In the summer of 2005 I finally got to meet Franco Ballerini, at the World Championships in Madrid. By then he was manager of the Italian national team, and he walked into the GB tent an hour and a half before the time trial. I thought, ‘Bloody hell! That’s Franco Ballerini!’, and then Max Sciandri introduced us. Max started talking to him in Italian, telling him who I was and what I’d done. I felt ten feet tall.
I signed for Cofidis in 2006, having finally resolved to make a go of my road career. I decided to give Paris–Roubaix another shot, and found myself in a good position headed into the Arenberg. I wasn’t strong enough to stay with the likes of Cancellara, Boonen and Ballan, but I settled into the main chase group of about 50 or so. Looking round I noticed that many of them were classics specialists, real class acts. I was relatively comfortable among them, and I remember being interviewed in the velodrome afterwards. I said, ‘Well, even if I never do it again I’ll always be able to say I finished Paris–Roubaix.’ Three years later I went back, finished 25th and realised I had the ability to be competitive. I was a million miles away from winning the thing, but at least I was relevant.
Franco Ballerini died tragically in 2010, co-piloting in a rally in Tuscany. It had a profound impact on me, but also on the Italian riders who’d ridden under him. I’d idolised him as a bike rider but guys like Pippo Pozzato loved him, almost without exception, as a human being.
All of which largely explains my own efforts at the 2014 and 2015 Paris–Roubaix. In 2014 I was focused on trying to earn selection for the Tour team, so I wasn’t specifically prepared for Roubaix. I was in decent form, but I was mainly concentrating on being good for the Tour of California. Notwithstanding all of which, I was at the front all day, and I had the strength to attack in the finale. They caught me, and Niki Terpstra went clear, but I came in with Boonen, Štybar and Cancellara. I finished top ten in a race I’d never really targeted, because in my best years my career path had taken me elsewhere. Roubaix requires colossal strength and stamina, but as I’d acquired them I’d been focused, necessarily, on the Tour.
Regardless, I’d proved that I could be a player at the Hell of the North, and in 2015 I wanted to have a serious shot at it. I knew I’d need the cards to fall my way (you always need that at Roubaix, unless you’re a Boonen or a Cancellara), but I was one of the elder statesmen of the peloton. The flip-side was that I was in a team containing guys like Flecha, Thomas, Stannard and Hayman, experienced riders who were more than capable of challenging for the win themselves.
The DS was Knaven, and he’d won Roubaix in 2001. When I put my hand up I knew I’d have the support of all of these people, but it was implicit that I’d need to perform. If you’re asking guys like Stannard to sacrifice themselves for you, you’d better have the legs to justify it.
The rest is history. I attacked on the Templeuve, and that was no coincidence. Rather it was my way of paying tribute not only to the race itself, but also to Franco Ballerini. It was my way of honouring his memory, while simultaneously realising, as best I could, my own boyhood dream. In retrospect it probably wasn’t the smartest thing to have done, but cycling’s not all about watts, power meters and tactics. To me this was the very opposite of those things, and I like to think that Ballerini was of the same mind.
I didn’t win Roubaix – I wasn’t half the classics rider he was – but hopefully he’d have approved.
Franco Ballerini’s 1994 Mapei-Clas Colnago Titanio Bittan
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 …’
From an Archer