1987. Channel 4. West Berlin. Team time trials. Stephen Roche. Z. Système U. La Plagne. Oxygen. Round-rimmed glasses and headbands. It was all terribly exciting for a nine-year-old living in York.
I’d rush home from school, dinner in the oven, and then that music would come on – that iconic Channel 4 Tour de France tune that would drown out all other sounds – and I’d be hooked.
Back then, we had this old Pioneer television that had to warm up before it started showing images. We only bought a remote control in 1994; back in the 80s, the television worked through on-unit buttons and ours were broken, so if you pushed 4, then 2 would pop out onto the floor, and you’d have to pick it up and carefully put it back in. A remote in the 90s felt like luxury.
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Roche started it all for me. I loved Laurent Fignon, Robert Millar. I just loved it all. The cycling was better then, and even the music was better. Sunday nights spent up in my room, taping the top-40 chart on cassettes, stopping it between ads and DJs talking over the top, and then swapping recordings at school the next day...
And back then cycling wasn’t mainstream like it is now. There was one kid at school who seemed to discover the sport at the same time as me. Alasdair Kay, that was his name, and just by chance his father was the caretaker at the local primary school, so when it was closed we’d do time trials around the school like it was a closed circuit. I think Alasdair still races.
For me, cycling and watching that ’87 Tour was all about adventure. Cycling opened my eyes to a new world that was outlandish and exotic. I’d go into bookshops in York and look up the place names of where the Tour visited in Michelin maps. These places actually existed, like Le Bourg-d'Oisans, with its post office and church.
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