CHAPTER NINE

Innocents Abroad

‘I DON’T THINK you should be riding. Get your team doctor to have a look at you.’ This is not what any cyclist wants to hear before the Tour de France, but that was the prognosis on Paul Watson at the medical check the day before the départ of the 1987 race. Watson’s reply spoke volumes about the readiness of ANC-Halfords, the first and to date the only British trade team to race the Tour: ‘I don’t think we have a team doctor,’ said the twenty-five-year-old from Milton Keynes. ‘We’ve got some paracetamol in a box somewhere …’

From the outside, ANC-Halfords’ entry to the Tour encapsulated the romance of cycling and, in a wider sense, of sport as a whole. The team was founded in 1985 but within only two years it brought several of Britain’s best cyclists to the start line of the greatest bike race in the world. Here was a zero-to-hero tale that matched the rags-to-riches saga of its sponsoring company, overnight-delivery specialists founded in the back of a taxi in Stoke in 1981, and worth a seven-figure sum five years later. For the first time since 1968 a British team was in the Tour – and ANC’s kit bore the evocative Union Jack logo.

Yet behind the romance of the Britons pedalling off to fulfil their dreams and do battle with cycling’s best, there was a hidden, disturbing story. The team ran out of money during the race. The riders and staff went through the toughest endurance event in cycling suspecting they were not being paid and returned home to find they were right. The episode was a reminder that underneath the glamour, professional cycling teams had often been poorly regulated and organised, and that professional cycling is a precarious existence.

Penniless ANC-Halfords may have been, but they were also colourful, with characters, tensions and sub-plots worthy of a two-wheeled sitcom. The team had even brought with them the perfect man to make sense of the script, the Daily Star journalist Jeff Connor, who travelled with them for the entire race. He could not believe the material on show before him and still gets nostalgic when he sees an ANC truck on the motorway. His daily presence in the team car would no longer be acceptable in the closed world of cycling: no team likes the press to get too close to the backbiting, double-dealing and bending of the rules that goes on behind the scenes. Connor was a fell runner, so his sports editor assumed that if he was sent to the Tour he would be able to ride a stage in the bunch, an error that perfectly expresses the level of knowledge of the race among mainstream British media at the time. His account, Wide-eyed and Legless, ranks alongside Paul Kimmage’s Rough Ride as one of the finest accounts of cycle racing in the eighties written from the inside.

The rise and demise of ANC-Halfords had a wider significance. The group had emerged during a surge in the popularity and profile of cycling in the UK in the mid-1980s; this was largely due to the fact that the recently launched Channel 4 spotted cycling’s potential as a televised sport. The success of Robert Millar, Stephen Roche and Sean Kelly had led Four to begin broadcasting a series of cycle races in British city centres in 1983, in which European-based stars such as Phil Anderson and Stephen Roche were brought over to compete against the British professionals. The arrival of even that small level of television coverage led to a rapid expansion in sponsorship of British cycling; Tony Capper, founder of the parcels company ANC, was riding that wave.

By 1987, the Tour de France was being covered nightly on Channel 4. In that year they also began covering a highly successful British professional Tour sponsored by Kellogg’s. Major companies were now deeply involved in sponsoring British domestic cycling, while the Daily Star’s involvement underlined that, for the first time, professional cycling had begun to get through to the British tabloid press. Connor’s sports editor might not have understood the details of the Tour, but at least he wanted his journalist to cover it, which was progress.

The team’s participation in the Tour was the high point of British cycling’s renaissance in the 1980s. For one and a half seasons, ANC provided the final link in the British cycling chain: there was a professional Tour of Britain, substantial television coverage, about sixty home-based professionals and a British team racing the European circuit. After ANC went bust, there would be a slow but steady decline in the sport’s profile and in the British domestic calendar, similar to the one that had followed the death of Tom Simpson twenty years earlier. A decade later there would be no Tour of Britain, and the home-based British professional class would be virtually extinct.

