Free On the Road Bike by Ned Boulting Page B

enough to keep them bundled up in a laundry bag. Perhaps he would have found it hard to look for praise, for recognition among his peers. But maybe he’d discovered a kindred spirit. Mick, at thirteen, was still too young to be a threat or to pass judgement. And so here was an audience, his singular audience. In that upstairs room, the older boy could feel like the champion he was becoming, and the younger boy could soak it all up. It was a moment fitted to both needs perfectly. For every rider, embedded in the narrative of their careers, there is a definable Eureka moment. Mick had just experienced his.
    â€˜This is what I want to be. This is what I want.’
    What followed was, by the standards of almost all of us, quite exceptional.
    He became a track rider. He was very good at it, winning races, and competing nationally and internationally at the highest of levels. Those two Olympic medals testify to that. But we judge men like Mick Bennett not in isolation, but against the achievements of others, unfairly perhaps, and he would acknowledge that he was not the greatest, and although he was conscientious, solid, dependable and valued, he did not tear up the record books.
    He had a fastidious nature that earned him respect and affectionate mockery in equal measure; beautifully turned out, manicured almost. A ‘softy’ as a noisy incoming generation of road racers, like John Herety, would have described him. In fact that’s exactly how John affectionately describes him when I ask him what Mick was like. He had an easy-going nature, and took things with good heart.
    One day that all changed. It was the day he stopped racing forever.
    In 1984 at the age of thirty-five, Mick and his fiancée Mandy had bought an old house together, which they were renovating. Financially, it was a bottomless pit, and they were permanently flirting with solvency issues. Mandy was fretting about money, and Mick had just finished riding in the now defunct French race, the Etoile des Espoirs. But, as she delighted in telling Mick over the phone to the South of France, they’d had a little windfall.
    The BBC had finally paid up for his appearance on
Superteams
, an offshoot of the now legendary
Superstars
. They had money in their account, for a change.
    â€˜I said, “Why don’t you fly out? We’ll have a holiday afterwards,”’ Mick tells me.
    And so she did. They embarked on a week’s driving holiday. They were just near to Châteauroux, where they were going to meet up with his new teammate John Herety, and his future wife, Margaret, when their sponsored Peugeot car was hit, side-on by a French couple on a motorbike.
    â€˜Mandy was killed, and I was the only one left alive in the accident.’
    â€˜Did he tell you that?’
    John Herety is surprised, when I speak to him later by telephone. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever spoken about it since. I don’t remember ever speaking about it.’
    John is a stocky, warm, amiable and completely bald Mancunian from Cheadle. A trained chef (just like Mick Bennett, curiously) he rode in the 1980 Olympic Road Race, and had a long career which yielded a National Road Race title. After his racing career, he went into coaching, at one time as British Cycling’s race director. He resigned from that post in 2005 after allegations that two of Britain’s representatives in the World Championships, Tom Southam and Charly Wegelius, sold their loyalty to the Italian national team. Since then, John has managed the über-cool Rapha Condor team. For some time now, he has been operating right at the heart of the British domestic scene.
    My phone call has just taken him back almost thirty years in time. And I can hear from his voice, that it’s caught him slightly off guard.
    But he remembers clearly. ‘They went off on a week-long trip. About sixty kilometres from where they were going to meet me and Margaret, they changed driving