MAN AND SUPE BIKE
Chris Boardman winning the Olympic pursuit in 1992 was the first thing I remember about cycling. I wasn’t even into it, but I knew I wanted to cycle and have one of those helmets. I went with my friends to the park and we did a pursuit on the path – we ke
The story began and ended at the Velòdrom d’Horta in Barcelona, at the time of a midsummer early evening where the light starts to soften and bathe everything in a glow, after the hard, bright light of the day. Heat radiated from every surface, making it shorts and t-shirt weather right through the night. On the track: two men, one on each side. Britain’s Chris Boardman versus Germany’s Jens Lehmann in the final of the 1992 Olympic Games individual pursuit. Boardman was aiming – get this, recent British fans with little knowledge of the sport before the 2000s – for Britain’s first cycling gold medal in 72 years. Lehmann was the reigning world champion. On the day of the final, 29 July, Britain had yet to win any gold medals. Public and media interest was intense.
The public back home wasn’t only murmuring in approval about Boardman, either. British sports fans, still unused to much in the way of success at the Olympics, had cottoned on to the fact that an unemployed cabinet maker from the Wirral had made it to the final of the pursuit. Yet they were even more interested in what he was riding.
Every Olympic Games has its star or its defining story. At Rio de Janeiro 2016, it was the gymnast Simone Biles. Four years previously, in London, it was Bradley Wiggins. Beijing: Usain Bolt. In 1992 however, the biggest star, for British sports fans at least, was a bike. Or rather the bike. The LotusSport 108 upon which Boardman sat in the back straight of the velodrome looked modern, and it does so even from the perspective of 2018. In 1992, it was like nothing even many cycling fans had seen before. It was a sleek, curved, one-piece frame made of moulded carbon fibre with a single fork blade and the back wheel also attached only on one side. It was beautiful, stylish and streamlined, lacquered in the iconic black and yellow colours of the Lotus Formula One team and shaped into organic, fast-looking lines.
If you were to pick a moment when bikes stopped being traditional and started being modern, the early evening of 28 July 1992 might be it. Boardman completed the futuristic look with a low, stretched-out position and a teardrop-shaped helmet which dwindled to a point almost halfway down his back. As much attention was lavished on the bike as the man riding it.
Boardman, a few weeks away from turning 24, was the favourite, though chronic nerves, low self-esteem, some bad experiences at previous World Championships and a lugubriously pessimistic worldview meant that he still spent a portion of the build-up to the final talking himself into the position of underdog. He’d cruised through to an easy win in his semi-final in a slower time than that of Lehmann in his, which meant that he was stationed on the back straight, with the German starting on the home straight. As the eyes of the sporting public fixated on Boardman, the rider himself had tried to exclude all external stimuli and distractions from the pre-race hush, only the mechanical ticking and flipping of the numbers on the countdown clock ahead of him on the infield getting through to his consciousness.
On the face of it, the final of the 1992 Olympic pursuit looked like one man against another. Sports events don’t get much more individual than the pursuit – rider versus rider, alone on the track. But Boardman’s progress to the final had been the result of a remarkable team effort. There was his collaboration with Lotus, for a start, which was a perfectly timed one-off. And also, the unusually close relationship he had with his coach Peter Keen, an innovative and creative scientist who was only a few years older than Boardman himself. They say that cycling is a team sport for individuals. The 1992 Olympic Games pursuit, on the other hand, was an individual sport for a team.
SELF IMPROVEMENT
The most famous thing Chris Boardman ever said was in an interview in early 1992: “I don’t particularly enjoy riding my bike.” The British cycling public took many years to forgive him, or rather to understand what he actually said.
Boardman was a congenitally serious individual during his racing career, outwardly unemotional, literal and laconic, with a bone-dry sense of humour. He’s still a bit like that now, as a broadcaster and now cycling infrastructure lobbyist, though he professes to have relaxed into his skin more these days. As a teen, his cycling club mates called him ‘Uncle Chris’ because he seemed earnest beyond his years.
His journey to Barcelona, and onward to Hour Records and yellow jerseys, was a circuitous one, which started on the windswept dual carriageways of the UK’s time trialling scene. He’d chosen his parents carefully – he was born to a champion time triallist father (who was shortlisted for the GB team pursuit squad for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics) and keen cyclist mother. Initially wary of pushing their son into their own passion, they were standoffish about getting the young Chris on a bike and let him discover the sport on his own.
