CHAPTER 1
The Wirral

Stranded between the Dee Estuary and the Mersey, the Wirral peninsula struggles a bit for an identity of its own. The posher part believes it is Cheshire’s long-lost cousin, while the northern fringe would desperately like to be recognised as an annex of Liverpool – so much so that the inhabitants have been christened ‘plastic Scousers’ by the true Liverpudlians.

I grew up in the village of Hoylake, in a quiet cul-de-sac where kids played outside and dads worked on their cars. If people know Hoylake at all it’s probably for the Royal Liverpool Golf Club, one of the best links courses in the country. I couldn’t have cared less about golf, the focal point of my childhood was Hoylake’s other distinguishing feature – its huge, open-air, seawater swimming pool.

My obsession with water predates my memory of it. Long before I could swim I was perfectly comfortable being in water way over my head. My strategy was to stay below the surface and bounce up off the bottom when I needed to breathe. I was addicted to Jacques Cousteau programmes on TV. I wore my first pair of flippers to bed. My birthday present every year was a season ticket to the pool and throughout the summer months, no matter what the weather, I’d be there. When it was freezing and the place was deserted I’d be the lone figure diving under the springboards to look for change on the bottom, where it invariably fell from people’s pockets as they bounced up and down. I’d then run across the cold stone floor to the coin-operated showers and use my prize to warm up. I loved it. I wasn’t a complicated lad.

And if I wasn’t in the baths then I was in the sea, usually in my canoe, surfing in on the waves and enjoying the freedom of an unsupervised 1970s childhood.

On land, family life revolved around my parents’ great love: bike racing. On Thursday nights we’d go to Huntington, just outside Chester, where my dad would ride a ten-mile club time trial. Afterwards we’d head to the pub next to the start area, The Rake and Pikel, and there’d usually be chips eaten by the River Dee on the way home.

At weekends we’d be woken at 5 a.m. and crammed full of toast before piling into the hand-painted family Mini Van to head off for an early morning race, my dad’s bike strapped to the roof. Afterwards, I’d hang around the kerbside results board and listen proudly for people talking about him and how well he’d done.

Keith Boardman – quiet, unassuming, sardonic sense of humour – had been long-listed for the Great Britain cycling team to go to the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, four years before I was born, but for reasons we’ve never discussed he decided not to pursue a sporting career. He settled down to life as a Post Office engineer and kept cycling as his pastime. I think perhaps my dad knew just how much pressure he could cope with and that was the moment he chose his path. When I was in the final ride for Olympic gold in Barcelona, he couldn’t bear to watch the race; he lay in the bath with a cup of tea and waited to hear the outcome second-hand. I don’t think going out to Spain and watching the event in person would ever have crossed his mind.

His talents extended to more than just riding a bike quickly. I don’t recall ever seeing a tradesman of any kind in either of the two houses we lived in while I was growing up: painting, plumbing, electrics, shed-building, car maintenance, my dad did it all and usually very successfully with not much more than mole-grips, a hammer and some black plastic tape. If our house had been powered by a nuclear reactor I suspect he’d have donned some oven gloves and got stuck in. On my seventh birthday he presented me with a homemade miniature scuba set: he had fashioned the tanks from a pair of plastic GPO cylinder-shaped cable junctions and some plumber’s copper pipe. I was ecstatic and spent many happy hours walking around our cul-de-sac wearing them.

Even well into my twenties, whenever I got stuck with a piece of cycle mechanics or electrical wiring in the house, I’d call Keith, who would always find a way to fix the problem, no matter what it was, using only materials within a two-metre radius of his position. It was a dark day when he retired from the Post Office and his ready supply of PVC tape dried up. He still has the mole-grips.

Even now, having spent most of my adult life around athletes, I can honestly say that my mother, Carol Boardman, is the most ferociously competitive person I have ever met. A cook at a local nursing home, she has always been full of energy, which is fortunate because she is a stealth combatant: one of those individuals who can quietly turn anything into a contest. Like my father, she had been a racing cyclist of some promise, finishing just behind the legendary Beryl Burton on one occasion at an event in the Isle of Man. When my sister Lisa and I came along, the demands of racing and home life became too difficult to juggle so she retired, but that didn’t stop her trying to get her fix in other ways.

