Going the extra mile for the art of fiction

After two months of intensive training while researching the gruelling regimes that Olympic cyclists endure, novelist Chris Cleave got off his bike, sat by the roadside and turned into a gibbering wreck.

“I just completely cracked. I didn’t have the energy to turn my legs around any more and I just found myself in tears. I just couldn’t get my head together.”

Eventually, shivering and wet, he phoned a local taxi firm to take him and his bike home. The award-winning novelist had taken on a hugely challenging cycling programme to research his latest novel, Gold, which focusses on two British female cyclists fighting for one coveted place in the London Olympics.

Zoe is the ruthless, cunning competitor whose raison d’etre is to win, while Kate just wants to do her best for everyone else and has other issues, most significantly a nine-year-old daughter suffering from leukaemia, and a husband who once had a thing for Zoe.

“For about a month afterwards I was really ill. I’d over-trained and destroyed my immune system,” he says, adding that he had suffered two months of really bad flu and depression. “It was like I’d flown close to the sun and had come crashing back to earth.”

It was a year before he sat on a bike again, but by then the experience had given him the idea of how he was going to write Gold.

“By that point I understood that athletes are more interesting than we give them credit for and their interior battles are psychologically fascinating. When I got sick, I understood the angle I had to take.”

Ironically, the 38-year-old author, whose previous novels Incendiary and The Other Hand were both best-sellers, says he wasn’t particularly interested in the Olympics until he started to delve into the athletes’ world away from the cameras.

“If you were the 200th best footballer in the world, you’d be driving a Ferrari and earning £10 million a year. If you’re the 200th best cyclist in the world, you’d probably be working at a supermarket when you’re not training.

“I chose cycling because it’s so extreme. The demands of training are absolutely huge and the margins of victory are absolutely tiny. You can win or lose sprint cycling events by a 10,000th of a second.”

He interviewed a number of female athletes including Rebecca Romero, the only British woman to win an Olympic medal in two different sports – a silver in Athens in 2004 for rowing and a gold in Beijing in the cycling individual pursuit in 2008.

“I wanted to find out what it was about her that means winning an Olympic silver was one of the worst, rather than one of the best, days of her life.”

The London Olympics may be an obvious peg for a novel, but Cleave has a knack of choosing topics of the moment. His debut novel, Incendiary, which was made into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Michelle Williams, centred on a terrorist attack. It was published on July 7, 2005, the date of the London bombings.

His next novel, he reveals, may examine obesity – from a different angle. Meanwhile, his cycling has continued. He’s doing a 350-mile London to Paris later this month to raise money for Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research.

He was keen to raise money for the charity following the research he did into leukaemia at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London.

“I don’t take one minute of mine or my family’s health for granted any more,” says Cleave, who is married with two children. “I’d come home from the hospital in the evening and hug the kids extra tight.”

Gold by Chris Cleave is published by Sceptre, priced £16.99.