Читать книгу Etape. The untold stories of the Tour de France’s defining stages онлайн

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Boardman kept talking about this illness, too. Now, however, he says he can’t remember being unwell. He thinks it might have been a case of getting his excuses in first. ‘I used to need mental crutches like that, like many athletes do. You’re hypersensitive to any sensation or the slightest twitch or anything. It’s a bit childish, but it’s a crutch, in case it goes wrong. You don’t just say, “I couldn’t go any faster and I wasn’t good enough.” You weren’t secure enough in those days to think like that.’

In the days before the prologue, Boardman carried on doing his own thing, as strange as it seemed to his team-mates. He had his routine for coping with the nerves. ‘What I used to do was read and sleep. They were my two escapes.’ To assist the ‘escape’ he liked science fiction – Iain M. Banks was a favourite. ‘It was a way to not be there, while you were still there. And I slept under pressure. A lot. Which is quite a handy trait.’

He didn’t do what his team-mates did, what professional riders had always done, which was to go out for easy rides in the week before the race, recce-ing the prologue course at a gentle pace to get a feel for it. ‘They used to go out and ride the course if it was open and have a chat,’ Boardman says. ‘I went out on my own and I could probably tell you now where all the grids were, where there was a bump on the road. I memorised it.’ Most importantly, he memorised it at the same speed as he would tackle it on race day. ‘They put the team car in front of me; I had to do it at race speed. So I had the car in front, it would take me up to speed, then get out of the way before the corners. I thought I could get round the whole course without braking, but that was the only way to find out. So I had it all mapped out. That was two days before. From that point forward, we got all the information we could.’