Tony Capper was a twenty-stone, chain-smoking ex-policeman. He had sold his parcels company and now ran the squad through a Stoke-based management company, Action Sports. ‘A bit of a big gob, but ex-coppers often are,’ according to the team leader, Malcolm Elliott. ‘How he held together in that heat I don’t know.’ Capper was going bald, and never permitted the sunroof of the Peugeot team car to be opened for fear his head might burn. ‘He was hellishly unhealthy. His diet was appalling.’ Capper’s favourite ploy while driving the team car was stopping for an ice cream late in the stage, then burning rubber to regain his place in the convoy. Connor wrote: ‘As Capper put it as he scattered pedestrians or made a U-turn across the central reservation of a dual carriageway, being inside an official Tour Peugeot was “as good as being in the presidential limousine”.’ ‘He thought he was a team manager, that he could get in the car and give us whatever instructions we needed,’ says Adrian Timmis. ‘I remember him saying he’d been up one climb in the Milk Race in his Land-Rover and had only needed third gear, so we should find it easy.’ Capper admitted to Connor that at one point during ANC’s formative years he had had liabilities of around £200,000. On the Tour he never lost his nerve as the phone calls multiplied, the bailiffs raided the team’s premises in England and the squad collapsed around him.

Cycling’s sudden transformation into a truly international sport was clear from the blend of cultures and personalities within the team. The directeurs sportifs were a grumpy Belgian, Ward ‘Muddy’ Woutters, who worked for the water board, and a fast-talking former English international racer turned salesman, Phil Griffiths. As well as Watson, the British cyclists were the good-looking, impeccably tanned Sheffield ‘playboy’ Elliott, the ‘foreign legion’ veteran Graham Jones and Timmis, a reserved twenty-three-year-old from Stoke. There were two Frenchmen, the grizzled Guy Gallopin and Bernard Chesneau, who never made it to his native France; an ebullient Australian, Shane Sutton; and a Kiwi, Steven Swart. Most amusingly, given that the Tour started in West Berlin (its first and last start on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain), the ninth cyclist was a Czech defector, Kvetoslav Palov, who had turned up in Sheffield that April and ended up in the Tour three months later.

With the addition of four masseurs from four different countries, it was an eccentric mix, riddled with tension and sniping. Woutters and Jones did not get on; the rider had more experience than the directeur sportif and said so. Griffiths resented Capper, a non-cyclist, elbowing him out of the No. 1 team car, and the pair disagreed over tactics. Capper fell out with the head masseur, Angus Fraser, one evening over whether they were eating cod or turbot. Griffiths and the head mechanic, Steve Snowling, had a stand-up row over saddle heights before a time trial. Dinner-time, says Watson, ‘was like the Mad Hatters’ tea party’.

This bizarre mélange of languages and characters reflected the speed with which the ANC-Halfords squad had grown since its foundation in 1985, when it was a team of just three riders racing the British domestic professional circuit. A year later, there were three teams run by Capper’s management company, Action Sports – ANC, Lycra-Halfords and Interrent – who raced separately in Britain to get round a ceiling on team numbers, and joined forces when racing in Europe.

The team’s rapid growth led, inevitably, to ramshackle organisation. Elliott recalls finishing a major French stage race, the Midi Libre, then driving two hundred kilometres to the airport. There was nothing abnormal in that, except that the riders travelled in the team’s bike van, sitting on bags in the back or on the wooden seats down the side, in forty-degree temperatures. En route to Watson’s first race in 1986, in the south of France, the team failed to pick him up as arranged at Newport Pagnell services on the M1; he eventually arrived at their hotel at 3 a.m., only to find the clothing for the season had been handed out and he had been left with barely any kit.

‘They were throwing us into everything, to get the world ranking to get in the Tour,’ he says. They finished the Milk Race, two weeks around Britain, then headed for a race in Brittany the next day. ‘I was begging not to go, but there were shouts and screams and threats down the phone, so I went. I got to the Tour and I was exhausted.’ ANC had qualified for the Tour at almost the last minute, thanks to strong rides from Elliott and Watson in the 1987 spring classics (third in Amstel Gold and sixth in Flèche Wallonne respectively) and a stage win by Timmis in the Midi Libre.