On the ten-minute walk to my Nan’s my mother would often force us to skip – it didn’t feel as strange then as it sounds now – which inevitably turned into a dog-eat-dog contest: a woman and two children frantically speed-skipping along a suburban pavement with a blue garden gate as the winning post. God knows what it looked like to people driving past. Later, I would sometimes find myself cycling the last few miles home from a club ride in a group with her. It’s standard practice for cyclists to take it in turns at the front, pushing through the air while the others sit behind in relative shelter until their turn comes. One Sunday afternoon, as I led our small bunch into the outskirts of Hoylake, I spotted in the corner of my eye a fast-moving dark shape. It was Carol launching a surprise attack, sprinting for the village sign.

Many of my childhood memories involve my mother and the outdoors, walking out over Hoylake sandbank, swimming in the deep gullies, or hunting for fossils on Llandegla Moor in North Wales after a bike race while my dad had his nap. The highlight of the summer holidays was our trip to Yorkshire for the Harrogate cycling festival. We didn’t have a lot of money and I don’t think hotels or holidays abroad were ever an option. It might only have been the other side of the Pennines but it felt like a magical foreign land.

Each year we’d arrive at The Lido campsite in Knaresborough, unfold the wings of our trailer-tent and that would be our home for the next two glorious weeks. Our parents slept in one wing while Lisa and I had the other, but I preferred to sleep underneath, with the trailer’s tarpaulin as a groundsheet and a dinghy for a bed. I can still remember waking to the blue light filtering through the canvas, the smell of the grass and the sounds of sheep and distant birds. Dad would ride his various races while we battered around the park barefoot with the other cyclists’ kids, climbing the rocks around the River Nidd and daring each other to jump off cliffs into the brown water. Once we got hold of a life raft and sailed it over a weir. It was a wonderful time, a working-class Swallows and Amazons.

Up until the age of eleven, I didn’t care what bikes looked like. They were strictly for entertainment and transport, vehicles to tear round childhood on. Then shiny BMX machines began arriving in the shops from America and suddenly bikes became cool, covetable objects in their own right. In the run-up to Christmas 1979 I hinted shamelessly, leaving the mail-order catalogue open on the kitchen table at the appropriate page. My parents, though, wanted me to have the same experiences growing up as they’d had with their friends, and on Christmas morning I ran down to the front room to find a second-hand blue Carlton racer. I was secretly gutted. Or perhaps not so secretly, because 12 months later they bought me a bright red Raleigh with yellow mag-alloy wheels. The Carlton was instantly consigned to the shed and I spent Christmas Day 1980 riding my BMX in the road for two or three minutes at a time before coming back in and cleaning it for an hour. It was my pride and joy.

Water, though, still exerted the stronger pull, and if I needed any kind of push there was Uncle Dave. Dave Lindfield, my mum’s younger brother, was everything an uncle is supposed to be: mischievous, childlike, not wholly responsible. Dave and his wife Mo didn’t have children of their own then, so Lisa and I often got spoiled by them. When I was ten he bought me the most heavily used item of my childhood, a tiny wetsuit. Encased in neoprene, I could belly flop off the springboards of Hoylake pool with complete impunity.

In 1981, for my 13th birthday, he arranged for me to have an introductory session with the local sub-aqua club, who were on the lookout for new members. It was the most amazing thing I had ever experienced, BREATHING UNDER WATER! I was so smitten that even though the club wouldn’t actually train me to dive because of my age, I persuaded my mum and dad to enrol me anyway. So on Thursday nights my mother would take me to Neston pool, where she sat patiently while the instructors did their best to tolerate me. After several weeks of doing the same thing, holding my breath a lot, the novelty began to wear off. I still loved water – being in it and under it – but I was frustrated at not being allowed to go further.

My mother was frustrated too, not that she ever said so, as Thursday was supposed to be Huntington night – time trial, pub and chips by the River Dee night.

*

‘Five, four, three, two, one, go. Good luck!’

It was a warm, dry evening with a light breeze blowing when I got my first ever countdown. I’d heard the starter recite his mantra many times before, but never directed at me. During that summer of 1981 I’d begun pestering my parents to let me have a go in one of the Thursday night club races. They were the scene of many people’s first competitive experience and it wasn’t unusual to see entrants turn up to take the start in cut-off jeans or football shorts.

