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      1992 National Championship jersey

      Britain was far from a ‘traditional’ cycling country – road racing had been outlawed here before the Second World War – but contrary to popular belief it wasn’t a complete desert as regards pro racing. The Milk Race was essentially for British domestic riders and foreign amateurs, but we had the Kellogg’s Tour of Britain to look forward to in August. That was followed two days later by the Leeds Classic, which had been founded by Alan Rushton in 1989. It was part of the new World Cup series, and all the big teams raced there.

      The UCI were trying to globalise cycling, but the race was typically British in the sense that, with the best will in the world, there was no money in it. The first edition had been in Newcastle, then it had moved to Brighton, and now it was up in Yorkshire. Everyone said they loved racing it, and the crowds were great. In retrospect, though, Britain just didn’t have the critical mass for a race like that to succeed. The Leeds (or Rochester, or Wincanton …) would fold the following year, and Hamburg would take its place in the World Cup. That’s just the way it was, I’m afraid. The sporting landscape was different back then, totally dominated by football, cricket, rugby and golf. Oh, and snooker.

      Whatever. First and foremost, the 1994 Tour de France was coming back to England. I say ‘coming back’, because I’d learned that there had been a stage in Plymouth twenty years earlier, though seemingly it had been a bit of a dog’s dinner. They hadn’t managed to get it televised live – I assume it would have interfered with the wrestling on World of Sport – but evidently that was no bad thing because the ‘racing’ had been hopeless. They’d literally just ridden up the new bypass to the roundabout, and then ridden back down it again. Thirty times.

      This time there would be two real stages, on days four and five. Everybody at the club was talking about them, not least because Boardman might be in yellow. He was the best prologue rider in the world, and if he could get the jersey and survive the team time trial we’d have one of our own in the maillot jaune when the race crossed the Channel. I learned that no Brit had worn the yellow jersey since 1962, when a certain Tom Simpson had kept it for a single day.

      Chris duly won the jersey but his team, GAN, couldn’t defend it in the time trial. Museeuw took it from him and wore it on the stage from Dover to Brighton, but the next day one of his team-mates, an Italian guy named Flavio Vanzella, got it in the break. He wore it into Portsmouth, and that was that for the British stages. As ever with the Tour, the fun seemed to be over before it had really begun. That’s the nature of cycling, I suppose, and I was starting to understand that part of its beauty is the fact that it’s so ephemeral, so fleeting.

      Yates hadn’t particularly extended himself in the prologue. He’d shipped almost a minute because he wasn’t a GC rider, but also because he was a serious professional with a job to do. Motorola had made the team time trial one of their main objectives, and Sean would need to preserve every ounce of energy he could for that. Motorola also had the likes of Steve Bauer and Phil Anderson, really powerful rouleurs with big engines, but you’d be hard-pushed to find any team time triallists better than Yates over 65 kilometres. In the event they finished second in the TTT, but as a consequence Sean found himself in seventh place overall when they got back to France.

      Yates wearing the maillot jaune in 1994 for a single day, before losing it to Museeuw on Stage 7.

      The first French stage was Cherbourg to Rennes, 270 kilometres. A break went, Sean and one of his team-mates got in it, and then one of the escapees, Bortolami, jumped off the front. Now all hell broke loose because you had Bortolami trying to win both the stage and the jersey, Sean and co. desperately trying to bring him back, and Vanzella’s team turning themselves inside out to bring them back. There were effectively three races in one, which is typical of the frantic, dramatic, desperate stuff you often see during the opening week of the Tour. Bortolami held on for the stage, but Sean was a monster. When the dust settled he’d taken the jersey by a single second, with Bortolami second and Museeuw third.

      Now it could be argued that he fell on his feet that day, because I am not sure that he’d set out with the objective of claiming the jersey. That wasn’t his job, but by the same token you don’t get to wear it by accident. That’s the key to it, because Sean’s day in yellow was fundamentally a consequence of both his physical strength and, paradoxically, his altruism. He’d shipped some time initially, and then buried himself for his team. That had left him there or thereabouts on GC, but not so close to the race leader that they weren’t prepared to cut him a little bit of slack. He grabbed it with both hands, and there was nobody better equipped to keep hold of it on that kind

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