From the outside, that most seasoned of Tour veterans, Barry Hoban, described ANC’s entry to the Tour as ‘premature’, and within the team, privately, there was almost total agreement with that. ‘None of us were ready’ (Jones). ‘The biggest mountain I’d seen was in Majorca’ (Timmis). ‘No one thought [the Tour] was what we were doing. It was kind of a distant, fifty-fifty thought’ (Elliott). ‘They had bitten off more than they could chew from day one [of the season]’ (Watson). As Sutton said (well away from earshot of the management) at the launch of the Tour team: ‘I’m knackered, I’m crook and we haven’t even got to the start yet. We shouldn’t be doing this, we’re all half sick.’

Watson was tired out, Jones was ill when he started the Tour and ‘was asked to ride because someone else pulled out’, while Sutton had just recovered from illness. He too was asked to start instead of another rider who was injured, and was told merely to get as far as he could. ‘There was all this talk about the Tour and I just went with the flow,’ says Jones. ‘I got carried away with it; I couldn’t see myself not going as part of a British team. None of us were ready. We rode Paris–Nice in March and the Midi Libre in May, whereas you really need to spend the entire season building up.’ Their longest event was the Milk Race, well short of Tour standard, ‘two weeks’ training and nice hotels’. As Elliott put it: ‘There was a lack of enthusiasm when we were told we were going to the Tour. None of the riders were jumping up and down. That would have been like a turkey voting for Christmas. We all thought, “Shit, are you sure?” Graham had actually ridden it and was less than impressed, and we took our cue from him. Instead of five or six days like Paris–Nice it was going to be three weeks – thank you.’

The 1987 Tour was won by Ireland’s Stephen Roche in a now-legendary duel with the Spaniard Pedro Delgado. Robert Millar highlighted that year as the point when he felt the Tour became ‘too big, too important, [with] too many people and too stressful’. Millar had ridden his first Tour four years earlier, as one of just 140 cyclists, a number which would not have seemed out of place in the 1950s or 1960s. By 1986, however, the peloton had expanded by 50 per cent, to 210. In terms of the daily battle for road space, the figures speak for themselves: half as many men again trying to funnel off a wide route nationale on to a narrow back road; twenty-one team leaders and their domestiques fighting for ‘position’; twenty-one teams rather than fourteen worrying about winning a stage to ensure that they went home with at least some prize money.

A closer look at the maths explains why the pressure on the riders increased another notch in 1987. A field of 207 was slightly smaller than the previous year; critically, however, there was the biggest ever number of teams, twenty-three, with nine rather than ten cyclists apiece. Whereas in a team of ten the chances were that one of the ten might be in there simply to make up the numbers, that was less likely in a team of nine, so the standard of racing was higher. There was also more of everything – forty-six team cars in the convoy rather than twenty-eight four years earlier, twenty-three teams and their vehicles squeezing into a town square for the start – while the one thing that had not changed was the size of the roads and the size of French town centres.

In one sense, ANC-Halfords was a product of its time. Cycling was expanding so rapidly that it could hardly be regulated. Team budgets were exploding. Wages for the stars were coming close to parity with sports such as tennis and motor racing, thanks to the demands of riders such as Greg LeMond and Phil Anderson and the well-lined pockets of sponsors such as the controversial French businessman Bernard Tapie. The rapidly growing number of teams on the circuit attracted multinational team sponsors such as Hitachi and Panasonic. The bigger teams were well run, but among the lesser lights ANC-Halfords was by no means the only outfit to overreach its budgets and leave riders and staff unpaid.

That year was when Tour followers began to worry about a phenomenon known as gigantisme. The fear was a straightforward one: that the scale of the event – vehicles, sponsors, fans, media, the organisation necessary to cater for them all – would overwhelm the sporting contest which was at its heart. The reason was simple enough: the event’s sudden globalisation, and in particular its discovery by the American media and sponsors – Coca-Cola was the best example – following Greg LeMond’s win in 1986. There were now some eight hundred media on the Tour, from countries as far from the cycling heartland as Kuwait and Japan.

