The investment in British Cycling in the long roll up to the London Olympics and through, as I wrote about, a couple of days ago, the generosity of the cycling community in the name of the tragic Dave Rayner have been responsible for the slick professionalism, scientific approach and precision planning embodied in the main ambassadors in the sport, The Sky Team.
Before that it was a case that talented British riders had to go it alone with continental based teams and for much of the post-war period the idea of a British team by identity and style must have seemed so far out of reach.
I seem to recall that at least one Tour de France was run on the lines of National Squads and British riders did compete although trade team loyalties as in "remember who pays your salary" figured highly in race day tactics.
Home grown riders did possess ability but this country has not until recently regarded itself as a cycling nation and consequently for many years money through a dedicated financial sponsorship structure was sparse and sporadic and certainly not in the amounts required to take a team into Europe for the Classics or the pinnacle of most careers, a ride in the Tour de France.
In the mid 1980's one larger than life individual, Tony Capper put himself and his millions at the service of catapulting a British Racing Team onto the heady stage of the Tour de France.
There was a certain brashness and haphazard approach in his approach to the task as appeared to have been the case in his business dealings that had netted him his fortune.
Capper had some misadventures in the taxi business (in one version of the story his business partner committed suicide, in another he sold the company and it was only later realised by the new owners that it wasn't his to sell). Chequered is the word that is most often used to describe this portion of Capper's career.In the early eighties, with Thatcher's Britain championing entrepreneurial acumen, Capper set up an overnight delivery company, Associated Nationwide Couriers (ANC) - think DHL, Excel or the like. ANC was, essentially, run on the same principal as Interflora, a franchise operation where local franchisees paid to use the name and access the central network. It's also the way taxi companies are often organised, and Capper knew the taxi trade.
ANC's growth was rapid.
Within five years, the company had become big enough to be taken over by British and Commonwealth Shipping, leaving Capper a wealthy man. How wealthy is always a question, but it was wealthy enough for him to live in exile in the tax shelter in the Irish Sea that is the Isle of Man.
In growing ANC, Capper had involved the company with various sports sponsorship opportunities - darts, athletics and football. In 1984 he was approached by a British racer, Mick Morrison, looking for sponsorship. The following year, ANC was sponsoring a team of British pros riding on the domestic circuit.
Capper - a brash and arrogant forty-something, chain-smoking, pie-eating, Coke-swilling giant of a man (wider than he was tall is the kind way of describing his girth) - quickly set about taking a Thatcherite approach to the sport. History and tradition were bunkum - 'Whatever you've done in the past, it's wrong,' he would tell people. Cycling was a business, he was a businessman and he knew best.
British cycling at the time was still over-shadowed by Tom Simpson's death, was very insular and parochial.
To give an idea of how hidebound British cycling was: though continental racing was just a ferry-ride away, domestic teams were limited to no more than six riders, a rule which effectively forced them to narrow their horizons and race only in the UK. A lot of people involved in the sport in the UK took a holier-than-thou approach to the continental scene, writing it off as drug-fuelled and corrupt, unlike the saintly pure local scene they championed. They wanted nothing to do with it.
Capper took a practical approach to the restrictions imposed upon him - he set up three different teams: ANC-Freight Rover, Lycra-Halfords and Interrent-Dawes. They co-operated in domestic races - down to splitting winnings across the squads - and gave Capper a larger pool of riders to draw from when he ventured forth and took on the European peloton, where the combined squads raced as ANC-Halfords.Capper was a man on a mission, a man with a dream, a dream which had come to him when he visited the Alpe d'Huez stage of the 1985 Tour de France: his dream was to put a British team into the Tour de France and bring them home safely. And to achieve that dream Capper knew that winning domestic trophies like the Milk Race wouldn't cut the mustard. His riders would have to show themselves at races like Paris-Nice and the Classics.
Malcolm Elliott, who Capper signed to ride for ANC in 1986, had this to say of Capper's ambition, when he recalled this part of his career in his 1990 autobiography, Sprinter"Not that many riders were bothered about [the Tour de France] anyway. I used to think: What do we want to go into that for anyway? None of us realised it at the time but this was the only way ahead. We'd started riding a few races abroad but a ride in the Tour seemed outlandish and we just humoured him. Capper was a trail-blazer, I'll give him that. ANC were the first fully-fledged British team to compete abroad consistently."
The trail Capper blazed was meteoric.
In June 1987 the Société du Tour de France gave him the nod he'd been waiting for: they were part of the 1987 Tour de France. From one rider in 1984 to five in 1985 and three teams in 1986, Capper was about to set foot on cycling's biggest stage.
Where the Société du Tour de France most failed the ANC-Halfords riders was in the way they handed out their wild-card entries to the Tour. It was not until June, a month before the race started, that the team was informed it could ride the race. In true chaotic style the riders were featured on the BBC childrens show, Blue Peter, when the news of the ride was announced.
