The recent upturn of interest in cycling and coverage of it makes it suddenly seem unthinkable that in the 1970's and before, and as recently as the 1990's, it felt like an undercover activity, some weird ritual and cyclists were some kind of strange breed apart that nobody else understood.In the same way that Lester Piggott's family tree went back a few generations with horse racing people, I was born into cycling to a slightly lesser extent, my dad having been a rider in Nottingham in the 1950's, also riding a tandem with my Uncle Don, and still to this day, Ron Hallam (my uncle's wife's brother) is setting new age-related records in time trials at the age of 85. I think that most things we do, or have a go at, are a result of 'monkey see, monkey do', or 'copy cat' traits in the way we are made so, when my dad returned to time trialling some time in the late 60's, or maybe very early 70's, and the family went with him early on Sunday mornings, it was not going to be long before I wanted to have a go. It might have been George Best I wanted to be at football but our man from Gloucester was called Ted Tedaldi and I more or less wanted to be him.
I had been piling up miles on my green Carlton Corsa bike, with 5 derailleur gears, to the extent that my dad thought the milometer attached to the front wheel must have been calibrated in kilometers, not miles and I had a number of different courses mapped out that began and ended in Hucclecote. So pretty soon it was time to make my debut in an evening Club 10 on the Newent Road and, aged 12, with Puppy Love by Donny Osmond at number one in the charts on 2/8/1972, I turned up and did a 31.37 compared to Ted's winning time of 24.02. And that was that for the 1972 season.
But the record shows I rode four more such events in my juvenile career, improving steadily through 1973, recording 29.12 on 5th July, which I remember very well. Eighteen years later I was going to realize what a good performance that was for a 13 year old when I came back at the age of 32 and couldn't match it. But that ride in '73 had been artificially enhanced by having a target for the last half mile or more as I caught sight of the lad who had started two minutes ahead of me and I made it very much a thing that mattered to catch him, and did. That target must have been worth 15 or 20 seconds off my time compared to what I might have done without it so, thanks for being there, Kevin. Two weeks later, perhaps too full of this new found panache, I perhaps went off too quickly and was so devastated by my 30.04, not quite 20 mph, that I didn't ride another race for 18 years. I did get a medal for Best Schoolboy in the Gloucester City Cycliong Club 10 competition and I could still find it if I had to but after that setback I did some fairly mediocre running (which is a chapter to come), football (which we've done already) but then entered a sporting wilderness that consisted of not much more than darts and pool until 1991.
I'm not quite sure now how or why I got back on a bike. I certainly wasn't in a fit state for it as much of the agonies I went through going up hills or any sort of distance provided ample evidence for. It was possibly because I'd started playing cricket again in 1987, thought I could get fitter and bowl faster if I spent a winter going swimming and, having gone from complete exhaustion having done two lengths to an hour and a half of non-stop
That could have been a bit depressing but two weeks later, on the course at Devizes, the record showing that I was among such big local names as the soon-to-be greatly admired Andy Cook, Rob Pears and John French, the last of who started a minute behind me, soon went by me as if the wind was somehow behind him but against me, seemed to hang about 50 yards ahead of me for a bit and then I never saw him again. But, having started at the top of a hill that you didn't have to go back up to finish and, I remember, having the legendary Gary Woodward doing the job of taking the times from the timekeeper at the finish to the result board, even something as insignificant as a 27.59 by me, there it was, Look, you lot, You proper bike riders, I'm one as well now and that was nearly as much as I wanted it to be.
Very much the same thing has been said about David Cameron being Prime Minister, that is that 90% of his ambition was achieved when he went into 10 Downing Street. All he wanted to do was Be Prime Minister and there wasn't much he wanted to do with it. But I found, and I hope he did, too, that once you've arrived you may as well see what else there is. After all, 27.59 isn't very good and on that result sheet, only four of the forty-five finishers went slower than me but at least in these days of gender equality it is not relevant that three of them were women and I dare say the bloke was much older than I was.
I only rode 30 time trials in my life which is not to say I didn't cover endless miles, or as endless as 6200 in 1995 seemed, in pursuit of something worthwhile. In 1992, I rode more than half of those, ransacking the RTTC handbook in search of events I could get to in my Ford Escort with the bike in the back. There are a few stories to tell as personal bests were achieved at 10 and 25 miles and three attempts at 50 miles finally resulting in a 2.24.07 and better than 20 mph. I might have finished next to last in one of them but there is no record of me ever finishing last.
But there were bigger and better things to do. One of the most astonishing things I'd ever seen in those early days was the 12 Hour event in which it might have been a trick of the light but apparently riders were sent off at daybreak on a Sunday in late summer. You could go home having seen them in the morning, see them again after dinner and then see them finish in the evening and, yes, they had been riding their bikes all that time in between.
Not all people who didn't know about cycling really thought that anybody rode 10 miles on a bike, still less thought that 25 miles was even humanly possible and so 12 Hours and just see how far you can go seemed even less likely to them in 1968 than a man could land on the moon. But I believed I'd seen it because I'd seen most of it. I'd seen Ted Tedaldi do it and I'd been there in about 1971 on a day of horrendous torrential rain when only four riders stuck it out. They were my heroes, they were from another realm- not the sad machismo of school rugby union which was only an institutionalized playground scrap- but that was real. By the early 1990's, I'd gone back and found out that the same kind of completely pointless heroism was still allowed to go on and riders like Gwen Shillaker could do it in pink on a pink bike, the sensational Keith Wright would grind out 240 miles making it look just as hard as it was, and probably the greatest bike rider I've ever seen in my life (and that includes Miguel Indurain, lots of those Tour de France riders, Phil Griffiths, Chris Boardman, Mark Cavendish and anybody else you might care to mention), it 's not Vicky Pendleton or Laura Trott, it's Janet Tebbutt, who set new standards for Lands End to John O'Groats and I saw her doing it, through Gloucester, late one night circa 1972, but she still had the nerve to be there more than 20 years later in 12 Hour events, still as modest and unassuming as she ever was.
And in Part 2 of My life in Sport - Cycling, I will try to explain how cycling was the best thing I ever did, why bike riding was about ten times more important to me than all the other sports I did put together and thus why Janet is my Sports Personality of All Time.