The strain was making itself felt in 1987. Press photographers went on strike over working conditions owing to congestion within the race itself. The 500-mile transfer out of Berlin through the East German ‘corridor’ was nightmarish – but the Tour organisers received a £1m cheque from the city for the start, and gained several evocative backdrops for television pictures: the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, the Kurfu¨rstendamm, the Wall. Preventing the Tour from growing beyond its logistical means was to prove beyond Goddet – understandably, as he was by now in his eighties – not to mention the businessmen who replaced Lévitan.

The 1980s witnessed a subtle change in the Tour’s support base on the roadside as well. To the French locals and holidaymakers, and hardcore European cycling fans, a new category could be added: what Connor describes with seventeen years’ hindsight as ‘generic sports fans’ with no specific interest in cycling, who turn up to witness a national event. Roche’s victory drew supporters who ‘just follow anything Irish, anywhere around the world, dressed in green. Apart from one guy, Oliver MacQuaid, the ones I met at the end of the 1987 Tour had no idea about cycling: I found myself the expert. I’ve watched sport in Ireland – football at Lansdowne Road, Michelle de Bruin – and panning around the crowd I notice they are the same people. Even now I go to Lansdowne Road and see one or two familiar faces from that Tour.’ Their Spanish equivalents would turn up in 1991 to greet Miguel Indurain in the town of Mâcon; 1996 would bring the Danes to hail Bjarne Riis. Not surprisingly, the first six Tours of the twenty-first century saw a vast influx of Americans swept along by the Lance Armstrong phenomenon.

For all that this was a new era in terms of numbers, it was a Tour that harked back to the past for its toughness: five consecutive days’ climbing in the Alps, twenty-five days’ racing. The event would never be as hard again. Added to that, Bernard Hinault had just retired: there was no senior pro to take control of the race and calm the unruly elements. With twenty-three teams fighting for the daily prizes, the speed of the 1987 Tour shocked even old hands. ‘Robert Millar and Stephen Roche said it was not normal, how fast it was,’ says Timmis. ‘It went flat out from the gun and went faster and faster. I remember just one day when it was a promenade, during the final week.’ Capper predicted before the start that stage wins and perhaps a brief spell in yellow were within ANC’s reach. Like much associated with the team, it was fantasy.

Physically, Elliott was the only member of the team who was competitive. Chesneau was the first casualty, outside the time limit on stage three, while Jones and Watson abandoned on stage six, which included the race’s first serious climbs in the Vosges. Watson was in negotiations with a Belgian team, Hitachi, for 1988, and saw no point in continuing. ‘Carrying on just doing worse and worse was doing me no favours. I told them I wasn’t riding the next day, and Capper took me aside for a pep talk, about how he had been in the SAS and you never pulled out, never let the team down. I looked at him, a twenty-stone blob, and thought, “You what?”’ Sutton battled on to the Pyrenees, while Swart lasted until the Alps, only giving in after an injury to his foot meant he could go no further. The only ones to make it to Paris were Elliott, Timmis, Palov and Gallopin.

‘It got lonely at the dinner table,’ says Elliott. ‘At the time you’d be thinking, “They’re at home doing whatever they want, I’m stuck on this Tour.”’ But as the riders thinned out, the hangers-on increased in number. Capper had brought along a French translator, Donald Fisher; both their families appeared halfway through the race. There was Fisher’s wife (‘caustic and dripping with jewellery’ as Connor recalls) and their poodle, which promptly died of the heat and was buried in a hotel garden. There was Mrs Capper and two teenage Capperlets, the younger of whom immediately announced that he was travelling in Griffiths’s car. The presence of ‘civilians’ among the Tour men remains a taboo. ‘It was a nightmare, you couldn’t relax at the dinner table,’ says Timmis. ‘You can’t have kids eating with you. It was like the more riders we lost, the more of Capper’s family turned up.’

