Triumphs and Turbulence Read online

  Yes, I’d beaten the world record in training. Yes, I’d set the fastest times in each of the previous rounds. But I still wondered what the hell I was doing here. This was what sports stars did – athletes, people on the telly – not people like me. I was terrifyingly aware of the opportunity the next few minutes represented. It could make history, change our lives forever. As the final few seconds ticked away, I had no idea how I was going to get my legs to go round.

  It had taken me more than ten years and a series of crucial events to reach this moment. But if I had to identify one specific starting point on the journey to Barcelona, it would be the car park of Chichester University, where I first met Peter Keen.

  In January 1986, the British cycling team, of which I was a very junior member, had begun serious physiology testing. It was not as part of any grand masterplan but because the rest of the world had started measuring stuff and someone in the hierarchy had decided we’d better do the same. I was instructed to get myself down to the south coast to meet a new student in the university’s sports science department who’d been engaged to conduct these tests. I was sceptical. The national squad had dabbled in testing before but I hadn’t really got much out of it. I had felt more like a lab rat, a source of data for some PhD project, rather than an athlete there to gather information which might improve my performance.

  After a 260-mile drive with national coach Doug Dailey in his ultra-modern GB team Ford Sierra, we pulled into the staff car park at Chichester to be met by a tall, blond, fresh-faced young man wearing a Persil-white lab coat and a warm smile. Peter Keen didn’t seem to be much older than me. As we chatted on the way to his tiny laboratory – little more than a large cupboard – I began to think that this encounter might be different from those I’d previously had with academics. For a start, Peter was a cyclist: he had competed successfully as a teenager, winning the schoolboy national ten-mile time trial in 1980, four years ahead of me. He had packed in racing to pursue his studies but from the questions he was asking me, I could tell his fascination with the sport, and not just the physiological side of it, was still strong.

  On the parquet floor in the centre of the small lab space was a rather tatty looking steel exercise bike. Its white paint was chipped and spotted with rust. A broad nylon strap looped around a cast-iron flywheel to create resistance in the usual way, but the knob that would normally tighten it was taped off to one side. Instead, the strap had been wound around a makeshift pulley before terminating at a handmade wooden cradle stacked with weights. Alongside were several large plastic bags hanging from what looked like a clothes rail on wheels. These apparently would be used to collect my exhaled breath for later analysis.

  The whole set-up was an odd assortment of high-tech and low budget. It looked like something Doctor Who might have knocked up had he been trapped in a cash-starved hospital rehab unit and forced to fashion something from the available parts to save the world.

  As we adjusted the saddle height and bar position to match that of my road bike, Peter talked me through the tests I’d be doing. The first would be a ‘max-minute’ test: I’d start at a steady pace and every 60 seconds he would drop a precisely calibrated weight onto the cradle, increasing my workload by 20 watts. This would go on until I could no longer sustain a full minute or I vomited, whichever came first. At this point he would stab me in the thumb to check the lactic acid level in my blood. In the afternoon, I’d do a ‘sub-maximal’ test, which meant riding at my greatest sustainable effort for ten minutes while he stabbed me periodically to take blood samples. Pete liked stabbing. Over the course of the next five hours, I completed the bank of tests and got the results, along with a thin smile from the tester that let me know he wasn’t overly impressed.

  On one side of the piece of paper he gave me were my power numbers – maximum, sustainable and per kilo of body weight – along with figures relating to my oxygen use, showing how efficient I was at processing it. These were all pretty standard. But there was also a brief list of identified areas for improvement, along with notes on how these advances might be achieved. This time it seemed the researcher wasn’t just interested in the figures: he wanted to see if he could improve athletic performance with new ideas. And there was more. On the reverse side of the paper was something I’d never seen before: training intensities had been categorised into four levels of effort with my personal information overlaid.

  Up until then I’d only heard coaches describe effort in vague terms such as ‘flat out’ or ‘dead easy’. Here was something very different. Each level was expressed as a 10 or 20 heartbeat range and accompanied by a brief description of what it should feel like to ride in that zone:

  Level 1. 1–2 hours.

  A recovery ride, no stress at all. If having a conversation, you will not need to pause for breath. The main limiting factor will be fuel. 110–130 BPM

  Level 2. 2–3 hours.

  Some concentration needed. If conversing, you will have to pause for breath occasionally. In this zone, feeding and drinking becomes essential over 1:30 H. 150–160 BPM

  Level 3. 10–45 minutes.

  This is aerobic threshold, the limit of your body’s sustainable effort. Mentally very challenging, requiring full concentration to maintain. Conversation will be almost impossible. 170–180 BPM

  Level 4. 30 seconds to 4 minutes.

  Maximal training. The intensity above threshold power will define the amount of time that can be spent here but typically seconds to a few minutes. Intense concentration is required (-mind-bending stuff!) 180 BPM to destruction.

  Pete had created what amounted to a training language for cyclists: a method for people to discuss effort without ambiguity and misinterpretation. To my knowledge, he was the first person in British sport to use evidence-based reasoning rather than history or reputation to make his case. I was impressed – and inspired. It might have said physiologist on the door but Peter Keen was a coach. He just didn’t know it yet.

