How I Won the Yellow Jumper (5 page)

It was only when I got home that I dared to study my reflection in the mirror and analyse fully the extent and significance
of this new, extraordinary fact: I had really quite large ears. Things would never be the same again. I could now see me as others saw me.

And so it was when I first heard my voice played back to me. The shock of hearing yourself as others hear you! My voice astonished me; odd, and at the same time intimately familiar. What was indisputable was that I desperately needed my voice to start to break. Dave Taylor's and Jim Briscoe's had gone two years ago, while I still sounded like someone doing an impersonation of my mother. It was humiliating.

I can remember with surprising clarity the gist of the phone call, and there's one phrase in particular, which I can recall verbatim. My sister can too, and she still takes some pleasure in reminding me of it.

‘I get around quite a bit . . . by bike.' Like a young Don Johnson from
Miami Vice
. I get around quite a bit. Honestly. In my mind's ear, I can almost hear the DJ quietly restraining his urge to snigger or resign, or both.

‘And I was riding along Tavistock Street yesterday, and I hit a pothole, and I nearly fell off.'

‘OK, Ned. So you think the state of the roads is terrible, do you?'

‘Yes. I do. Really dangerous.'

‘Because of the potholes? Are they a real problem for you on your bike?'

‘Yes. I think something should be done.'

‘Right.'

Pause.

‘OK, that's Ned from Bedford, who thinks something should be done about the potholes. Next up, it's Supertramp, and “Breakfast in America”.'

That episode should have put me off any notion that I might one day make a living from talking on air about cycling, in any form. But, quite incomprehensibly, here I am, doing just
that.

One summer, I think it was in 2004, Kath, my partner, delighted in showing me a TV review in which I was described as the ‘Monty Don' of cycling: determined to ‘dumb everything down'. This was a bizarre piece of criticism, given that I really don't think I look much like the wizened gardener, and would also consider him to be an expert in his field (literally). But it made her laugh wickedly and with just a hint of scorn, which you wouldn't normally expect from a supportive family member.

Prior to this engagement, I had worked almost exclusively on football programmes, with a brief foray into the extraordinarily forgettable world of women's golf. (Not forgettable, I hasten to add, because it's played by women, but because it's golf. The 2002 Oslo Open is a week that will endure in almost no one's memory.)

Football, though, was a game I had learnt how to read and write. Phrases such as ‘overlapping wing-backs' and ‘playing off the shoulder of the last defender' formed part of a language I could not only understand, but also express with cliché-strewn abandon. I could talk a passable football, even if I still couldn't play it.

But initially in this shrill, garish, bullet of a race, I couldn't move without a grammar book, a primer, a dictionary and a babelfish stuck in each ear. For a long time the language of cycling remained stubbornly foreign to me.

As the dust settled on my first Tour, I had vowed never to return to cover the race. I reflected in a lengthy debrief with our producers that the work I had produced over the month of July 2003 had been the worst of my career. I would still stand by that assertion. What made that admission still worse was that they agreed.

By the end of the first week, when the Tour had delivered us up to the very top of the Alps, I was sick of the sound of
my voice. The problem was a collapse in my self-belief, the illusory arm bands that keep the TV reporter afloat. Quite when, or how, I started to learn to swim, I am still not sure. And even after eight years, I have the odd moment where the old sinking feeling returns.

Talking to the camera is a strange business. What you see on the screen only tangentially relates to reality. Even though it may be our words and our mouths that articulate them, at the same time there is a confidence trick being played by presenters. It may be our faces that we stick in front of the lens, but we are just pretending to be us. It's like being a ventriloquist's dummy who looks strikingly like the ventriloquist; a clone almost, manipulated by the original from which it was cloned. Less Rod Hull and Emu. More Rod Hull and Rod Hill. All presenters have to create a fictional persona, which is close enough to the truth for them to feel comfortable, and yet different enough for them to be able to carry out the functions required of them without being shambolic. The end product that pops up on the telly is a fairly true-to-life version of the person whose name appears in the caption below.

A ‘real' report, from a ‘real' me, would be peppered with unacceptable amounts of fumbling around and lapses into linguistic disarray. These are the bits that, generally speaking, have to go when you're a TV presenter, even though they are often the bits that make you most human. Over the years I have tried to allow these back into my delivery, like letting weeds take seed in lawn to lend it a more natural look. But you don't want to overdo it.

Likewise, the ‘real' Gary Imlach might be tempted to close the show by simply, bluntly speaking his mind, rather than using the wonderfully spiked baroque constructions that are his trademark.

There's a subtle difference. This is Gary Imlach being ‘Gary Imlach'. And frankly, no one will ever do it better: eloquence,
precision and, most importantly, humour. As Gary grips the microphone, he does so with the archetypal iron fist in a velvet glove.