Boardman may not have particularly liked riding bikes, as he would later admit. But he was exceptionally good at it, and it gave him an outlet for his biggest love, and the thing that really motivated him: improvement. He coerced his parents into letting him enter his first 10-mile time trial at the age of 13, and he rode 29:43. A week later, having thought a bit about pacing and efficiency, he showed up again and rode 28-something. That hooked him. By the end of the year he had improved four minutes. By the end of the next year, 1983, he was down to 21 minutes, and under the hour for 25 miles (without tri-bars). In 1984, still a juvenile, he set a national junior 25-mile record of 52:09.
It sounds like Boardman was always destined for greatness, but in spite of clearly being the best young rider in the country, he spent a great deal of time not winning National Championships. Two weeks after setting that national junior 25-mile record, he managed to only come fifth in the National Junior 25-mile Championships after nerves wrecked his concentration. His track ambitions were similarly thwarted – just when it seemed he was emerging as the best junior pursuiter in the UK, Colin Sturgess, an even more precocious talent, showed up from South Africa and easily beat Boardman between 1985 and 1987. It wasn’t until 1988 that Boardman won a significant national individual title – the hill climb crown – and with Sturgess turning professional in 1989, the way was cleared slightly for Boardman.
THE MEETING OF MINDS
The first time Peter Keen met Chris Boardman, he was underwhelmed by what he saw. The rider had turned up unfit to a physiological test at Keen’s lab at University College Chichester in the winter of 1986-87 and turned out a comparatively mediocre set of numbers.
Keen was quietly making a name for himself at the time – still in his early 20s, he’d already become a senior lecturer in exercise physiology and he’d gained some real-world experience of coaching by working with the two-time world professional pursuit champion, Tony Doyle. A former champion schoolboy time triallist, he’d been put on the national cycling programme, such as it was, in the early 1980s and it had left him ill, overtrained and burned out. After achieving a mediocre pair of A-Levels (‘D’ in maths, ‘E’ in physics and the academic equivalent of a DNF in biology, which he dropped out of) he managed to find his way on to a sports studies course at Chichester, where he was lucky enough to have one of the most innovative sports
As a teenager, his cycling club mates called him ‘ Uncle Chris’ because he seemed earnest beyond his years
scientists in the country, Professor Tudor Hale, as a teacher. “When I got in the lab with an excellent teacher I was a completely different person,” he said about his undergraduate studies. Within a year he’d won the Sports Council’s Dissertation of the Year award. He spent long evenings in the university library reading the works of the philosopher of science Karl Popper – the lightbulb moment came when he realised that science in its purest form was not about sitting in classrooms absorbing facts and repeating them, but was more about probability and method. “It was about posing questions,” he said.
Keen tested Boardman and sent him off with a training plan to follow over the next three months. When he came back, Keen described the improvement as “staggering”. The rider was four kilos lighter and put out 50 watts more. Even then, he wasn’t convinced that Boardman was a world-beater, but he was still only going on the numbers (itself quite a revolutionary concept at the time). Keen was measuring pulse and power, along with the more subjective perception of effort, which gave Boardman what motivated him – the ability to track his progress.
The timing of their coming together was serendipitous. Boardman’s previous coach, Eddie Soens, had been the archetypal fiery motivator. He’d recognised Boardman’s class, and added pugnacious drive to the rider’s obsessional nature. However, Keen brought something different. He was trying to approach coaching using the scientific methods he’d studied at university and starting with a clean slate rather than relying on received wisdom. And in Boardman he had the perfect guinea pig. Boardman’s congenital honesty and straightforwardness meant that the quality of his feedback was high. “I learned faster with him than with anybody else I worked with, because he was such an exceptionally good and honest communicator,” said Keen.
Keen still hadn’t learned that Boardman was a worldbeater, however. The numbers on that second test were impressive but Boardman’s power was never his primary weapon. What made him exceptional were the rate of improvement, his lung function, which was unusually efficient, and the fact that he had a very small frontal area on a bike – he was able to ride efficiently while holding a much better-than-average aerodynamic position.