  Completing the tests gave me a clear marker, showing me exactly where I was. I’d then been handed a road map, complete with directions on how to get where I wanted go, along with a persuasive argument as to why the path indicated would get me there. I left the lab motivated and excited. Everything was set out, and because of the evidence I’d been shown I truly believed. Pete’s application of science to cycling had turned me away from my love/hate relationship with winning and instead given me a fascination with the journey itself.

  Two months later, having implemented all his recommenda­tions, I trundled back down to the south coast and repeated the tests. I was four kilograms lighter and 50 watts more powerful. The look on Pete’s face was exactly the reaction I was after. After that, the lab tests became a regular feature. I was making trips to Chichester every other month, now under my own steam in my newly acquired rusty Renault 14. I craved the information that came after each session on the testing rig. Our relationship remained a distant one for a while, though. My big improvement between tests had piqued Pete’s curiosity, but I still wasn’t good enough to capture his full interest.

  One of the things I liked about Pete was that although he’d given up racing, he still rode his bike hard and often tried out training ideas on himself first. So he not only knew the theory, he knew how it would feel. That gave me an added layer of confidence in his advice, which isn’t to say that he always got it right.

  Although he was only 22, Pete’s reputation had spread quickly and he was soon advising one of the best athletes of the day: the pursuit star Tony Doyle. For all his brilliance as a physiologist, though, Pete didn’t know much about aerodynamics. Tony fitted the classic template for athletes who had historically excelled in the pursuit discipline – big and powerful. I, on the other hand, was small – and not powerful. I had a good power-to-weight ratio – the number of watts I generated per kilogram – but my absolute output was nothing like Tony’s. In the second year of our association, before we started to understand the significance of power-to
-frontal-area, Pete gently advised me to give up track racing and concentrate on the kind of endurance events more appropriate for someone of my stature. I still remind him of that counsel from time to time.

  By 1988, two years after our first encounter, Pete had become a constant presence with the British squad. In the run-up to the Seoul Olympics he became the National Endurance coach. It was the first Olympics for both of us and it was a fantastic experience, but in those days little was expected from Team GB and that’s what we duly delivered. Our team of Rob Coull, Simon Lillistone, Glen Sword and myself finished thirteenth. Colin Sturgess was the best performer of the track bunch, placing fourth in the individual pursuit.

  On the UK racing scene things were going well for me during this period. I won most time trials that I put my mind to, while road races, which were less predictable, I largely avoided. I was a bit of a coward and enjoyed being the biggest fish in my own small pond. I was comfortable and would probably have stagnated at this point, never getting any further as a sportsman, if it hadn’t been for the arrival of a weird Scotsman on a home-made bike who stopped me having it all my own way.

  Like most people, I didn’t know what to make of this eccentric loner with his odd riding position and his strange machine with its upturned handlebars. But over the 10- and 25-mile distances that I had made my own, and even when I was in my very best condition, Graeme Obree could beat me. He might have been unusual but he certainly commanded respect. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was witnessing the first real innovator in British cycling: the Dick Fosbury of his sport and his era. Graeme hadn’t just brought new thinking to cycling but an approach that would fundamentally change how we all looked at races against the clock.

  Over the next two years, the constant threat of defeat he represented forced me to be better than I was, more than I realised I could be, in order to beat him. Graeme Obree was the catalyst I needed to get me to the next step, to the point where I believed I could compete on the world stage. Without him, I don’t think I would ever have won an Olympic title.

  Although our performances were incredibly closely matched, with usually only a handful of seconds between us after an hour’s racing, our methods were very different. They weren’t necessarily different in the ways everybody thought they were, though.

  Pete Keen and I were labelled as the ones with the scientific approach, often credited with being the first to free ourselves from the way things had always been done in cycling and instead look purely at ‘the demands of the event’. But we weren’t, we were more constrained by what we thought bike riders should look like than we realised at the time. It was Graeme who was the first to really turn his gaze outside the sport and recognise that air resistance was the single most important obstacle to be overcome. He had the guts to ignore what the rest of the world thought, shrug off the ridicule and alter his position radically in an attempt to improve his aero efficiency. In doing so he changed pursuit cycling forever.

  As Graeme and I competed in the same races and were often pictured in magazines together, there was always an assumption that we knew each other when, in fact, we hardly did. The only time we would really meet was at or around a competition, so we never got past the stage of polite small talk about whatever event it happened to be. We did once find ourselves on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, along with the great Italian Francesco Moser and a few other pros, as guests of a cycling-mad Swiss travel agent, but we never took the opportunity to get to know each other. Perhaps this was because we were rivals and you can never really turn that off.

  At events, people were amazed by Graeme’s bike, with its washing machine bearings, and his seemingly Heath Robinson approach to performance in general. He clearly enjoyed this and seemed to play up to it. His ‘I eat marmalade sandwiches and bashed this bike together on the kitchen table’ persona irritated me at the time. We were working so hard to claw our way forward and Graeme seemed to make a mockery of that. Of me. In my arrogance I failed to see what his approach could teach us. He’d supplied proof that there was more out there than we knew about, but in our annoyance, we focused on the eccentric public image and missed what he was actually doing.

