Bad Blood

London, 1993

‘Turn him around so he can see the sunset,’ said Tom Dobson. Immediately behind the smirking shadow cabinet minister’s son, Red Menace centre half David Milliband jogged over, cupped a hand to his mouth in horror and turned away.

I lay on my back on an AstroTurf football pitch in Battersea Park, my left leg crumpled beneath me. In the dusk, my teammates gathered and stood over me. I watched the clouds drift past. Birds sang in nearby trees. Our field of dreams grew dark as we waited for the ambulance.

The floodlights hummed and flickered on. A game of hockey on the adjacent pitch was momentarily halted as the blue flashing lights appeared. The players stared bemused across the pitch at the crumpled figure. ‘Shiiit, that hurts,’ I hissed as I gave up the struggle to get back on my feet. Paramedics lifted me gingerly onto the stretcher.

I had been on the pitch only a couple of minutes, taking up my usual midfield position just in front of ‘Big Dave’ Milliband. He will forgive me if I say he is a better potential prime minister than a centre half.

Milliband’s calling card was his sheer size. He’d bellow a booming ‘Dave’s ball!’ at every goal kick, regardless of his positioning. His forehead was a battering ram, sending each hopeful punt soaring back towards the opposition. We were captained by Dan Corry, a skipper blessed with the decisive leadership style of John Le Mesurier in Dad’s Army, latterly best known for a fateful email exchange on 11 September, 2001.

The other positions in the team were filled by thrusting young Labourites. A hardened Sunday Leaguer and fully paid-up mockney, I swore more than the others – and certainly a lot more than Milliband. I was a ringer, with trademark mane and headband, brought in chiefly because I had some training bibs, spare shin pads – and took corners.

That spring evening, fate intervened. A ball lofted high over my head had bounced between us all. I pivoted, volleyed the ball away and, as I landed, heard the snap of my kneecap.

New Labour’s ministerial hopefuls watched the ambulance leave. Unlike their glorious leader, there was to be no golden goodbye, no testimonial moment. My career in park football was finished. ‘I think it’s only dislocated,’ I said to the nurse, as they drove me to the Accident and Emergency wing of St Stephen’s Hospital in Fulham. ‘Maybe you can put it back …?’

As we trundled over speed bumps in the south London backstreets, she did as I asked. Detached from the pain, a gas mask clamped to my face, I watched curiously as she manipulated my knee. It felt as if she was sifting shingle through her fingers.

Later, after more gas, the Sister scissored through my boots and socks. I reached for the gas mask again and grinned deliriously as they did it. They smeared a cast from my heel to my groin and wheeled me into a ward. As a weekend warrior, I was finished.

‘Don’t expect to play sport again,’ the surgeon told me after the operation.

Not even cycling, I asked?

Maybe cycling, he said. Maybe – but not for a long time.

This, it has to be said, was a bit of a blow. I had no job and no prospects. Now I had no escape either. Sport had rescued me from isolation as a teenager and from jobless depression as an adult. As I was wheeled back to the ward through a vague fog of anaesthesia, the black dogs barked and howled.

The ever-cheery Tom Dobson came to my hospital room to watch the Cup Final. He smuggled in some cans of Stella in a carrier bag and gurned in mock revulsion when I showed him the scar. ‘It was my ball anyway, Jezzer,’ he said.

I wailed like a baby during the first agonising days of physiotherapy. Crutches, however, had their advantages. People held doors open and black-cab drivers, showing a rare glimmer of humanity, no longer refused the fare home, south of the river.

My crutches also became a prop. At a wedding in Edinburgh, the bride’s mother looked appalled, as, drunk as a skunk, I played a crutch-wielding Kenny Rogers, hobbling through a karaoke version of ‘Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town’, relishing the line ‘It’s hard to love a man whose legs are bent and paralysed …’ After a while, they gave me a walking stick. Between sessions of physio, I camped on the sofa and became an expert on daytime TV. Left leg perched on a chair, remote control at my side, I started writing. I wrote for magazines, any magazine, on everything from Vanessa Feltz and her monumental cleavage to Siberian oil and gas supplies. A trickle of cheques dropped through the letter box.

More than anything, I wanted to write about sport. The editor of a cycling magazine, a friend of a friend, gave me a break. Could I go to Yorkshire to interview a young American professional? I caught a train to Leeds, and anxiously limped down a hotel corridor, preparing to knock on Lance Armstrong’s bedroom door.

