After flying back to England from Hong Kong, I had a few weeks till the Junior World Championships in San Marino. But with that guaranteed place in the British road race team came anxiety because I knew that I hadn’t trained enough to ensure I had the form of the year before. So I panicked and pushed myself as hard as I could in training and racing in an attempt to try to recover some semblance of form.
Meanwhile, I had to race in a time trial in the north of England in order to qualify for the World Championships time trial, as my place in this discipline was not guaranteed. Mum and I traveled up north, but, under the nose of the British selector, the trip was a disaster. Rolling to the start line, I punctured and missed my start time.
In what I considered to be typically petty British fashion, I was not allowed to start again. I refused to accept this, waited till the last man had gone, and set off one minute later. Unlike most of those competing, I wasn’t on a special bike—just my road bike with clip-on triathlete bars and borrowed wheels. Despite that, I completed the course in the fastest time by a significant margin, but it still wasn’t accepted as legitimate and I was not selected. That experience cemented my desire to get out of the British racing scene as fast as I could.
After cramming my training, I arrived in San Marino for the Worlds thinking I had made up enough ground in the previous four weeks. I was proven gravely wrong. It was a very hard course, and I couldn’t even do half of the race distance with the front of the peloton. I got dropped unceremoniously but stuck with it, riding lap after lap on my own. It was humiliating, but it taught me a lesson. At one point out on the circuit, there was a quiet area with nobody around. I got off, put my bike down, and sat there for a few minutes in despair.
I was so angry with myself. I felt like such an idiot for being given the opportunity and just wasting it by having too much fun in HK. It didn’t take me long to realize how ridiculous I must have looked, so I pulled myself together and promised to prove that I was better than this. I’m quite sure that was the moment that gave me the drive to work as hard as I did over the next eighteen months.
The British team rode terribly, yet the results failed to reveal just how badly we performed. Although Charlie Wegelius finished in front of me and I ended up getting lapped, I was somehow awarded twenty-seventh place in the results—making me highest finisher in the British team. We took a bit of a beating in the British cycling scene’s traditional mouthpiece, Cycling Weekly—more often called “The Comic.”
I noted the name of the author of the piece, determined that one day I’d be able to exact my revenge on him. But the desire to prove myself was becoming intense, and I went back to racing and winning road races and club time trials in the UK.
I was with the biggest British cycling team at the time, Team Energy, and, against my will, they wanted me to ride the National Junior 25-mile time trial championships. Under duress, I acquiesced and traveled up north with one of my older teammates, designated as my chaperone for the day. Once again, contrary to the majority of other competitors, I was on my road bike with time trial add-ons.
It was a classic British open time trial, out and back on one of the busiest roads in England, the A1. This did mean it was very fast, and it was one of the first times I got to race on a far bigger “senior” gear, a 52/12 ratio compared to the 52/15 we were limited to as juniors. In the end, I barely used it, but I did use it enough to have a sore knee for the next week. I won, and it remains the only open 25-mile time trial I have raced in the UK, so officially I’ve yet to better my time of 52:05.
Next came a GB trip to the Junior Tour of Ireland, a race that at the time was organized by current UCI (International Cycling Union) president Pat McQuaid. At the last minute, the volunteer manager in charge of the trip was changed to Mike Taylor—a fortuitous moment in my cycling life.
I can still remember arriving in Chapel-en-le-Frith in the Peak District, at the Taylor household, where I was to stay the night before we left for Ireland. Ten years later, when I was the fallen-from-grace British number one, I was given the same warm welcome from Pat, Mike’s wife, as on that first meeting.
“Hello, love,” Pat would say. “Come in. You must be tired—fancy a cup of tea?”
Mike and Pat are two of the loveliest people I’ve met through cycling, and Mike went on to play a very important role in my future development.
That trip was my first visit to Northern Ireland, and it was shocking to see the armored cars and fortresslike police stations. Before then the “troubles” all seemed so distant—far-off events I saw only on the news. Just in case it wasn’t overwhelming enough, we arrived in Londonderry on the day of the Orange Walk, a Protestant march that wreaked havoc in the town.
We were kept awake for hours that night as all hell seemed to break loose outside our hostel. When we dared step outside the next morning, there was debris everywhere—windows were broken and there were bricks and other missiles scattered all over the place. Great Britain’s junior cycling team were, to be frank, shit-scared.
The race itself went brilliantly. We won the overall classification, and, on the day of the time trial, I won the road stage in the morning and the time trial in the afternoon. Mike was a great teacher, but he was also our manager, masseur, coach, and cook. I learned more about bike racing in that one week than I had in all the races up to that point.
Mike and Pat were huge cycling fans and had been traveling to Europe to watch races for years. He was full of stories, and he seemed to know all the big British continental professionals well, as he’d take care of them whenever they came back to race in the national championships.
He was good friends with the commentator and ex-pro Paul Sherwen, and I’d seen photos of him with Robert Millar, Sean Yates, and even one with Eddy Merckx. In short, Mike was like a god to us.
We came out of the Tour of Ireland different bike racers. Mike gave me the confidence to believe I wasn’t insane in thinking I could just head across to Europe and hold my own. The next step was to tell Mum that I wanted to postpone my art college entry so that I could race on the continent with the goal of turning professional. This took some courage.
I didn’t have a place on a team in France—tradition and statistics dictated that France was the best place for British riders to graduate from amateur to pro; from Tom Simpson to Sean Yates, they’d almost all taken this route. I had very little money, and there was the small matter of having decided a few years earlier, with Dad’s backing, that it was pointless to learn French. All of these were mere details, however.