Mum and Dad were reluctant to give their consent, for a number of very good reasons. I’d already disrupted the rhythm of family life by insisting Mum take me to the pool on Thursdays instead of going to watch Dad race. And I’d already rejected the racing bike they’d bought me. Now, I was proposing to give up the lessons they’d paid for, along with the flashy BMX, and take up time trialling. They saw it as yet another fad and they were right. I was curious, no more than that, and just fancied having a go at a race. Eventually, perhaps because it was an activity they could relate to better than my desire to swim about underwater, they relented. The neglected Carlton was retrieved from the shed.

I charged off down the road like my life depended on it, with no idea about anything as sophisticated as ‘pace judgement’. The next ten miles was a series of all-out charges followed by grinding to a near halt as I sucked in air through every orifice in my body, trying to recover. As soon as the nasty burning feeling in my lungs subsided, I repeated the process. This vicious cycle went on for 29 minutes and 43 seconds.

The beauty of the event was that despite posting one of the slowest times of the evening, I wasn’t obliged to compare my performance with anyone else’s – that time was mine. So I chose what for me was a new way of thinking, to forget everyone else and have a competition with myself. I wanted to see if I could better my mark. The following week I lined up again with a new strategy. It was called ‘Don’t start a ten-mile race with a sprint’ and the result was a time more than a minute faster than I’d managed in my first go. It was a satisfying experience, to have taken my own ideas, tested them and got a positive outcome. It didn’t escape my notice, either, that there were now several names below mine on the piece of A4 paper taped to the lamp post by the finish line. I wanted to do it again.

One of the regular timekeepers back then was an elderly man called Alf Jones. Late that summer, at one of the final events of the season, Alf presented me with a challenge as I lined up for the start. It was a light-hearted, spur-of-the-moment offer that would change my life: ‘I’ll give you 50 pence if you can keep Dave Lloyd from catching you until Aldford Bridge.’ Dave Lloyd was an Olympian and had been an accomplished professional, riding for Raleigh on the continent. He’d also won more national time trial champion­ships than I could count. Since he lived on the Wirral himself, he’d turned up at the race for a bit of training and was scheduled to set off one minute behind me. Aldford Bridge was the midpoint of the outward leg, some two and a half miles away.

It was the first time I’d ever had a specific goal that I truly considered to be achievable: a win/lose proposition in which I had a decent chance of winning. I started strongly, pushing hard down the twisting B5130 towards Aldford and the prize. After a mile it started to hurt more than it should. I’d gone off too fast. As the road climbed I knew my destination would soon be in sight and chanced a look back: Dave Lloyd was bearing down on me; it was going to be close. I let go of all thoughts of a ten-mile race, mine had just a thousand yards left to run. As the road narrowed and gently dragged up towards the curve of the bridge, I could hear the swooshing of his tyres on the road behind me. With less than a hundred yards remaining he swept past, leaned hard into the bend and pulled away into the distance.

Having overextended myself, I struggled through the next seven miles and went slower than I had for some weeks. But what I encountered that night, triggered by that personal challenge, was unlike anything I’d experienced before. I had been scared of losing but I’d also been excited at the prospect of success. Alf Jones and his 50 pence – he still gave it to me – had started something rolling.

CHAPTER 2
Births, Marriages and Deaths

Of the three routes to adolescent popularity available at my secondary school – football, fighting and success with the opposite sex – I excelled at none.

I definitely liked the idea of getting a girlfriend, but on the rare occasions when I managed to snag one I had no idea what to do with them. Short of money and imagination, a date with me consisted of wandering around aimlessly and a series of stilted conversations: Kim Smith and Lorraine Evans, I can only apologise. Steve Carney and Neil McDonald were the Casanovas in my circle, although saying that I had a circle is overstating things a bit. I’d often tag along with them to the house parties that some parents were reckless enough to let their teenagers hold. I’d sip my contraband cider in the corner, listen to Ultravox and then make my way home.

On the sporting front, I had absolutely no talent for or interest in football, which got me labelled as dysfunctional by my peers at Hilbre High. The same went for most other school sports. As far back as I could remember, I’d never won so much as a single ribbon in the sack race. As for fighting, there were various gangs in our school, but I didn’t belong to any of them. When beatings were being handed out I’d usually be on the receiving end, so I became very good at spotting trouble developing and removing myself from the vicinity.

