Ned Boulting dictates his column from bed
Ned gets closer to living the TdF than he intended
“My recuperation involves lying in bed being ferried cups of peppermint tea and wincing theatrically”
A pattern is beginning to emerge. Both my visits to hospitals after falling off a bike have happened with a revealing simplicity of thought in the immediate aftermath of the Tour de France. Both incidents are differently embarrassing. The first crash involved a near brush with a 12-yearold pedestrian and ended with them being unhurt and me gazing in confusion at a battered bike helmet and claiming that I had won the 2003 Tour de France.
The latest debacle resulted in more severe consequences, thankfully restricted to my body only, and its daft narrative is still unwinding. To cut a long story short, I have contrived to turn my upper arm into a mess of crushed bone and swollen tissue. Still, at least my bike was okay when I finally retrieved it from the moat of the 12th century castle in which I had been staying for the duration of my commentary duties on the Tour de France. I don’t think I heard it go crunch, but I knew instantly that my arm had been transformed into a heavy and useless appendage. The pain came a little later, and when it did it made its presence felt in the same way as jackhammers get to work on tarmac when the cables need relaying. I could envisage my nerves as fibre optic broadband connections, and, as a result, there has been a degree of intermittent buffering ever since. Let’s put it that way.
So, I write this column from my bed, using Microsoft Word’s dictation function. The reason I have to do this is because my right hand is out of action. But it does allow me nevertheless to construct wildly over-elaborate sentences that seem to go on and on without any punctuation or sense of purpose other than to fill up a line or two because there is nothing easier than to do this when you are simply dictating into a machine that types it for you.
Anyway, once my fellow commentators David Millar and Peter Kennaugh had finished laughing about the manner of my accident, they both explicitly noted that this ditch dive represented an opportunity for me finally to understand the reality of crashing: a daily hazard in a bike race and a frequent opportunity for television commentators to shout, ‘Whooaaaa!’ and ‘Oooooh!’
And it’s true. Certain aspects of crashes, which I had noted from commenting on them, happened to be completely accurate. For example, the desire to spring to one’s feet immediately and attempt to get back on the road is a primal instinct hardwired to some distant point in humanity’s evolution. Also, and this is something that I have been told over and over by professionals like Thomas de Gendt, the extent of your injuries and the proliferation of bruising and small tissue rips only become apparent two days after the accident itself. It takes that long for the body to complete a full systems check and audit.
Of course, where my experience and that of the professionals completely part company is in the recuperation period. In my case this involves lying in bed being ferried cup after cup of peppermint tea, wincing theatrically as I dictate a column about crashing for a cycling magazine. This is indeed a hardship of sorts, but it pales into insignificance when placed against the stoicism of pro riders, such as Wout Poels who endured a horrifying week at this year’s Tour de France in which he had to pretend that he hadn’t broken two ribs. Or Geraint Thomas, in 2013, who seemed to think that breaking a pelvis wasn’t sufficient cause to take a day off work.
Nevertheless, I like to think that there is a naive romanticism about my propensity for crashing straight after commentating on the Tour de France. It is clear that my enthusiasm for the race is boundless, and that my only desire is to get as close as I can to the lived experience of a racer. Spare me your moral superiority, riders! For I have suffered greatly too.
Right, that’s my word count complete. Now for some tea and toast. And co-codamol.