LITMIR.BIZ

      Racing in 1992 for the Banana-Met team.

      So I’d ‘met’ Museeuw and Ballerini, and shaken hands with Flanders and Paris–Roubaix. Next up would be a visit to the Milk Race, a pro-am Tour of Britain. I couldn’t wait to see real-life riders in the flesh, but in the meantime I had my 13th birthday. Like anyone starting out in cycling, I’d quickly become obsessed by its equipment and I wanted the same gear as the champions had. I wanted to ride like them and look like them, and that meant one thing and one thing only. A date with destiny for me, and a long haul down to the cycling heartlands of deepest, darkest Croydon for my poor, put-upon mother.

      It was a hell of a trip from Kilburn, and it wasn’t as if we had much. She was a single mum working as a receptionist at the local school, but I wasn’t interested in all that practical nonsense. Geoffrey Butler’s was probably the best bike shop in the south-east in those pre-internet days, and at that age you just want stuff. The stuff I wanted was cycling stuff, and so off we set.

      Before we went I made it clear that I wasn’t mucking about, and that I absolutely needed a pair of proper cycling sunglasses in the first instance. Then there was the legwarmers issue, which I felt needed to be addressed urgently. Previously I’d worn a pair of mum’s tights, and she’d elasticated the bottoms to make them seem real. I’m sure it was well meaning and all, but I wasn’t prepared to put up with it any longer. As an Olympic gold medalist in the making I wasn’t prepared to compromise, and I couldn’t be held back by substandard equipment.

      And besides, you wouldn’t have seen Franco Ballerini riding around in a pair of his mum’s tights …

      I THINK ROOTING AROUND IN THE BARGAIN BIN AT BUTLER’S is one of my very best childhood memories. I got a pair of shorts, and I found a Carrera headband like the ones I’d seen on TV. Then a Motorola cap like Sean Yates’s, a Tulip winter rain hat, a pair of Bernard Hinault cycling shoes and some Look clipless pedals. I was like a kid in a sweet bike shop.

      It seems crazy now, but it’s a classic cycling story. It’s rites-of-passage stuff, and I don’t suppose I was any different to thousands of other kids all over Europe. What was different was the fact that cycling was small-fry in Britain in just about every sense. Because there were so few shops you had to travel further to get kit, and I think that made it more of an event. There was a rarity value to the things you bought, and that was maybe because you had to do something and go somewhere to get them.

      British cycling is unrecognisable these days from what it used to be. Back then it wasn’t in the least bit ‘aspirational’, but rather price-sensitive. You didn’t have the likes of Rapha with their huge marketing budgets, and the British cycling industry was strictly of the cottage variety. It was centred around functionality and economy as distinct from ‘design’ and fashion, and such marketing as existed was quite primitive. It amounted to photos of the champions on their bikes, whereas these days it’s infinitely more sophisticated. Apparently it works – and whichever way you swing it, the more people out riding the better.

      None of this concerned my all-new teenage self. I was far too busy strutting around the flat and preening myself in my new headband, cycling shoes and cap. I was a racing cyclist, and by hook or by crook I was going to assert my new identity.

      The place to do that was the Archer Road Club. At first I’d been suspicious, but I was starting to feel at home there now. We had something – cycling – in common, but the collateral effects were positive as well. I was much happier, and my general demeanour was much better. Even school, which had never particularly interested me, became less of a drag. The teachers would say to my mum, ‘His behaviour has improved no end. He’s much more polite …’