Ned Boulting has worn the Yellow Jersey for ITV’s coverage of the Tour de France since 2003. He began at Sky Sports in 1997 as a tea boy and left in 2001 after working on the popular show ‘Soccer Saturday’. He then joined ITV’s football coverage team, before making the switch to cycling.

Along the way, he has won the Royal Television Society Sports News Reporter of the Year in 2006, written three books on cycling, produced and directed documentary programs on Denis Bergkamp and Steven Gerrard, and even covered the Oxbridge boat race.And his race began at Cambridge, where he studied Modern Languages at Jesus College from 1987-91…

Or not. Boulting spent most of his undergraduate years at the ADC, where he “bounced from one production to the next.” He loved the freedom which student dramatics entailed: “there are no grown ups in charge; the animals are running the zoo.”Such an investment into drama came at a cost. “I was barely involved in my studies, to be brutally honest. I did the bare minimum to keep myself ticking over.”

Boulting’s interest in football began to develop during his time at Cambridge, which directly correlated to Cambridge United’s surge up the Football Leagues. He remembers going to the Abbey stadium with friends to watch the matches, as well as the feeling of antipathy from ‘townies’ since they were “not necessarily made to feel welcome.” Growing up in Bedford, a town without any professional football teams in the vicinity, Boulting “wasn’t massively into sport” and “certainly didn’t play it very much.”

In spite of this, he acknowledges that it was hard to avoid the biggest sporting events. “I generally liked my sport and liked the big occasions. The seed was sown and bubbled away, but the gene only really expressed itself later in my life.”

After completing his degree, Boulting moved to Hamburg where he became deeply fond of a local club called FC St. Pauli, which he describes as “the alternative left wing anarchist football club of the German Leagues - and they play in Brown!” By his mid-twenties, Boulting was hooked: “I was a football fan to the point of obsession.” But his life lacked any real direction.

In 1997 everything changed. “When my incompetent grand master plan to be an actor dried up, I fell into working for Sky.” He started off as a tea boy, working for £50 a week.

By 1998 he was a reporter. “That is how it works sometimes in the media. If you show willing and initiative things can happen quite fast.”

Boulting worked on ‘Soccer Saturday’ with “some of the best” in the business. Namely Jeff Stelling, whom he describes as “unparalleled”, possessing an “encyclopaedic knowledge” of football.

After joining ITV in 2001 where he continued similar work with football, a groundbreaking opportunity arose in 2003. ITV had secured the rights to cover the Tour de France and needed somebody to present it: Boulting was their man. “My sporting professional career turned on an axis when I was introduced to the Tour de France.” At first Boulting describes how he was quite out of his depths: “It took literally years to understand the sport. I wasn’t quite prepared for how absolutely stunning the Tour de France is as an event.”

He claims that he has been to World Cup finals which “hadn’t even approached the Tour in terms of grandeur and global interest. It is immense, uncontrollable, unfathomable, overcomplicated and foreign.”

He explains cycling as “as sport within a sport, stories within stories - like cracking a code, and a lot of it was written in a foreign language.” With 198 riders and 198 narratives on any given day, the Tour de France is “so much more interesting and engaging than football.”

The state of cycling in 2015 is very different to where it was in 2003. While Boulting concedes that it remains a fairly minor sport, when he started working it was “an invisible sport, right up there with croquet, badminton and chess, so unimportant in the national scheme of things. And now it is everybody’s second favourite sport.”

This “unimaginably successful fairy story” began in 2008. “Cavendish won four stages of the Tour de France, and Hoy, Pendleton and Wiggins all came back from Beijing with a flood of gold medals. The best cyclists in the world were British. Britain had a global superstar in the Tour de France and Britain dominated the track.

“Cavendish continued to become the greatest sprinter there has ever been, and then Team Sky formed (2010), stating that they wanted to win the Tour within five years. They did it within three (2012), and again the following year.” The rest is history.

But it is not all about reporting and presenting. “It is important to keep my life varied.”I never imagined that I would be able to write a book”, he said, and yet he is currently working on his fourth. He is also an acclaimed director and producer, which he describes as “great fun.”

Boulting also used to cover the boat race. “At Cambridge I held active antipathy towards the boat clubs and rowers,” but after covering the race extensively claims a “new found respect for the Cambridge rowers.”

Reflecting on his career, he will remember jousting with Lance Armstrong most clearly. “I was captivated by him at first. But I was very quickly aware of what was going on – all the journalists knew – but we didn’t have the silver bullet fact that would nail him and stand up in court. We could only raise an eyebrow and express doubt.

“Funnily enough, he quite enjoyed it. He was a clever man. When he dominated the sport, he felt so impregnable, so indomitable because he had so many friends in high places. In a way the entire sport depended on him, and he knew that nobody could touch him.

“And he was bored of sycophants and he always used to seek out the challengers. He would single me out and say “go on, what have you got for me today?” One in ten times I might land a blow.”

Has cycling been permanently tainted? “For some people it will be”, Boulting accepts, but the Armstrong scandal was perhaps a blessing in disguise. “Cycling needed to be singled out because it had by far the biggest problem, and today cycling is doing ten times more than any other sport to combat doping. I think it is cleaner now than ever in one hundred years. That doesn’t mean that it’s clean – just cleaner.”

Boulting too recognises the “human cost” of competition. “Athletes are human beings at the end of the day, and the real tragedies are the lesser athletes who are on a UCI minimum wage and need to feed their families. They are locked down in a system where you can only compete if you play ball.”

A perk of Boulting’s job is the chance to witness the biggest events live. He says that he will never forget Liverpool’s comeback in the Champions League Final in 2005 or the 2006 World Cup Final when he happened to glance at Zidane’s infamous head butt. Yet the free tickets are also one of the pitfalls of the job: “attending sporting events feels like work.” Boulting actually enjoys going with his youngest daughter and buying a ticket to watch Charlton Athletic.

As the conversation draws to a close, Boulting concludes with a word of advise to aspiring journalists - even if “the days of secure jobs on newspapers are numbered if not vanished.”

“There will always be value in having the right contacts. That is what journalism is - knowing the right people and being trusted so that people will talk to you. “You can sit at your keyboard and be a blogger and a warrior all you like, full of opinion and bluster, but you have to get out there and chat to people and build up connections and contacts.”

Boulting will soon be presenting his 13th Tour de France. He certainly has ridden a long way from the Cambridge United-supporting thespian of his university days. “I’m not sure if Cambridge really prepared me for any of this, but maybe it did – in a funny way.”