The back-up personnel, like the riders, thinned out, however. Woutters lasted a week. ‘It really annoyed him that everyone wanted a free ride, everyone wanted an access-all-areas pass,’ believes Watson. Capper disappeared into thin air four days before the finish. ‘His excuse was that me and Malcolm had upset the kids,’ says Timmis. ‘The little brats were at the table one night and we were taking the piss.’ That left only the head mechanic, Steve Snowling, to drive the second team car. Connor, as a spare pair of hands, ended up at the wheel of the team van, carrying all the bikes and spares, driving several thousand pounds’ worth of equipment around France with no idea where he was going. ‘That I was allowed to do that says volumes about the team organisation,’ he says. As does the fact that the brakes failed on an Alpine descent.

Not that the standard of the Tour organisation was impeccable either. In one hilarious episode, the team were billeted in a school – Collège Marcel Aymard at Millau in southern France – eating in the dining hall off plastic-topped tables, with the staff watching them as if they had dropped from another planet. The facilities were basic and it was rapidly nicknamed ‘Dachau’. ‘It was like the sleeping accommodation in a monastery or public school – two long rows of beds facing each other with hardboard partitions,’ recalls Connor. ‘It was horrendous, with people getting up in the night and Capper snoring. I don’t think many people slept. Malcolm threw a little strop then calmed down.’ ‘I always felt as an English team we got the short straw on accommodation,’ says Elliott. ‘When you’ve had a day like we had had’ – six hours through the Massif Central – ‘you appreciate being able to put your stuff down, watch TV, have a bit of privacy, but we were all in the same room from the end of the stage to the start of the next.’

Hardboard partitions were not the only thing leading to sleepless nights: rumours that the team had run out of money and that pay cheques had not arrived had begun circulating shortly before the race. Once in the Tour, however, the riders were left with an invidious choice: quit and face an uncertain future, or continue without pay in the hope of attracting a backer for the next year. ‘I’ve always felt you’re never treated as a normal person when you’re a bike rider. In a factory you’d go on strike, but as a bike rider you have to ride even if you aren’t being paid, in order to stay in a job for the next year,’ says Timmis. Amid discussions among the riders about whether they should continue, Sutton (who had bought a bigger house on the strength of his ANC salary) kept calling home to find out if the money had arrived in his bank account.

The consensus now is that the money paid from ANC to Capper’s company, Action Sports, had been used up in the rush to get the team to the Tour. The riders were paid up to the Tour start, and that was that. ANC was by no means an isolated case of a team overreaching itself: there have been numerous tales in a similar vein from France, Italy, Spain and Belgium. Britain had a repeat of the ANC fiasco in early 2001 with the Linda McCartney Foods team: ‘sponsorship’ by three major companies was a figment of the manager’s imagination, and the squad went bust when the riders were assembled on the eve of their presentation to the press. It is only recently that the International Cycling Union has begun more stringent checks on the state of finances among leading cycling teams, to ensure that they are properly run.

With hindsight, Adrian Timmis acknowledges that far from being an opportunity, finishing seventieth in the 1987 Tour probably destroyed his cycling career. The slight, silent lad from Stoke had been a track pursuiter for Great Britain in the Los Angeles Olympics. Pursuits take about four minutes; within three years he was racing four to six hours a day for three weeks in the Tour. ‘I wasn’t ready. I’d just turned twenty-three and wasn’t physically and mentally mature enough. Everyone at the time, guys like Sean Yates, Martin Earley and Graham Jones, were all saying it would finish me off. I was too young to know better.’

Timmis was tipped to be the next great British stage-race star. He was the kind of cyclist whose perfect style on the bike belies the suffering he is going through. That July, his sheer talent and ambition backfired on him. ‘As a kid I thought, “The Tour de France, that’s it.” Today if a young rider does the Tour he will ride ten days to experience it, then get off. I won a stage of the Midi Libre and the team thought I was ready for the Tour. I was fit enough to get round, but it dug deep into what I had.’ According to Connor’s account, the ‘almost painfully shy’ Timmis ‘changed almost visibly during the month in France, from a gawky young boy to a mature professional cyclist’.