I didn’t do any better in class than I did in the playground: I was totally uninterested in almost everything. I think it was an attitude rooted at least partly in self-defence, a reaction to my undiagnosed dyslexia. The word didn’t seem to exist in the seventies and eighties, at least not in the world I was growing up in. People who couldn’t spell or write neatly were simply labelled as slow. My condition wasn’t extreme but it did make expressing my thoughts in written form painful, so I avoided it, as I tried to avoid school in general. For me it was a place that generated and then reinforced low self-esteem.

I wasn’t the only one struggling through secondary school. In the same year at Hilbre was another lad who didn’t fit in, who seemed like me to be doing his time until he could get parole. Flouncy is the first word that springs to mind when I think of him as he was back then. I’d see him every now and again during the summer, striding bare-chested and alone along the Hoylake promenade. If you’d transposed him from that seaside setting onto a catwalk he wouldn’t have looked at all out of place.

At school he seemed to be in every theatrical production. Regardless of whether or not he had the lead role, he was three times as loud and animated as every other cast member. At the time it was painfully embarrassing to watch, but on reflection the reason he stood out was because he was the only one really acting, like a peacock in the middle of a flock of flea-bitten pigeons.

Standing out at our school made you one of two things, a leader or a target. He wasn’t a leader. Still, I like to think that his character-forming experiences at Hilbre High were what helped Daniel Craig develop that marvellous pout.

For me, only two subjects relieved the tedium of the school timetable: woodwork and sociology. The former is an interest I hold to this day and it was pretty typical of my group, but sociology was perhaps a less obvious favourite for a boy in his teens. It was the beginning of another lifelong interest: human psychology.

I can’t say I remember my time at school with fondness or made friends that I’ve kept in touch with. I couldn’t wait for it to be over and once it was I never looked back. I didn’t even go in to pick up my mediocre exam results.

Built just outside Liverpool in the 1960s while Britain was having its love affair with concrete, Kirkby Stadium was a tatty, well-used establishment. Habitually windy, spitting with rain and five degrees colder than its surroundings, it seemed to have its own microclimate. With its peeling paint and broken fencing it might not have looked like a world-class facility, but without it I would never have been an Olympic champion. It was there, in the spring of 1984, that I was first introduced to track racing.

Having started out in my dad’s cycling club, the Birkenhead Victoria CC, I had now jumped ship and joined my mum’s. The North Wirral Velo had a growing contingent of members my age and as I found myself spending more time both riding and racing with them, it seemed like the logical move. One of their regular activities was track racing, over the Mersey in Kirkby, and I was encouraged to have a go. I needed a fixed-wheel bike for that and mine was a Keith Boardman special. On a visit to the local tip, my dad spotted an old frame in a skip, took it home, sprayed it Kingfisher blue and built it up.

It was a typically chilly Kirkby evening when I lined up to ride it in my first track race, a handicap event. The riders – all ages and genders – were spaced around the bumpy asphalt circuit according to their ability, as defined by John Mallinson, one of the track league’s regular organisers. Each person was to be pushed off by a helper when the whistle blew. My helper was more help than most: Bob Memery was a keen cyclist and family friend. He was also the winner of five British weightlifting titles in the 13-stone class and still incredibly muscular in middle age. He was in high demand as a pusher-off.

When the whistle blew Bob launched me down the straight like an Exocet and it was a good half a lap before I even had to pedal. Thanks to Bob’s overdeveloped right arm and John’s generous handicap, I won my first ever race on the cracked surface of the Kirkby track. All through that summer and well into the autumn Wednesday night became firmly established as track night.

As is often the case with grassroots events, it was only made possible because of the commitment of a group of characters who, without knowing or seeking recognition for it, became a small but important part of many people’s lives. John and Doreen Mallinson did everything from setting the race programme to pushing riders off. Doreen – always called Alf for reasons I never discovered – handed out numbers, smiles and encouragement to everyone. Chief adjudicator was commissaire ‘Ginger’ Hewitt, working from a set of rules known only to himself: he frowned a lot and sometimes lost his temper, but every week there he was, doing his bit to keep it all going.

