team sport, after all.

It’s the same deal on the track. The team pursuit is a beautiful thing, four kilometres of screaming pain for the participants, a few minutes of poetry in motion for the spectator.

Of course sprinting is the purest form of one-against-one in a velodrome (now the individual pursuit is sadly deemed surplus to requirements) but nothing grips like the four-man version.

A Tour de France without a team time trial has something missing, akin to the Grand National minus Becher’s Brook. The weaker teams are found out, struggling to maintain any semblance of order, popping riders out the back until they are lucky to hold the minimum five together to the finish line.

Some (Garmin for instance) make a point of training for the discipline with some success, while others (Team Sky) despite their obvious firepower, have still been known to blow apart badly.

Getting it right is glorious. Screwing it up is utterly humiliating, but I guess that’s what I like about it…

Bill Watkins was a TTT specialist, which is kind of an odd thing to specialise in, if you think about.

He is now CEO of Serotta in Saratoga, but back in the days when the four-man 100km time trial was very much a part of the Olympic line-up, Watkins and a group of big burly bruisers on bikes were whipped into shape by Polish defector Eddie Borysewicz for an event that rarely took place.

“In my time, it was the Russians, Poles, Czechs – they were the masters. Eddie defected after the Montreal Olympics and when I met him in Squaw Valley at the Olympic Training Centre in ’77 he hardly spoke English.

“We had a two-week training camp there with Davis [Phinney] and [Ron] Kiefel; Greg Lemond was there too, but he was only 16. He could still rip the legs off of us…

“When Eddie came over from the Polish team, who had already won two World Championships and a bunch of Olympic medals, we didn’t have the first idea how to train for it. We were just a bunch of guys doing our own thing.

“But then we started specific intervals, even weight training, to improve our stamina, so that we could all pull at 31 – 32mph and be ready to go again by the time we reached the front.”

The squad improved rapidly. These unlikely-looking cyclists, with physiques that would not look out of place powering a coxless four, got their act together with the aid of their new coach.

“What Eddie B did was introduce a very scientific approach to selection: power, body fat, weight,” says Watkins. “So we were fed into this system and eventually came out with eight TTT riders.

“We needed real big engines and we were mostly real big guys, but it didn’t matter. Put us on a flat road and we went full throttle. You can’t have a guy who weighs 150lb in front of me – I get no rest. It had to be a complimentary selection: no surging, just steady but fast.

“There’s no rest. When you’re dropping back down the line, you are almost at your limit. You pull for maybe a minute, minute and a half, two minutes max, then swing over and you’re at your threshold. And you need to get back on the train immediately.

“Miss that wheel by a couple of inches and you’re gone, and you’re never coming back. No rest, for two hours…”

The ’84 Olympics saw the US team rise from nineteenth position in Montreal in ’76 (USA boycotted the ’80 games in Moscow) to bronze medal position.

It should be pointed out that, as the Eastern Bloc countries boycotted the LA Games, the chances of those four Americans mounting the podium had the Russians, Poles and East Germans attended, are somewhere between slim and nil, but it was a great achievement nonetheless.

And had the US not boycotted four years earlier, Watkins fancies the group of “world-calibre riders” under the tutelage of Eddie B would have been strong contenders for medals.

Watkins never got to travel to LA that summer, making the longlist but not the final selection. “I was sad. I was more than sad. But it was rocking good fun, to ride at 31mph for two hours.

“It was intensely competitive and we all had big egos. We probably should have been cheering each other on, but we were always at each other’s throats. Now we laugh about it and apologise to each other for what assholes we were back then!

“I loved it. It suited my personality.”

Bill Watkins is 6’2”, weighs 180lbs and rides a Serotta.

Many thanks to all at Serotta for showing us around and loaning me a rather swish Legend SG for the Tour of the Battenkill. 

Bernard Hinault

Words: Graeme Fife Photos: Gerard Brown

“The snow was driving so hard into our faces, on a crosswind, that we had to protect our eyes with one hand. We needed ski goggles. I couldn’t see a thing.”

Bernard Hinault talking after Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Sunday 20 April, 1980. The race was 245 kilometres; after 70km, 110 of the 174 riders had already quit.

Approaching the feed station at Vietsalm, at 149km, Hinault told his directeur Cyrille Guimard that if it hadn’t stopped snowing by the time they got there, he was climbing off.

As if Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance herself, was eavesdropping, the sun came out. Hinault, being the sort of man he is, was obliged to ride on.

“I went to the front and started to go [roule] because that way I could get some heat into my body and legs.” (The French word rouler can mean to lick someone, as in a fight, or, in the slang, to stand on the pedals.)

He caught and dropped a small group of breakaways, and, 80km from the finish, he was on his own.

“My mind was blank – I couldn’t see anything. I was locked up in myself. I looked at the pine trees – everything was white. I was riding in the furrows left by the car tracks.”

He finished 9min 24sec ahead of Hennie Kuiper, his second victory in the doyen of Classics (Hinault had already won in 1977 and was second in ’79).