Teammates noted that Timmis was completely self-contained, his emotions kept on a tight rein, whether he was scraping himself off the road after a heavy crash on the Pyrenean Col de Bagargui or watching the personnel snipe at each other around the dinner table. Similar things had been said of Brian Robinson in 1955. ‘I’m a quiet person and I just got on with the job,’ says Timmis. ‘It was just survival, looking after yourself, always thinking about the next day. There was only one day when I didn’t think I’d finish. It was the day after l’Alpe d’Huez. We started at Bourg-d’Oisans [in the valley below the Alpe]; it was fifty kilometres uphill to the Galibier. Stephen Roche had decided he had to do something and it was lined out from the gun. I cracked and swung out, assumed the gruppetto was going to form soon, but someone told me it was too early so I had to hang on. A little later the race did split up, but it happened so early that we still had to ride hard up the climbs and in the valleys.’

There would have been another way out, but Timmis was not prepared to take drugs. ‘I didn’t want to get involved in it, because I didn’t want to have to face my mum, and my family, because they’d backed me all the way to be a bike rider. Perhaps that’s one reason why the Tour did finish me off. Perhaps it was good that it did, because I never had to make the decision.’

Timmis signed a contract with Z-Peugeot – the team that had once fielded the ‘foreign legion’ of Jones, Yates, Millar, Roche and Anderson – for 1988 and 1989, but was released after a single year, because he never found form. Now, he believes he was suffering from chronic fatigue as a result of the ANC programme. ‘I was so tired. I was up and down all the time. I was mentally tired because I would do a consistent training effort and it never translated into form. I’d have really good days and really bad days. In the Milk Race in 1988, one day I’d be towing the bunch for ten miles, the next I’d do nothing. It took me a few years to get over it.’ Eventually he turned to mountain-bike racing, and after retirement he became a soigneur, in which capacity he went through a rerun of the ANC nightmare of unpaid wages with the Linda McCartney team.

Like Robert Millar, Timmis was not drawn to cycling in search of celebrity. Nor was he driven by the money – he acknowledges that with ANC his wage was a pittance: £6,000. When I bumped into him in June 2003 at a very local road race, in a very anonymous village hall, you would not have known that sixteen years earlier this man in the plain jersey was rubbing shoulders with Stephen Roche and the greats. But he does now begin to accept the achievement. ‘I put the video on last year and watched some of the 1987 race. It’s an eye-opener. You forget what the climbs were like. In a way it was sad I never got to do it again. Perhaps it is a bit of an achievement, but to me it’s not so very big. I just did it and was capable of doing it. I will be a Tour de France rider until the day I die.’

In the long term, the principal beneficiary of the ANC saga was Malcolm Elliott, who earned the bulk of the team’s prize money for them in that Tour. He finished only ninety-fourth, but came close to winning stages in the bunch sprints at Bordeaux, where he was third, Avignon, where he came sixth, and Troyes, where he finished ninth, while he had the strength in the final week to take twentieth on the penultimate day’s time trial. He was the only ANC survivor to ride the 1988 Tour, where he raced alongside Robert Millar in the Fagor team. That team, he recalls, was particularly badly organised and riven with internal conflicts, making ANC look positively benign.

A rapid sprinter and strong climber over short, steep hills, Elliott had been British cycling’s brightest prospect since winning two gold medals at the Commonwealth Games in 1982. Until the 1987 Tour, however, the talent of the ‘Sheffield flyer’ had always seemed to be greater than his ambition, which seemed limited to the Milk Race Tour of Britain, where he won seventeen stages in four years. He had a legendary reputation as a party animal, founded on his good looks and a succession of fast cars and motorbikes. Stories abound, particularly from the Milk Race, of Elliott drinking much of the night away and winning the following day’s stage on a few hours’ sleep. ‘I’m not monastic, I did enjoy the trappings and was not particularly discreet about it. I don’t know what the stories were but they were probably true.’ Surprisingly quietly-spoken and attached to his Sheffield roots in spite of his playboy reputation, he was never certain he wanted to be a professional on the European circuit. He does not like being away from home. ‘When I’ve been away for a long time I look forward to getting down the local with a few of my mates … there’s always the feeling in pro cycling of [being] always in transit.’