On the coaching side – whether people wanted it or not – was Fag-Ash Bert, often seen crouching beside the track making pedalling motions with his fingers to the riders as they sped past. No one had the nerve to ask him why he did it so we never found out what wisdom he was trying to impart. John Geddis, an Olympic medallist himself at the 1956 Games in Melbourne, was always in charge of the PA and took the time to learn all the riders’ names, especially the young ones, for his colourful and terribly partisan commentary.

Just a handful of individuals presiding over a low-key activity on the outskirts of Liverpool, helping people take their first steps in the sport. What they didn’t realise was that they were the true pioneers of the Olympic success to come, quietly preparing the ground for Britain’s cycling revolution.

In August 1984, the regional track championships were held at Kirkby – it was the only track in the region. Although I was 15 and racing as a juvenile, I fought my way to the final of the senior pursuit, where I found myself up against international roadman, Alan Gornall. It was my first big track event and to match the occasion my blue skip special had been replaced by one of Dave Lloyd’s old frames, provided by my first ever coach, Eddie Soens.

My dad had overseen my introduction to cycle racing and been the early source of coaching guidance, but by the end of 1983 he felt he’d done all he could. The better I’d become at cycling in those first two and a half years, the more winning had started to mean to me. Although neither I nor anyone around me could see it building, I was already heading towards a classic early-achiever crisis. For someone struggling to fit in at school, even small successes were disproportionately important and my sense of self-worth was becoming heavily reliant on my results. Winning and losing, even at that fledgling stage, was linked to enormous swings between euphoria and despair. In one event towards the end of 1983 I’d climbed off mid-race for no other reason than I thought I was going to lose. My dad, who had sensed that something wasn’t right, decided to ask his old coach if he’d consider taking me on.

Often compared to the legendary Liverpool football manager Bill Shankly, Eddie Soens was one of the greatest British cycling coaches of all time and had helped his riders win more UK, world and Olympic titles than any other domestic coach. But it wasn’t just cycling: he’d also enjoyed success in a variety of other sports from boxing with world light heavyweight champion John Conteh, to distance-running with double Boston Marathon winner, Geoff Smith.

A short, stocky man with an almost permanent scowl, Eddie spoke in brusque, staccato statements. His no-nonsense demeanour was intimidating and gave him tremendous presence. Praise from Eddie carried a lot of weight. That was my 15-year-old impression. Only years later did I flesh out that view and remember the accom­panying twinkle in his eye, the slight twitch at the corner of his mouth as he delivered a lot of those declarations, which showed that under it all he was a warm-hearted man.

Eddie’s style was perhaps forged during his time in the army where he had been a regimental sergeant major during some of the most ferocious fighting in Burma. If you can get men to run into gunfire, everything else is probably a walk in the park. His strength gave him absolute credibility, and believing in him made people believe in themselves: if Eddie said you could do it, you had faith that you could. For a kid who was low in self-esteem this was an amazing boost.

So it was Eddie behind me, holding the bike he’d supplied me with, as I lined up on that gloomy late summer evening for my first ever pursuit final, mirrored by the figure of Alan Gornall in the opposite straight. The whistle blew, Eddie pushed me off and I bounced down the track towards the bend, my new bike noticeably lighter than my original machine. The near dark made it a surreal, dreamlike experience, increasing the sense of speed as I powered round the bottom of the track. The noise made by the handful of spectators seemed to be absorbed by the night. I was aware only of the sound of my own breathing, the instructions being shouted by Eddie each time I entered the home straight, and the figure of Fag-Ash Bert crouched at the edge of the track making his pedalling motions. When I crossed the line for the final time, the whistle blew a full two seconds before Alan Gornall reached his own station in the back straight. I had won. There might only have been about 30 people present but it felt like winning a world title.

On the road, I was already starting to win national honours. The previous month I had taken the under-16 10-mile time trial title and then broken the national juvenile record for 25 miles, with a time of 52.09. That performance made me favourite for the junior national 25-mile championship, contested on home turf, just outside Chester, the following week. But I crumbled under the weight of expectation – my own as well as everyone else’s – and didn’t even make the podium.