In order to get that nod from the Société du Tour de France, ANC-Halfords had bust a gut from the beginning of the season, throwing themselves into races in the hope of grabbing the attention of the Tour's organisers. (That may have changed today, the wild-cards announced earlier, but it is still a problem within individual teams, who leave the last of their selection until as late as possible, with the consequence that some riders knacker themselves getting selected and then have nothing left for the race itself.)The ANC-Halfords guys, in their quest to catch the eye of the Société du Tour, showed themselves in races like the GP d'Ouverture, the Ruta del Sol, the Tour of the Mediterranean, Paris-Nice, Het Volk, Bordeaux-Paris, the Tour of Limburg. At the Flèche Wallonne Paul Watson finished sixth. At the Amstel Gold Malcolm Elliott finished third. At the Midi Libre in May Adrian Timmis won a stage. These hurried exertions meant that the team was exhausted even before the Tour de France had reached the grand départ in West Berlin.
Capper's failures, for such an apparently successful businessman, were surprisingly simple: the team was shoddily organised. From riders' contracts through support staff down to finances, Capper hardly got a thing right. That he even made it as far as 1987 and the Tour de France was an amazing achievement.
Having built ANC Capper sold it to British and Commonwealth Shipping in 1986, but he chose to retain control of the company's cycling interests himself, through a management company he set up called Action Sports. This created a confusion which only became apparent when the team collapsed, with some of the riders contracted to Action Sports and some contracted directly to ANC. When the team collapsed, those contracted to Action Sports were left penniless. Those contracted to ANC only eventually recovered some of the monies owed to them.Another problem Capper created was in not recruiting soigneurs, mechanics and other support staff, preferring instead to hire them in on an ad hoc basis. Apart from Griffiths as directeur sportif, the team doesn't appear to have had any other permanent non-cycling staff beyond three people who manned its Stoke-on-Trent office. What this meant during the Tour de France was that there was considerable disorganisation - and strife - behind the scenes. Among the soigneurs, the mechanics and the directeur sportif, no one seemed to know where they were supposed to stand in the pecking order.
Much of this wasn't helped by Capper imposing himself above his own directeur sportif and insisting on driving the lead car in the race convoy, even though he wouldn't be able to help the team's riders. For Capper, the thrill of driving a car at rally speeds in the Tour's convoy seemed to be a reward he felt was due to him for sponsoring a team in the first place.
But the real problem Capper created was in budgetary restraint, or the lack thereof. Here's how Phil Griffiths, who Capper recruited in 1985 to act as his directeur sportif, described Capper's approach to budgeting:
"Tony Capper was always a gambler. The guy spent the ANC-Halfords budget by the Milk Race [in May] every year. That was his strategy. Spend it, win the Milk Race and then go back to the board to get enough to cover the rest of the season."
That tactic worked when Capper was in charge of ANC himself and could treat the company as his own personal fiefdom. But in 1987, he having cashed his chips in, there were new hands at the helm. And when the 'please sir, can we have some more' request came in, they ignored it. The first the riders knew of any problem was during the Tour when some of them discovered that their salaries had not landed in their bank accounts. The phone calls from home for Capper were also increasing in their frequency and it was clear that all was not well.
Exhausted riders could do nothing but drop out if the race. Capper simply used the abandoned riders' hotel bookings to accommodate family, friends and business associates.
The team turned up for the opening Prologue in Berlin and were promised the best equipment such as specialist time-trial cycles. Instead, they rode the opening time trial on standard road bikes, with only four disc wheels between nine riders. After a gruelling three weeks of a particularly hot and fast Tour only four riders looked like they had a chance to make it to Paris. The only success was Malcolm Elliot's third place on one stage. The best ranked cyclist in the general classification was Adrian Timmis, ranked 70th
As the Tour enjoyed it's last day in the mountains, the La Plagne to Morzine stage, with the race within four days of Paris, Capper climbed into the team's Citroën and, promising he would rejoin them for their post-race celebratory dinner in Paris, drove off and was never seen again.
After the Tour de France, the ANC team was only revived for a few races. Joey McLoughlin won the first Kellogg's Tour of Britain and Malcolm Elliott won two stages in the Nissan Classic in Ireland. By the end of the season, the team ran out of money and was no more.
It would take a couple of decades for British Cycling to recover from that fiasco and feel confident enough to have another go. If anything the Capper Business Plan had embodied all of the "what not to do"aspects of putting together a credible and competitive racing team for the European scene and thankfully lessons have been learned as can be seen from recent and sustained successes.
(Sourced from Cycling Weekly, Rouleur, Podium Cafe, Wikipedia, Wide Eyed and Legless)
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