When I was preparing for my second Tour, I spent two days locked in a little broom cupboard just off Piccadilly Circus, surrounded by boxes of tapes from twenty years of Tour de France coverage. Most of them stretched back to the years when it was Channel 4 who broadcast the highlights show. In those days, Gary did my job, with Phil Liggett fronting up the coverage.

It was an education watching Gary's contributions. Two features stick in my memory. In one he was riding a bamboo bike around some Dutch town. The act itself broke a long-standing personal vow never to allow himself to be filmed on a bike. It was delivered in Gary's inimitable dry deadpan, and it dripped with irony.

In another little film, he had stopped at some remote rural location, which was on the route of the Tour the next day.
There, by whatever means, he found himself steering a pedalo out into the middle of the lake to help the mayor of a virtually non-existent hamlet attach a huge floating sign depicting the name of the village to a mooring. The sight of Gary sitting in a white plastic boat pedalling out into a murky lake set a benchmark for strangeness to which I still aspire.

On the 2010 Tour, Gary was presented with a trophy from the Tour for twenty years' service. Christian Prudhomme, the Tour director, appeared to have no idea who Gary was, since he's not a very visible presence outside the confines of our truck. But it was a fine moment, rendered all the more amusing by witnessing Gary's almost total discomfort with the proceedings.

Gary eshews cliché. He has a style that is all his own. He stands wilfully apart. But the Tour provides a big enough canvas for his highly individual space to exist and still leave some blank room for others. With time, I realised that it was possible for Gary's fine brushstrokes to sit alongside my Jackson Pollocks and have understood that our contrasting approaches may have nudged the entirety of the production in a new direction.

You might argue that on my first few Tours I was trying too hard. What now seems self-explanatory to me, at first seemed deeply mysterious. My efforts often fell short of
clarity. I shudder to recall some of them.

My quest for ground-breaking TV once had me sitting outside a café somewhere in one of those hard-to-define areas in France's vast interior, lining up nine sugar cubes into a paceline, and rotating them across the table so that each cube took its fair pull at the front. I was bringing the team time trial to sugary life. My enthusiasm for metaphor didn't stop there. I had them in an echelon, too. Diagonally stretching out across the tablecloth, from saucer to ashtray, sheltering the other cubes from a notional sidewind.

Stretching the conceit to a point way beyond the viewer's patience, I discarded cubes one by one, as they were ‘dropped' by their sugary teammates, succumbed to punctures or snapped forks. Then, with a brilliant flourish, I rounded off the epic by deliberately tipping the contents of my coffee cup over them all, soaking the white tablecloth on which they were arranged.

This was high-pressure television, since for obvious enough reasons there could be just one take. Not only that, but once the grand crème was dripping from the margins of the table and we were hurriedly dismantling the camera equipment, we had to fend off a tirade of perfectly justified abuse from an understandably terse waiter. His moustache flickered disdain. I suspect the five-euro tip we left for him was taken out the back and shot. I didn't dare ask him for a receipt so I could claim back the cost of the coffee.

As I said, it was early days.

At about the same time that I started to become a regular contributor, Chris Boardman also started presenting for ITV. Even if his world records, world championships, yellow jerseys and Tour de France stage wins meant that he was marginally better placed to talk about cycling than I was, he still had to learn about telly. He too has had to follow an arc of learning, especially in the uniquely cobbled-together world of ITV's broadcast operation.

Here's a revealing picture for you. When Michael Owen was still playing for Real Madrid a few years ago, he was flown by private jet from Madrid to Liverpool and back again to sit in the football studio for a couple of hours as pundit on a Champions League match. By contrast, last summer on the Tourmalet, the former Olympic gold medallist Chris Boardman stood around for a couple of hours ankle deep in mud and wearing a bin bag to keep out the rain so that we could all help load up the truck at the end of the day. Like your dad packing the family car before a holiday, I suspect he even enjoyed it.

Watching him go about his day, you can see why he achieved everything he did. Chris has a habit of applying an aggregation of marginal gains to almost everything he turns his hand to: writing scripts, taking photos, running a multimillion-pound bike business or eating lunch (all of which he is prodigiously good at).

He's part of the team, although on the other hand, he obviously isn't part of the team, since he's actually done the stuff that the rest of us just talk about. He will only discuss his own
career when asked and even then reluctantly. But despite this, he is still capable of the odd bold claim to his own prowess.

‘How many kids have you got, Chris?'

‘Six.' A deadpan face looked up at me from behind his Sony Vaio laptop. ‘I've only had sex six times as well. I'm just extremely efficient.'

It took me a while to be able to read his dry sense of humour. It might take my parents even longer. On my birthday in 2005, the ITV team were all enjoying a sun-drenched rest day lunch together in Courchevel. I was moaning about the fact that no one from home had contacted me to wish me happy birthday. Chris put down his beer, grabbed my phone, scrolled through my contacts list to one labelled Mum and Dad, and dialled their number.