In late 1984, I switched clubs again, from the North Wirral Velo to the all-conquering Manchester Wheelers, a club Eddie had strong links with. The following June, Eddie took me to Leicester’s Saffron Lane velodrome to try out for the national junior team. The GB head coach Geoff Cooke had organised the event to scout new talent and it was open to anyone who thought they could make the grade. It was the first time I’d ridden on a wooden track and after the relaxed geometry of Kirkby the severity of the bankings was daunting. For now, though, we weren’t expected to climb the boards, just cover 3000 m around the bottom as fast as we could, a task I completed six seconds quicker than anyone else.

I was deeply content on the way back up the M6. The National Championships were just a few weeks away and I hadn’t just shown that I was faster than any of the competition, I’d done it on the track where the event was going to be held. I thought I was heading for my first junior track title. I wasn’t.

It seemed that every time it looked as though I had the measure of the opposition, someone appeared to pip me at the post. In 1982, my nemesis had been local time-trialling ace Lee Proctor. A year later, once I’d managed to claw my way past him, it was Guy Sylvester who had kept me off the top step of the podium. In July 1985, just in time for the National Championships, 17-year-old Colin Sturgess and his family returned to the UK after living in South Africa. Colin proceeded to power his way to the junior pursuit title, relegating me to the silver medal position. Again.

Although I was deeply disappointed, Nationals week wasn’t over yet. Despite being new to the track and still a junior, Eddie had made sure I was included in the Manchester Wheelers team pursuit line-up. It was a decision that annoyed the star of the team, Darryl Webster, who had wanted his brothers Martin and Alex to ride alongside him. I’d be replacing Alex. In our qualifying ride my inexperience showed and although we got through to the final it had been ragged. Darryl climbed off and immediately raged at Eddie, pointing towards me, screaming ‘He is useless!’ Darryl was the rider who had usurped the great Dave Lloyd as the UK’s time-trialling supremo and I’d followed his career in Cycling Weekly ever since I’d started riding myself – I even had pictures of him on my wall – so his outburst was deeply upsetting and embarrassing.

What happened next was something of a blur. Eddie went to sit on a pile of mats under the bridge that led from the track centre. I had no idea then that it wasn’t thoughts of the race that occupied him but his own health. Feeling unwell, he was escorted away from the riders’ area and a short time later out of our view, into an ambulance. We were told that he was just being taken to hospital for checks.

Absorbed in my teenage self, my concern was fleeting and my thoughts quickly turned back to the pending final. Determined not to be the weak link, I gave it everything. I closed on the wheel in front to get maximum shelter and matched Darryl turn for turn. We won the national title, my first at senior level. But Eddie hadn’t been there to see it.

In the few hours between him leaving the track and the end of the day’s racing, Eddie’s wife Mima had travelled down to Leicester to be with him. When I phoned the hospital to see how he was, she took the call. Mima was a wonderful, warm and gentle person with a resolutely positive outlook on life. She told me that Eddie had suffered a ‘small heart attack’ but was OK, then in true Mima style switched the conversation back to me and the day’s sporting events: ‘I’ve just left Eddie and he saw the highlights on the TV. He said, “Did you see Chris, wasn’t he great?”’ High praise from the man whose approval meant as much to me then as my own father’s.

Reassured, we made the long trip home and, as tradition dictated, went straight to my Nan’s house to show her my winner’s sash. While we were there the phone went and my mother answered it, returning to the small backroom a few seconds later pale and in tears. Eddie had suffered a second – this time massive – heart attack and passed away. I was devastated and had no idea how to deal with it. I learned later that those words of praise for me that Mima had conveyed were Eddie’s last. I felt guilty, as if I’d somehow wasted the last few days of his life.

We’d known each other less than two years but I’d become highly dependent on Eddie, not just for training advice but for validation. His powerful style had made it all too easy to accept that someone else had the answers; his praise was enough to let me know when I’d done well. All I had to do was follow instructions and trust in his expertise. Without Eddie, I was utterly directionless. I’d achieved a modest amount of success, shown potential, but I had no idea how to move it on.

Despite being only 16, I was selected to represent Great Britain at the 1985 Senior Track World Championships in Italy the following month. After Eddie’s death I was glad to get away. My performance at the championships could best be described as modest, but the trip was not without interest. The British Cycling Federation had brought along a prototype bike to see if it met with the approval of the UCI. It didn’t, as things turned out, but it met with mine.