Armstrong was a hothead from Texas who was threatening to take bike racing by storm. They said he had an attitude problem. They also said he was the future of the sport.

For a long time in my life, there were few things as inspiring as the Tour de France. I cherished the race and its long history. I measured the passing of time, not by Christmas and New Year, but by the annual excitement of the Tour. The grandeur and spectacle of the race, the names of the towns and the mountain passes, got under my skin as much as the sight of the sweat-streaked, glassy-eyed riders toiling across expansive ancient landscapes. I loved the fact that the Tour crossed mountain ranges, wide estuaries and endless plains, that the peloton flashed past road signs to Bordeaux and Geneva, Barcelona and Milan, Nice and Brussels. Now, they are all just over an hour from Stansted, Heathrow or Gatwick; yet twenty years ago, before cheap flights shrunk our world, the names still evoked a dizzying pan-European exoticism.

The Tour’s tradition of camaraderie et amité, nobility and honour achieved through suffering and sacrifice, its against-all-the-odds nature, has an enduring appeal. Falling in love with the Tour led to falling in love with France.

Yet as I fell in love with their landmark sporting event, the French were growing restless. They were familiar, perhaps overly familiar, with the Tour’s tall stories. They had become complacent and disenchanted, and they needed a steady flow of French champions to keep the dream alive.

In the mid 1980s the successes of a stream of English-speaking riders brought huge television audiences to the event, as a new world discovered the Tour’s old myths and legends. Meanwhile, even as they embraced the influx of tourism and revenue from the Tour’s bewitched new fans, the French took solace in their former glories. Year by year, as the foreign legion swamped their territory, their love of cycling faded.

By the turn of the decade, the battle lines were drawn between the old world and the new, between tradition and modernisation. The success of a young American called Greg LeMond had stirred interest on the other side of the Atlantic. LeMond had challenged Breton farmer’s son Bernard Hinault, the last bastion of French tradition and, coincidentally, LeMond’s mentor, in an epic 1986 Tour. LeMond stood the test to become the first American winner. The Tour was never the same again and Hinault, winner in 1985, remains the last French champion.

LeMond’s sheer Americanness appalled French purists. He was an innovator who saw cycling as an old-fashioned business with potential for growth. He expected to be a high earner, he wanted his wife to travel with him, he ate ice cream and he demanded air conditioning in his hotel room. The outrage at his behaviour reached its peak when he once decided to play golf on the Tour’s rest day. Pétanque, he might have got away with, but golf …? This was sacrilegious. What made him all the more remarkable was that LeMond was sponsored by a French team – led by Hinault – yet he still had the guts to break the mould. LeMond was a fan but also a foreigner, an outsider, un étranger, competing on his own terms, yet sensitive to European sensibilities. He learned to speak French and rode in Classic races such as Paris-Roubaix, in an effort to prove he was no dilettante. Nevertheless, his victory over Hinault, by then an iconic figure in French cultural life, broke the years of French resistance and ushered in a new era; incredibly, no native rider has won the Tour since. That’s twenty-two years – and counting.

The American, still riding for European sponsors, went on to win the Tour twice more. Those who have followed in his wake, led by Armstrong, have been corporate athletes, mostly riding for American brands in American teams, with little time for cycling’s history. They have surfed a wave of opportunity and created vast wealth for themselves and an entourage of hangers-on.

Armstrong was always keen to carve his own place in the sport and often sought to distance himself from LeMond’s legacy. ‘I’m not the next Greg LeMond – I’m the first Lance Armstrong,’ he would say, a little impatiently, when he first made his mark in Europe.

Ignoring Floyd Landis and his 2006 ‘victory’, quickly discredited by his positive drugs test, there have now been ten American wins, shared between LeMond and Armstrong, in the past twenty years. But it was Armstrong, the recovered cancer sufferer and tough-talking charity spokesman with his Hollywood friends and celebrity lovers, who became the poster boy for cycling’s new world.

As Armstrong took the Tour by storm, winning for seven successive years, the French became sullen and resentful, taking refuge in the notion of two-speed cycling – one group of riders (principally themselves), was clean and credible; the other group, they preferred to think of as dirty and doped. They even coined a phrase for it, cyclisme à deux vitesses.

Meanwhile, they remain as distant from Tour success as ever.