By the time Kuiper arrived everyone had gone – television and radio reporters included. It’s as cogent an example as there is of Hinault’s sheer class, his willpower – the rage à vaincre of which he’s spoken – and his style, the panache, the exploit, the dominating spirit, what he called “une morale terrible”.

“Since that day,” he said 30 years on, “I have no feeling in two of my fingers. As soon as the glass drops below eight degrees, I get a pain there.”

This is an extract from issue 19

Farewell to Perren Street

Words: Guy Andrews Photos: Taz Darling, Offside and Ben Ingham

Seven years ago this very week I sat on a pink Ikea sofa in an old piano factory in Kentish Town with a handful of pieces of paper and an idea.

It had been knocking around my head for many years. There wasn’t much to show for it, but I’d been in a rush and I could explain the rest.

I was here to meet up with Rapha’s founder and managing director Simon Mottram. I was feeling a bit strange about it because two rather awkward encounters with Simon had gotten me to this place.

On our first, as a then magazine product tester and journalist discussing the idea for Rapha with him, I said I thought he was mad (I don’t think I was alone with that).

The second time was when he’d sold out his first jersey range and started the company that now sponsors a fairly well-known professional team and is, well, doing a roaring trade.

Seeing as I’d told him I thought that his concept for Rapha was rubbish, I was quite expecting him to return the advice.

My premise was to produce a magazine with high production values, paper and print. It would be a magazine for the discerning reader and the fan of bike racing.

In a climate with very few alternative magazines and a worldwide web cluttered with blogs and simple news-based sites, the idea was pretty ambitious.

But I’d always thought that there was a space in the market for a reportage style cycling magazine, something with the spirit of Jock Wadley’s Coureur and the striking visual sense of Foto 8.

I was wrong. Simon liked it. I think we had a shared aesthetic and passion and I’d realised that Rapha was the ideal starting point for this new idea. We decided to have a go and I went off to develop the idea.

Four or so like minded advertisers liked our pitch and we realised that we were onto something. It was small beer on the page yield front – I’m no salesman, after all – but it would pay for the printing. We were in business.

The cover of Rouleur 1

These were the hand-to-mouth beginnings of Rouleur magazine. Before long we moved into the then-spacious headquarters of Rapha Racing Limited, which numbered four employees and that pink sofa.

In the early days contributors were bribed with Rapha socks, jerseys and even soft shell jackets for those longer features.

Many gave their time for free. Photographers like Gerard Brown and Ben Ingham and writers like Matt Seaton and Graeme Fife were there at the start and still work for us today, albeit for a little more than threads and goodwill.

As time went on readers started to subscribe. So Rene Groot, Claire Wilson and I stuffed envelopes and amended spreadsheets as the orders came in.

The boxes of magazines filled the storeroom and we worked amongst them wondering if we could ever sell them all. We did.

Since that first issue, we’ve gone from 64 pages to 260, from four issues a year to eight. We’ve launched mountain biking magazine Privateer and a book publishing imprint with Bloomsbury.

Bruce Sandell came in to manage the business and we moved from Perren Street to Shoreditch three years ago.

The ideas kept coming at a furious rate and we all realised that Rapha couldn’t help us grow them anymore, mainly because of their own exponential growth and success.

Almost seven years to the day we started out with issue 1, a management buyout created a new company and added some much needed investment.

So amicably we agreed to part and allow us to take Rouleur to the next step.

Publishing an independent magazine in these times of economic vagueness and printing decline hasn’t always been easy, but cycling has been in rude recent health and niche independent magazines are on the up. Rouleur has survived, prospered even.

I would like to thank everyone who has been involved in the journey so far, especially those who helped us in those early days. The list is long, forgive me if I don’t mention you all.

But some special thanks go to Neil Wass and all the kind folk at Manson Group our printers, to Jonathan ‘Biff’ Bacon who worked tirelessly on the design of the early issues, to Edwin Ingram at Tapestry, to Peter Guest at Image Lab, to Brian Dowling, all the guys at BDI and to all of the talented contributors who have stuck with us.

And thanks to Simon Mottram who believed in it. We’ve had our differences and still do, but he saw the good in it and that was more than enough.

But above all, thanks to the readers who subscribed and the advertisers who have supported us. It’s thanks to all of you that Rouleur is here to stay.

It hasn’t always been ideal but if it was easy then everyone would be at it.

*The leading photograph was one of our more ambitious covers. It was for issue 20 and is a story in itself.

It was shot on the roof of Perren Street in Kentish Town, Rapha’s HQ. The dog is Gino and the mechanic is John Sutcliffe, who at one point was Rapha’s (and Rouleur’s) accountant.

It took weeks of planning and some tireless work over a very wet August weekend by a small group of talented professionals under the guidance of regular Rouleur photographer Taz Darling. And thank you for everything Taz.

Not quite everyone’s a Big Mig fan on the cover of Rouleur 38, which hits the shops in a fortnight.