It was unlike any bike I’d ever seen. No frame tubes, just a triangle of carbon fibre. The streamlined forks and wing-shaped handlebars had been machined from a single piece of aluminium. It weighed a ton. It was sitting unattended in the track centre on a training day, so I decided to have a go. Despite its heft and the fact that it was a bit too big for me, once it got going it felt noticeably quicker than the bike I was competing on. It was my first ride on one of Mike Burrows’s carbon fibre creations.

In the 1980s, Assos was by far the most prestigious and expensive clothing brand for cyclists: the stitching impeccable and the form-fitting cut light years ahead of any other manufacturer. The Swiss-made garments could be relied on to last for years, by those who could afford them. I couldn’t and neither could any of my mates, but when I joined the Manchester Wheelers I was given two full sets of Assos kit. I had other clothing for everyday use but only two pairs of the precious shorts. One of these pairs would do more than keep me comfortable and let me pose on rides with my friends: they would change my life.

I almost met Sally in early December 1984 at the North Wirral Velo annual club dinner, held in The Red Rooms function suite above a café in Arrowe Park. It was a cost-effective affair, a few trestle tables tarted up with some paper table cloths and the obligatory one-man disco with his lonely three-bulb flashing light box. It was the social highlight of our young lives. In charge of handing out the various medals and plastic plaques was Pete Johnson, the club president. Slightly rotund and red-faced with a mischievous grin, he was a real character and the club was his primary passion.

On one of the tables across from ours was the Edwards family. Barrie and his son Andrew were both racing members of the Velo. As Barrie was an adult and Andrew younger than me, we were only on nodding terms. I was vaguely aware they had two daughters, who I’d glimpsed from time to time at local events. His older daughter – not a cyclist – must have been dragged out of bed at the weekends to accompany the family. She could sometimes be seen hanging around the results board, wrapped up in a duffle coat, looking generally unenthusiastic and waiting for her dad to finish racing so she could go home. I’d noticed her but never spoken to her.

Tonight she looked very different from the figure I’d glimpsed in Broxton picnic area: dressed in a simple black outfit with little make up and no jewellery, her dark hair cut short in a Phil Oakey wedge. She was quite beautiful. And she seemed to be looking at me. I had no idea what to do about this, it was an utterly alien experience. I wanted to talk to her but knew if I went over it was sure to turn out to be a terrible mistake. I sat there in turmoil and did nothing. A couple of hours later, as the evening was winding up, I still hadn’t made a move. I watched her put on her coat and head towards the door where she turned, looked at me again, smiled once and left, leaving me disgusted with my lack of courage. I hadn’t even tried. Pathetic.

I was still brooding on this a week later while I was out with the local gang – a mix of Velo and Port Sunlight Wheelers members. Dave O’Brien, a lad who could always spot a potential angle, announced with a sly grin that he had, in fact, got the contact details for one Sally-Anne Edwards but believed that a negotiation was required before he would hand them over. He didn’t want money, he wanted something more precious: the cachet that came with owning a pair of Assos cycling shorts. His inside information for my hard-earned Manchester Wheelers kit – that was the offer. I tried to haggle but he wouldn’t budge. Eventually I gave in and the deal was done. An old receipt with a phone number scrawled on the back was handed over.

That evening, scrap of paper in hand, I stood in the hallway where my parents kept the phone, staring at it for a good 20 minutes, before plucking up the courage to lift the receiver and dial.

‘Hello?’ A female voice.

‘Can I speak to Sally please?’

‘Who’s calling?’

‘It’s Chris Boardman.’

Rustling, a hand going over the mouthpiece, a muffled, sing-song shout: ‘Saaaallllly!’ Another 30 seconds passed. Eventually Sally came to the phone and after a short but excruciating exchange of polite conversation, I blurted it out: would she like to go to Chinatown with me and the gang? Amazingly, she said yes.

The following Friday, I went with some of the group to call at No.22 Kelsall Close, a small semi-detached in Oxton. I was resplendent in my Guinness jumper and flat cap, sporting a barely visible moustache as I escorted Sally into the back of Simon Flood’s blue transit van for the trip through the Mersey Tunnel to Liverpool. Our first date: a night out with the lads and a Chinese meal. Classy.

