This time 30 years ago Chris Boardman was a very nervous young man, the biggest moment in his sporting life only a few days away. The prologue time trial of the 1994 Tour de France in Lille on 2 July was looming; Boardman had been fast-tracked unexpectedly into the race by his French team having made a meteoric start to his professional racing career. He was already an Olympic champion, in the pursuit in Barcelona in 1992, and had taken the Hour record the previous year, but this was on a very different scale in its implications for him – “a gamechanging moment for me personally”, he recalls, and there would be ramifications for his sport that are still seen today.
Boardman is now the chair of Sport England, and the government’s active travel commissioner; he was appointed a CBE in the king’s birthday honours, but he recalls that in 1994 he was “a kid, horribly arrogant, scared and self-obsessed”. The nerves made him play down his chances of success when I met him a few days before the race. Boardman claimed he was “not 100%”, his form “had fallen off a bit” and he was worried about his health; it was nonsense, of course, as he realised once he set off down the start ramp outside Lille’s brand new Eurostar station in the gathering dusk.
