Chris Boardman

Another year passes, and Chris Boardman finds himself at the heart of another of the most important issues in cycling. Who better then to pull a cracker with? Rewind 12 months, and Boardman would have been settling down to Christmas dinner with a successful Olympic Games as a member of British Cycling’s so-called ‘secret squirrel club’ – the research and development team behind Sir Bradley Wiggins’ Olympic time trial winning machine – under his belt. Boardman, of course, has first hand experience of winning Olympic gold on radical machinery.

The topic of conversation this year, however, might be road safety. Boardman, in his role as policy advisor to British Cycling, gave short shrift to MPs sitting on the Transport Select Committee earlier this month, accusing them of demonstrating a lack of research and understanding that at such a senior level in any other business would be classed as negligent. Having spent a career working with the likes of Peter Keen and Dimitris Katsanis, Boardman might have been expecting a similar meeting of minds in Westminster. Those he encountered were clearly lacking.

With Fabian Cancellara set to tackle the hour record next season, Boardman’s opinion will again be one worth hearing, and likely to be of greater interest as the condiments are passed than the progress of Jemima’s violin lessons. Holder of the record in 1993, when he set a new standard of 52.270 using tri-bars, and again in 1996, riding in the ‘superman’ position pioneered by Graeme Obree, Boardman saw both marks expunged from the records by the UCI in a clampdown on technical development. Undeterred, Boardman returned to the Manchester velodrome in 2000 with a conventional machine and promptly broke Eddy Merckx’s 28-year record. Spartacus will attempt the same record, since improved by the Czech rider, Ondřej Sosenka. Boardman is likely to find himself an interested observer.