It was a damp, foggy night a week later when I rode around to Sally’s for what we now refer to as our real first date on Christmas Eve, 1984. It was also the first time I stepped over the threshold at Kelsall Close and met her family.

Our house was quiet, with a small back room where my parents read. The front room was where the TV resided, and when it was on it was considered rude to talk. Sally’s house couldn’t have been more different. Picture an early pilot of The Royle Family: everyone sat together in the lounge, the only downstairs room, the TV was permanently on and there was lots of shouting. Sally’s mum, Sandra, sat in her armchair wearing big furry slippers and chain-smoking. Barrie wandered in and out, making jokes and chuckling, while Sally’s younger siblings, Nicola and Andrew, squabbled continuously. I felt instantly at home.

A little later on we stepped out into the foggy night. The silence came as a shock. We strolled down the hill past The Swan pub and up into Prenton village where I bought half a chicken from the local chippy. I still don’t know why I did that.

Sally was beautiful, confident, quiet and clearly very smart. She excelled at physics, which she was studying in the sixth form, and didn’t partake in exercise of any kind. She loved playing Trivial Pursuit, listening to music and reading poetry. I did none of these things. I was ambitious; she was happy to see where life took her. I worried about details; she preferred to focus on the bigger picture. I never worked out why she was interested in me and she’s never really told me. If you’d put in our personal details, no dating agency in the world would have matched us up. It was clearly a relationship that couldn’t possibly work. Within a matter of weeks, we were officially an item.

Over the next two years, Sally and I spent as much time together as possible. She was finishing off her ‘A’ levels, while I’d finally escaped school and was pursuing a career – in the loosest sense of the term – working with wood. I attended Cavendish Enterprise Centre on Laird Street in Birkenhead to learn my trade – carpentry – but was enticed away by an offer of paid work making furniture. For someone aspiring to be a cabinet maker, I thought this was a good career move. It turned out to be assembling chipboard panels. After that I did a short stint fitting out an ocean-going yacht, the dream of a one-man band in a farmyard in Thornton Hough.

While I was enjoying having some money in my pocket to fund my social life, the demands of training and riding for the national team were making it difficult to fit everything in. Employers weren’t keen on their workforce disappearing for weeks at a time to ride their bicycle. In 1987, I was offered a job by North Wirral Velo club president Pete Johnson, who knew about the problems I was having. Not only would I be able to work with wood, I’d also be allowed as much time off as I needed to pursue my cycling career. I spent the next 18 months at Pete’s Furniture Emporium on Church Road, Higher Tranmere, making furniture to order – often badly – and occasionally helping out with house clearances. All for ten pounds a day.

Stacked floor to ceiling with a chaotic mix of cheap furniture, ornaments, curios and boxes of old cutlery, the three floors of Pete’s Emporium were almost impossible to navigate. It was perfectly normal to move around large areas of the premises without setting foot on the floor. Some rooms hadn’t been entered since the seventies. Out the back there was a small area with two huge metal tanks. These were filled with hundreds of gallons of caustic soda solution and usually had 20-odd doors soaking in each. The paint was slowly being dissolved off them and in many cases so was the glue that held them together. Each door was periodically turned and eventually jet washed by the master of the yard, Billy, his red face made redder by a speckle of burns from the sodium hydroxide, a roll-up permanently sticking out from under the left corner of his moustache.

To the side was a small workshop where Paul, Pete’s only officially declared employee, toiled away finishing furniture. I also worked in this cramped, unventilated space from time to time. The fumes from the large amounts of petrol-based wax we used kept us happy all day: Sally used to be able to smell it on me for hours after I came home.

Big Dave led the house-clearance crew and conveyed the booty back to the shop in one of the two barely functioning vans. Pete had a strict rule never to pay more than £30 for his vehicles, a philosophy that often saw the police returning them to their rightful owners. Every day we would all meet for lunch – usually chips and a fishcake – in the shed in Billy’s yard, where Big Dave tried to overdose on salt and tales of the day were exchanged.

Running the whole show was Pete, a cross between Mr Pickwick and Del Boy. He was a generous man who had given me a job not because he needed a furniture maker, but because he wanted to help. I loved him. His character was reflected in the shop itself, where barely a day went by without a miniature drama of some sort. Altogether it would have made an excellent soap opera, although I don’t think the script would ever have made it past the lawyers.