For all his talent, Elliott was not like Robert Millar or Tom Simpson, both of whom dreamed of the Tour from their teenage years. He is a man who takes life one day at a time. ‘I live in the present, want to win the race at the weekend and the one after that. I never had a passion for the Tour. I get turned on by different races. I’m much more into one-day races, and the Milk Race used to get me going. The Tour is a three-week grind. I’m not that kind of rider.’ Nor did he view the Tour as a stepping-stone to a lucrative career in Europe. ‘I’m not really that analytical. I don’t wonder, “Can I do it, can’t I do it?” It was “What am I going to do next year, and the following year? Where could I ride and get well paid for it?” I had to ride for a team in Europe.’

Elliott has never imbued the Tour or any side of cycling with much mystique. ‘I didn’t consider the Tour to be the Everest of cycling achievement. I didn’t think it was a massive peak with the other races in the foothills. It is a hard race and a long race, but just because I’d done it I didn’t think I could take on anything. [Then] I still lacked a bit of confidence. Now when people talk about the Tour it has high, revered status. In 1987, the Tour was just the Tour, the Giro was the Giro and the Vuelta was the Vuelta. I’ve ridden all three; it’s hard work in all of them – you start to suffer after ten or twelve days in all of them. The Tour gets a bit exaggerated in a lot of people’s eyes. People diminish the quality of other races because they aren’t the Tour.’

Elliott did not look forward to the Tour, and he did not particularly enjoy it when he was there. ‘The first things that come to mind are the heat and the sheer duration of it. You’re there at the start and you sit there and think, “In three weeks’ time I’ll still be doing this.” It’s best to try not to dwell on it. You can’t comprehend how far it is and what you have got to go through.’ He did, however, devise his own way of dealing with it. Elliott had learned early in his cycling career to tune out, to distance himself from what was going on. ‘A lot of cyclists learn it when they’re training. They can switch off, plod away for hour after hour, go somewhere else and roam around in their head.

‘I could never think three weeks ahead; the most I’d think would be five days. I’ve often gone through a stage race promising myself I’ll pack the next day. It’s my way of getting through the day, a carrot. You’ll see people on holiday and think that in a couple of days that’ll be me, with the bucket and spade out building sandcastles. All of Europe seems to be on holiday in France in July. You’ll be riding through idyllic villages with deep blue lakes, they are all at the roadside in shorts with a beer in their hand. I’d be thinking “I want to do that, I want to be on holiday.”’

The one side of the Tour that he enjoyed was ‘the whole last stage – general euphoria, silliness, people finally starting to relax’. That came as a sudden release after the tensions that had developed as the entire field grew steadily more and more tired. ‘In the final week tempers fray easily because everyone is tired. If someone does something on the first day, like leaving gaps all the time, pushing in, thinking they can ride over you, you ignore it, but after twenty days you’re going to say something.’

In the 1987 Tour, as later in his career, when he was a prolific winner for the Spanish team Teka, Elliott’s speciality was the bunch sprint. To the outsider, this is the most fearsome side of cycle racing, more so than the 60mph descents in the mountains. There seems infinite potential for mayhem in the vast group of cyclists jockeying for position at 45mph, shimmying across the road, cutting each other up, barging their fellows out of the way in the rush for the line. Like most sprinters, Elliott found it best to act without thinking too much. Sprinting is, he says, a matter of ‘going on instinct. It’s like a mist comes down. When a sprint is over you don’t recall it clearly. Part of the mist is fear, sheer adrenalin, a heightened sense of self-preservation, the instinct for survival. To get the most out of yourself, you have to feel that it’s a matter of life or death that you win. Being a good sprinter is about getting in that frame of mind when you are fighting in the final kilometre.’

Elliott was one of the few ANC members to get any redress after the team’s collapse, but it took a year’s legal action and was actually due to an administrative oversight. His contract for 1986 had been signed with the delivery company, and he had kept a letter saying the company would employ him in 1987. That year, like the other riders, he was actually signed to Capper’s management company, Action Sports, which ran the team, but the courts considered the letter equivalent to a contract of employment, so he got his cash. The other riders simply walked away; some turned up to ride the Tour of Ireland after being offered a symbolic cash sum by the co-sponsor, Halfords.