  On the first weekend of June 1990 I managed to win the national 25 mile title 30 seconds ahead of Graeme, before collapsing on a grass verge at the finish with severe stomach pain. It was the fourth such attack I’d had that year – sharp appendicitis-type pain – but despite several trips to hospital the specialists had been able to find no cause for it. Six days later the pain was back and I was taken to Arrowe Park where the surgeon decided to open me up and investigate. What was supposed to be a ten-minute look-see turned into a four-hour operation that left me feeling as if all my insides had been taken out, chopped up and squeezed back in. That turned out to be pretty much what had happened. I had a condition called Meckel’s Diverticulum and, left unchecked, the complications might have killed me.

  A week later, out of hospital and walking like an old man, I resigned myself to the season being over. I spent the remainder of June moping around the house and the beginning of July moping around Terry Dolan’s workshop. Terry is a frame builder from Liverpool, although that description short-changes him so badly it’s hard to know where to start to put it right. He’s a frame builder, ducker, diver, eternal optimist, philosopher – for those who can understand him – and someone who’s never happier than when he’s getting the better of ‘the man’. He’s an evader of security, a serial materialiser in VIP areas without the necessary credentials and the central figure in a long list of stories that couldn’t be published in this or any other book. Actually, what he is, really, is an honourable man disguised as a rogue.

  On several occasions Terry had helped me out – with frames and bits of equipment – for no other reason than that he could. After my operation we were very short of cash, so Terry let me come and do a bit of work for him to earn a few pounds. When I first went to his workshop, he tried to show me how to build a frame. Step one was mitring the steel tubes so they met at the right angle, then carefully filing them until no daylight could be seen when the parts were pressed together. I focused intently on the task, filing away, checking for fit and, still seeing light through the joint, filing again. By the time I’d finished, the frame I was working on had gone from an XL to an S. He never did show me how to weld.

  By the end of July, I felt a lot better. I’d even started to travel to work by bike, so I decided to try my hand in a small race – just an evening ten-mile time trial near Rainford. I think Terry was relieved to see me go. Surprisingly, that Thursday evening I posted a time of 20:42, no slower than when I’d ridden the course fully fit. I decided on the spot to go to the National Track Championships at Leicester’s Saffron Lane and see if the trend would transfer to the boards. It had to be a snap decision – the first round of the individual pursuit competition was the following day.

  I qualified in third place, won my semi-final comfortably and went on to finish 0.8 seconds behind my friend and national teammate Simon Lillistone in the final. Silver in the individual pursuit from pretty much a standing start. The selectors took my lack of a proper build-up into account and decided my performance was good enough to warrant the second pursuit spot on the team for the upcoming World Championships in Japan.

  On 20 August, we lined up in Maebashi Velodrome – the Green Dome – famous for hosting the professional Keirin races that pull in large crowds and even larger amounts of gambling money. I qualified seventh, posting what would be the fastest final kilometre of the whole meeting. The following day, though, I was out, beaten by America’s former Olympic champion Steve Hegg. Despite not getting near the podium, I flew home excited and energised. Pete Keen and I had seen something that changed our whole outlook. My qualifying time had been just two seconds slower than the fastest ride by the winner and world champion, Evgeni Berzin. We had what we believed was a bridgeable gap, a target to aim for, and so we set about planning a campaign to win the World Championshi
ps in Stuttgart the following year.

  Over the next 12 months Pete and I devoted more time and energy to the project than I would have thought existed. Certainly more than was healthy for a proper family life. Sally became pregnant with our second child and we moved to Hoylake – a tiny terraced house in Walker Street that put us nearer my mum and dad. But she was the one who sorted it all, I just tagged along, my mind on power outputs and split times even when I was physically present.

  On the evening of Friday 30 June 1991, Sally went into labour. I ran her up to Arrowe Park Hospital, dropped her off and went back home to bed. That Sunday was the national 25-mile championship near Bristol and I not only wanted to ride it, I wanted to get up there the day before to see the course.

  On Saturday morning, I rang the hospital and was told the baby would be some time yet, so I drove the 170 miles to the event with my father and completed my all-important reconnaissance ride. That afternoon my dad phoned home for news – I was having a post-ride soak in the bathroom of our B&B – and came in to inform me that I had a daughter. I was the fourth person to find out. We had decided that if our second child was a girl she would be called Maisie, but alone in hospital that weekend Sally changed her mind and called our new daughter Harriet. With the tiny fragment of remaining common sense I had, I chose not to object.

  In the end my obsession was my downfall. Pete Keen and I committed a very predictable mistake, or at least one that was totally foreseeable with hindsight: we’d overdone it. In the 12 months between hatching our plan on the flight home from Maebashi and the 1991 World Championships in Germany, I trained harder than ever in my desire to force the result we wanted. Every exercise session and every race was turned into a test to reassure myself that I was on track. As a result, I arrived in Stuttgart over-trained and jaded. Although I qualified fifth, two places better than the previous year, I got no further than the first knockout round. Worse than that, the time gap between me and the podium had widened. The rest of the world had moved on and at a faster pace than I was chasing them.