By 1989, Boardman was starting to dominate domestically – he won the National 25-mile Championship by a minute. However, he and Keen had also identified a possible trajectory towards the ultimate ambition: an Olympic pursuit gold medal in 1992. In 1989, Boardman was 10th in the World Championships. The rough aims were this: top six in 1990, top three in 1991 and then gold in Barcelona the following year.
Boardman qualified seventh fastest in the 1990 Worlds and though he was knocked out in the quarter-final, he was roughly on track. However, 1991 gave him a rude awakening. He recorded 4:31 in the qualifying round of
the World Pursuit Championships, but he still only qualified fifth, and his final position was ninth, even though he’d ridden faster than ever before. The gap to the gold medal had widened, too – he was nine seconds off the pace of the new world record of 4:22 set by Jens Lehmann, who won the gold medal.
Lehmann’s performance was staggering. He’d ridden faster over 4km than the British team pursuit squad, and improved 14 seconds over a year. Boardman’s morale was on the floor. Keen knew that his rider needed not sympathy, but evidence that he could improve enough to win gold in Barcelona. Keen looked at Lehmann’s time, along with his height, weight and frontal area, worked out what wattage Boardman would need to produce to beat him and worked out what they needed to do in the 12 months they had left.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Like Chris Boardman himself, the LotusSport 108 was born on the dual carriageways and out-and-back courses of the British time trialling scene. Mike Burrows, an engineer based in East Anglia whose day job was
designing and making packaging machines, but who had a sideline in bike design, had come up with an original aero bike in the early 1980s featuring a one-piece frame made of carbon fibre, which he called the WindCheetah. Burrows, who well fitted the stereotype of the eccentric inventor, didn’t want to have to train to go faster in time trials, but he realised perfectly that making his bike more aerodynamic would have the same result. His background in model plane building and flying gave him more aerodynamic knowledge than any bike manufacturers at the time, and this coincided with him starting to work with carbon. His memory, years later of getting his hands on this new material, was gleeful: “Ooh, stuff! What can we make with this?”
Burrows’ inspiration for the monocoque (one-piece) frame was not just space-age technology and modern aerodynamics. He’d been aware of a bike called the Invincible, made by the Surrey Machinist Company in the 1890s, a model of which he’d seen at the Transport Museum in Coventry. The Invincible had only one fork, and as Burrows would later say, “Nothing is more aerodynamic than no fork.”
Burrows took the WindCheetah, which had a more square profile than the LotusSport but was recognisably similar, around the bike companies of the UK, but they were mystified. They asked him why he’d covered the frame, while Burrows’s incredulous reaction was that he hadn’t – the covering was the frame. Things also weren’t helped by the UCI banning one-piece frames in the mid1980s (though they were fine for use in British time trials).
That might have been that, except for the fact that Rudy Thomann, a retired Formula Two racing driver and a test driver for the local Lotus car company, saw the WindCheetah hanging in Burrows’ office and asked if he could take it to show to the Lotus engineers. The board of directors at Lotus saw an opportunity to leverage their high-end engineering cachet to make and sell exclusive hand-made bikes, and the WindCheetah was sufficiently innovative and revolutionary to work with.
Lotus had the expertise to made the WindCheetah even more aerodynamic, with access to the Motoring Institute Research Association (MIRA) wind tunnel near Birmingham. Their project coincided with the UCI relaxing the rules on monocoque frames. Lotus had the idea and the impetus to make the bike; all they needed was a marketing strategy.
Thomann, a keen cyclist and blue-sky thinker, got in touch with Boardman, the germ of an idea already formed. What better marketing than a British rider riding a British bike to victory in the Olympic Games? He invited Boardman to MIRA and they spent a day seeing how much more aerodynamic the WindCheetah could make him. Initially, the answer was not at all. But the first test had Boardman riding on a bike built for Burrows, a much bigger man. They gaffer taped Boardman’s arms to the underside of the bars and got better results. The Lotus aerodynamicist Richard Hill asked him if he could go even lower, and they contorted Boardman into a very extreme position. It had been a gruelling day. They’d been testing in the unheated tunnel in February and it was so cold that the drag profiles showed Boardman shivering, but the results were so good that Boardman was sold.
Lotus bought the rights to the design from Burrows and worked on a series of models through 1992. The new UCI rules stipulated that bikes had to be used in international competition before the Olympics so the British Cycling Federation slyly sent Bryan Steel, a good but not great pursuiter, to a World Cup event in Hyères, France, to compete on the LotusSport. The officials had a look at the bike, but it was quite heavy, and Steel’s results weren’t brilliant, so the BCF got it through. The LotusSport was legit.