Post-ANC, Elliott plied his trade as team sprinter, first with Roche’s Fagor, then at the Spanish team Teka, with whom he won the points classification in the 1989 Tour of Spain and took eight major wins in 1990. After Spain, he spent five happy years racing on the US professional circuit, where the lifestyle and the racing were less demanding than in Europe. After retirement in 1997, he ‘partied like it was going out of fashion, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, straight through, smoking forty a day. It was horrendous on my body, but it was what I wanted to do, and I finally got it out of my system.’

Eventually sobering up after the birth of his daughter Evie, he returned to cycling for the sake of his health and realised he still liked riding his bike. In 2004 he won the British Premier Calendar series, which denoted the strongest cyclist on the home circuit and in 2009 he was still capable of finishing in the top ten of stages in the Tour of Britain and Ireland against cyclists young enough to be his children. He only wishes that twenty years ago he had had his motivation of today. ‘With hindsight I was too young for the [ANC] opportunity. I wasn’t mature enough to make the most of it. I had focus but couldn’t maintain it for long enough. I’d have a blow-out, have a week off the bike, self-destruct a bit and come back.’ Now, the urge is partly to prove himself in spite of his age, but he confesses to being mystified by what drives him. ‘Even now it’s hard to put my finger on why I do it, why I want to go to the races at the weekend. It’s a craving for competition, an urge to continue to prove myself. It’s what I do. I’m good at it.’

Like Elliott, most of the various participants in the ANC saga are still involved in cycling. Timmis is now a trainer, while since his comeback Elliott has raced for a team sponsored by none other than Phil Griffiths, who runs a large cycle-component import-export business in Stoke (among his employees, coincidentally, is Barry Hoban). Watson turned to mountain-bike racing, spent time in the US, ran a property management business in Milton Keynes and is now a television cameraman. Jones is now a key figure in running the Tour of Britain. Swart moved to the American circuit and returned to the Tour in 1994 for the Motorola squad. Sutton raced on the British circuit during the 1990s, then took a job as Welsh national coach, where the 2008 women’s Olympic road race champion Nicole Cooke was one of his protégés. He then became a senior trainer in Britain’s Olympic track cycling team, playing a key role in their success in Beijing and then assisting with the formation of the British professional squad Team Sky in 2009 and 2010.

As for Tony Capper, he was most recently rumoured to be in Cardiff, building another taxi business, but his last contact with one of his old protégés came in 1988. The year after the ANC experiment, Sutton signed a contract with the British-based squad Banana-Falcon. He and his new teammates were driving along a motorway in southern Spain en route to a race, when they were flagged down by a large, unhealthy-looking man in a big car. It was none other than Capper. ‘He had been more than a sponsor,’ says Sutton. ‘He was an ally, a mate, he got close to us. He was the man on the street made good. Here he was asking all kinds of questions about how we all were and so on, but I wasn’t impressed. I didn’t feel I wanted to kiss and make up.’

The Tour’s rapid mondialisation meant that ANC did not have the exotic novelty attached to the Britons in 1955 or even in the 1960s. Rightly so, as the 1987 field contained two Colombian teams and an American squad sponsored by 7-Eleven, while the nations represented in the race included Australians, Poles and Canadians. It was the 7-Eleven squad that Capper’s ANC was aiming to emulate, and the Americans’ progress is worth tracing, because it shows what might have been had the British team been a little more efficiently managed.

The 7-Eleven team began competing in Europe immediately after their formation in 1985. They won stages in the Giro d’Italia that year, then turned up at the Tour in 1986 and put their Canadian, Alex Stieda, in the yellow jersey on the first full day of racing. In 1988, they won the Giro d’Italia with Andy Hampsten. By the early 1990s, they had introduced a whole generation of American cyclists to the Tour, as well as millions of armchair fans. Then, in 1991, they pulled off a major coup by attracting the first mobile-phone company to sponsor cycling, Motorola.

With ANC defunct, British fans tended to follow the American team, but this was not solely because it was the only team on the circuit with English as its first language. There was a far more substantial reason: 7-Eleven and Motorola just happened to include the most popular cyclist Britain had produced since Tom Simpson, that legendary foreign legionnaire Sean Yates.