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was a guy from Newark called David Miller, who’d been national criterium champion in the 1980s; I knew him well, and knew he raced for a team called UV Aube in the town of Troyes, in eastern France. I got in touch and said I’d had enough and needed to go out there. I had a routine to my year: race the Australian season over the winter; then work at a training camp in Spain with Graham Baxter, who ran holidays for club cyclists and liked to have pros along to lead the rides and give advice; and finally the British season. I felt I needed to go and race in
    France just for the experience. Perhaps I had realised that I was never going to make it at the highest level. France was fantastic. I loved every minute of it, even though it was hard: there was no phone to call home, I didn’t speak the language to start with, and there was no coaching. It was simply a matter of ‘Just be there at this time. We’ll pick you up and go to the race, then we’ll drop you off.’ But my attitude was that I was going there and I wanted to live the life. I couldn’t afford to go home anyway. I was working in the winter doing little bits here and there, but I wasn’t getting paid to race in France. After three months I was doing OK: I wanted to learn the language and I managed that, and I started making some prize money. Then the club started to pay me £20 a week, which meant I could afford some food. In 1998 I met Jacques André, who wasthe real force behind cycling in Troyes and ran the rival club to UV Aube, UVC Aube. He’d run UVCA since the 1960s, and had had some very good British riders who had gone on and done well as pros: Vin Denson, Alan Ramsbottom, Derek Harrison.
    Jacques was a barber who had his own shop in a suburb of Troyes. He loved the Brits. He told me one day that he thought we were fighters, that we never gave in, but on the other hand, when it came to cycling, we had no idea how to train and race. He was a strong character. He would send me home in the winter with a handwritten training plan of what to do every day until I came back to Troyes. We had a fair few arguments because we’re both very opinionated people – for example, he didn’t approve of me going to Australia in the winter – but it always felt as if we respected each other. He’d drop in most days to the flat above a newsagent’s where I lived – he’d come to buy his paper, pop in and open the fridge to see what I was eating. In that part of France the roads are made for motor pacing – rolling roads, very straight, lots of steady climbs – so he’d take me out for hours and hours and hours behind the car.
    The club had a minibus, and we’d all cram in to go to the races. I had my own seat, right behind Jacques in the second row. Over the years Jacques had learnt a few words of English, and he thought he was really good at it – but he talked too fast, so it was hard to understand. The way it worked was that each generation of foreign riders at the club would introduce the next, so after me came Dan Lloyd, who went on to ride the Tour with Cervélo, Yanto Barker, who is still racing, and Jon Tiernan-Locke, who is now at Sky.
    I was winning ten or twelve races a year, always getting inthe group who made the money in the criteriums. But it wasn’t about the money; it was about going and doing it, about the whole experience. So from 1997 to 1999 I was lost to the GB system. I’d missed the boat earlier because of the pro thing with Ambrosia, and I knew I wouldn’t be a pro with a career like Paul Sherwen or Robert Millar, both of whom had gone abroad as young amateurs and ended up with long, successful spells riding the Tour de France.
    I came home in the winter of 1999 because I had heard they were taking on firemen in Grantham. I had thought I would go on cycling until I was about thirty, and then think what to do with the rest of my life. I didn’t have a clue what to do, but I had always wanted to be a fireman, so I won my last