The bike was starting to attract attention from rival teams, and the British Cycling staff were having to keep it covered in blankets. There were some comical moments as the F1-trained engineers of Lotus incessantly tinkered with the bike between races, a normal habit in motorsport, where they strip the car down after each race, but less common in cycling. The British mechanic came across the LotusSport after one rebuilding session to find that the cranks were at 90 degrees to each other after Lotus had assigned a different mechanic to each side. However, the British Cycling staff got a glimpse of a different world as Hill delivered one version to the south of France using a brand new Lotus S4 sports car. The final version – prototype four – was beset by manufacturing problems. A heatwave in southern England
The bike was starting to attract attention from rival teams, and the British Cyling staff had to keep it covered in blankets
meant that the epoxy resin wasn’t setting and the engineers had to make it at night so that the frame would bond. But it was ready.
And so was Boardman. Six weeks before the Olympics, he underwent his final tests, on an old Kingcycle in front of an Amstrad computer at national coach Doug Dailey’s house. Dailey was in the kitchen making a cup of tea when Keen came into the kitchen. There was nothing underwhelming about Boardman’s numbers this time round. “The gold medal is on,” Keen told Dailey.
THE LOTUS POSITION
Boardman’s form was excellent and he had the mental advantage of riding the Lotus bike. Lotus’s claim that it gained him 12 seconds was marketing hyperbole, and some experts suspected that Boardman’s new low position, rather than the bike itself, was the main gain. But the combination was intimidating.
In a training session on the Velòdrom d’Horta, Boardman rode 3km in 3:18. If he could hold that pace for another kilometre, he’d be in the low 4:20s, comparable to Lehmann at the previous year’s Worlds, but on an outdoor track against Lehmann’s indoor time.
There were four rides: qualifying, quarters, semis and the final. Boardman won it in qualifying. In riding 4:27, he was slower than he and Keen had hoped, but so was everybody else, in very hot conditions. He was three seconds ahead of the next rider, a huge margin over such a short distance. In the quarter-final, Boardman caught the Danish rider Jan Bo Petersen and carried on to record 4:24, but also took care to visibly sit up on the last lap, to show his rivals that he could go faster.
The British press had got wind of the performances and sensed that the story of the Games was unfolding. Boardman, for his part, was having panic attacks, and he’d later credit his performance to the BCF psychologist John Syer. Off the bike, Boardman felt chaotic. On it, he was masterful, racing the man rather than the clock in his semi-final to ensure that he qualified fresh. Keen and Boardman set a schedule of 4:26 for the final, allowing for a faster finish if Lehmann was anywhere close. As the clock ticked down to the start, Boardman was primed.
It was over in a lap – Keen later said that he knew Boardman would win after one circuit of the velodrome. He was a second faster at a quarter distance, and three clear after two kilometres. With the full distance almost covered, Boardman bore down on and then caught the German. The headlines in the German papers the next day: “Their F1 beat our Trabant”.
The story, not at all countered by Lotus, was that the bike had won the gold medal, though it’s not as simple as that. The bike had a definite aero advantage, but Lehmann was riding a carbon fibre FES bike, so the comparative gain wasn’t that much. Shaun Wallace, a professional contemporary of Boardman who rode to the silver medal in the 1991 Worlds pursuit on his regular bike, rode on the Lotus in the Worlds in 1992. Result: another silver medal. Maybe the bike didn’t make as much difference as all that. The Lotus was heavy, as well, and interestingly the wheels didn’t line up – they were offset to accommodate the engineering design.
You can argue that a direct line can be traced from Boardman’s gold medal to the success that British cycling has enjoyed in the 2000s. Keen’s opinion was that the methods he’d used with Boardman could be applied to anybody, and he proved it by training Yvonne MacGregor to a World Pursuit Championship gold in 2000. When the Lottery money cascaded into cycling in the late 1990s, he set up the World Class Performance Programme which resulted in steadily improving Olympic track performances from 2000 onwards. Dave Brailsford took over from him as performance director in 2003, and from there flowed all the Olympic success, Team Sky and six Tour de France wins. The story that ended in 1992 was the beginning of another one.