Mum was very logical. She listened carefully to me as I explained the Plan to her.
Funded by my winnings from the Tour of Ireland, I intended to leave for Belgium the next week, staying with another British junior with a family in Ieper, in western Flanders, and race against continental juniors for the last month of the season, in order to get results that would add value to my palmares—my cycling CV. This would help boost my search for an amateur team for the following year.
While there, my supposed excellent results would supply me with enough money to live. I would return from Belgium, find a coach, and train all winter while living at home with Mum in Maidenhead. During this time I would start to learn French in order to make my arrival in France a little easier. I would give myself a maximum of two years as an amateur, and if by the end of this I didn’t have a contract, I would return and go to art college.
Mum sat and listened patiently. Then she rained on my parade. “So what job will you get when you come back from Belgium?” she asked.
It hadn’t even crossed my mind that I’d have to get a job, but I knew she was right. I was fueled by the self-belief and desire to prove everybody wrong that characterizes most teenagers, and was desperate to race in Europe. Once again, I was about to leave the confines of the UK. Sadly, that was how it felt—as if I was suffocated, restrained, and held back by the parochial British cycling scene.
Fifteen years on, things are very different, and it’s a measure of how far British cycling has now come that I am perhaps one of the last riders to have followed this tortuous path. Back then, there was no National Lottery funding, no national team to speak of, no indoor track in Manchester, barely a racing scene, and hardly any sponsors.
Everybody meant well, but the British cycling scene, such as it was, survived only because of the goodwill and charity of the people who loved it. Racing at home was light-years away from the Tour de France and the continental professional scene. I had to get out.
—
Sleeping in a bunk bed for over a month in the home of a cycling-mad Belgium family was an interesting experience and surprisingly good fun. Ieper had been the scene of great destruction during World War I. There were family connections: my great-grandma—who was still smoking and drinking whiskey at ninety-nine—lost her brother in the final horrific fighting of the battle of Passchendaele in 1917.
There is something very haunting about Flanders. The scars of battle are still evident. On every ride we would pass fields of white crosses, sometimes stretching beyond the horizon. Riding a bicycle through the countryside while surrounded by such tragedy felt frivolous, yet the melancholy of the place was important to me. I never really understood why.
The cornerstone of Flemish racing is the local kermesse race. Kermesses are the village or town festivals, and these festivals wouldn’t be complete without a bike race hurtling through the town, and finishing, at the heart of the kermesse, on the main street. We would just turn up to these, jump on, and race. The locals would bet on us, and it would all be fun and games. As gung-ho juniors, we’d just smash each other for the full distance, usually about 90 kilometers, and be given our cash prizes at the finish. I didn’t finish lower than third in the ten or so that I raced in.
The last kermesse I rode was the big one and also the last race of the year, in Koksijde, called Keizer der Juniores. Within two laps, my roommate of the previous four weeks, Paul Butler, and I found ourselves off the front of the race on our own. It was horrible weather—cold, dark, raining—anybody who knows Koksijde will also know that even on a perfect summer’s day the place doesn’t exactly glow.
With about 100 of the 120 kilometers still to race, it wasn’t an astute move tactically. Thirty kilometers from the finish, we came around a corner on the seafront a little too fast and slid off in perfect unison. I got up, Paul didn’t. Somehow I managed to hold on for third place. It was enough to seal my reputation in Flanders and to return to Britain, head held high, convinced I had done enough to get myself a ride with a top French amateur team.
I’d got to know one of the Cycling Weekly journalists, fellow Scot Kenny Pryde, quite well. Through his contacts, Kenny found me a place with a big team in Brittany. I wouldn’t be expected to go over until the following February, so I had almost four months to get ready. I found myself a coach, and—as Mum had suggested—got a job stacking shelves in Tesco’s at night. But I didn’t learn French.
Over the winter, I discovered that there were others in the British scene, who, like Mike Taylor, backed my decision to head over to the continent. They were again ex-professional cyclists and keen lovers of the sport, two of whom were Sid Barras and Keith Lambert. Along with some like-minded others, they had started a small fund in order to help young British amateurs head over to the continent. It was named after a talented young English pro called Dave Rayner, who tragically died very young.
Because Mum and I found out about it only late in the day, my application to the Dave Rayner Fund was sent after the closing date. Fortunately, they were not of the rigid British cycling school of thought, and still read my application and invited me to the interview weekend in Yorkshire.
We stayed at Sid Barras’s farm and met all the people behind the fund as well as the other applicants. One by one, we met with the committee members and then impatiently awaited their response. I was lucky enough to be the rider they chose to back, and their financial help and their belief in me was an incredible help. It was also hugely motivating.
I trained ferociously through the winter, regardless of the weather. My coach, Dave Smith, had developed a very technical training program and I followed it obsessively. I barely stayed in touch with any of my Hong Kong friends, and I didn’t make any attempt to find new ones. I was extremely determined to arrive in France in the best possible condition. Nothing else mattered.
But then, late in January, I found out the team in Brittany had decided to take another foreign rider. I was devastated and completely lost as to what I should do next. So I turned to Mike Taylor. “Don’t worry, Dave,” he said. “I’ll fix it.”
Ten days later, Mike called asking if I could get down to the Basque Country. I had to ask Mum where the Basque Country was—for some reason I imagined it was in Switzerland. Mike explained that the team was based in Saint-Quentin, in the Picardie region of northern France, but was down in the Basque Country training and competing in early season races. We decided that I would head over to Saint-Quentin to be there when they got back. Mum had sold her car to help me buy a battered Ford Escort. I packed it up and set off for France.