Alf Engers was to cycling what Alex Higgins was to snooker, for want of a better comparison. Charismatic, controversial and maverick, he did things his own way, not always to the liking of the sport's governing bodies but was impossible to ignore and a champion in spite of whatever circumstances were put in his way.
It was possible to ignore him for the majority of the public who in the 1960's and 70's had no idea about what was going on in the esoteric sport of cycling, on the road, on the track and in time-trialling. It was not always headline news and a boom sport, it was more like an undercover operation known about by a select few who knew their stuff.
Paul Jones has produced a gripping account of Alf's turbulent career based on recent interviews with the man himself and, as a rider who achieved sub-50 minute times for 25 miles and a talented writer capable of telling the story in the spirit it benefits from being told in, he is well ahead of many such sports books not always as well-placed to do so.
Alf Engers was a baker who worked nights which didn't lend itself to traditional timetables for training and preparation for early morning racing. He was also very much his own man, regularly moving from club to club, and thus dependent on the devoted patronage of those who believed in him but found himself perennially caught between cycling's 'North London Mafia' and those whose scriptures were the RTTC rulebook as interpreted by them,
the RRTC made the Taliban Militia look like Club 18-30 holiday reps.
But, as the title does much to suggest, Jones is ultra-sympathetic to the Engers point of view. Those of us interested in sport for sport's sake, rather than administration for administration's sake, always were, too, and one can't come out of reading this book without being even more so but, partisan as it so clearly is, one would just like to hear something from the self-styled apparatchiks of the ruling body to see if, for example, the ban from amatuer competition imposed on Engers after his return from the grey-ish area of 'independent' status was at all justified. It was, after all, a time in which the Olympic Games was for amateurs, as was Rugby Union, while the Soviet Union could train athletes full-time by giving them positions in the army.
Such blurred lines have always benefitted students of the law more than those taking part.
Alf Engers came from school athletics, via the post-war cycle speedway scene, which was the equivalent of skiffle in pop music, and track racing, a world populated by such characters as,
You always knew where you stood with Len Thorpe because he would always let you down.
Famously, a three-man Team Time Trial unit, including Engers and the 'taciturn' John Woodburn, beat the Olympic squad in the run up to the Games but, selection committees knowing who they were selecting anyway, they selected who they were going to select anyway. Alf is forever up against the 'powers that be', sometimes happy to take a sabbatical, whether imposed or not, and return to his angling or, indeed, on that first occasion, to form a skiffle band.
I don't think his mythology was of his own making - his dedication and dedication to detail foresaw SKY's marginal gains theory several decades ahead - but he was capable of living up to it as an idiosyncratic time-triallist who turned up in a fur coat and dark glasses. Talent has its own mystique for the rest of us who don't possess it but, for me, it is in the attitude whereby,
they laughed at things in a sport in which laughing at things was no laughing matter.
It is also about putting the record where nobody else could get to it, for as long as any record can be. The championship 25's, the performances that put more than a minute into the much-vaunted rivals on the day and, less interestingly, the technonology are the point until, aged 38, it is the first sub-50 minute '25', 49.24, the likes of which can be witnessed regularly by now but which, coming so soon after Concorde and the Moon landings, seemed of a piece with them then to those who had any grasp of the matter. It would bear comparison with Roger Bannister if the 4-minute mile hadn't been set up as a team effort with Brasher and Chataway.
Paul Jones has the clubman's lingo, which means that non-cyclists might need to know that a 100 inch gear is very hard to push round and that 'the Comic' means Cycling/Cycling Weekly but it is unlikely that this excellent book will break out of its niche market to become a mainstream best-seller. Would that it were. It might have benefitted from more thoroughgoing sub-editing and, certainly, having been so matter-of-fact thoughout, some readers might find the last four pages of philosophical reflection less than the ideal ending. But the best Christmas present I had, really, was being allowed to read my nephew's present to my dad before he did, while I was there, so I could come home and review it in such short order.
Books on sport are, by necessity, usually either ghost-written by hacks for the inarticulate sportsman in question or by fans more interested in dull statistics and achievements who aren't good enough writers. Paul Jones, possibly showing off a bit, can actually get T.S. Eliot into his text. He is a proper writer and a proper cyclist. Those advantages multiply themselves by each other.