This Island Race

THIS ISLAND RACE ROULEUR’S YEAR IN THE BRITISH ISLES

THIS ISLAND RACE ROULEUR’S YEAR IN THE BRITISH ISLES

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Published by Rouleur Books An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP www.bloomsbury.com First edition 2014 Copyright © 2014 ISBN 978-1-4729-1231-2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means — graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems — without the prior permission in writing of the publishers.

Whilst every effort has been made to ensure that the content of this book is as technically accurate and as sound as possible, neither the author nor the publishers can accept responsibility for any injury or loss sustained as a result of the use of this material.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Editor: Ian Cleverly Assistant Editor: Andy McGrath Designer: Rob Johnston Image Editor: Jonathan Briggs Illustrator: Tom Jay Special thanks go to Charlotte Croft, Nick Ascroft and Marina Asenjo at Bloomsbury.

Made from wood grown in managed, sustainable forests.

It is natural, renewable and recyclable. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

Printed and bound in Spain

by Tallers Gràfics Soler Gruppo Media Limited 47 Bermondsey Street London SE1 3XF www.rouleur.cc Rouleur magazine is published eight times a year ISSN 1752-962X

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Foreword by Ian Cleverly

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Rutland-Melton International CiCLE Classic Timm Kölln and Andy McGrath

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Women’s Tour Geoff Waugh and Ned Boulting

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Photographer biographies

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Writer biographies

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Image credits

Lincoln Grand Prix Robert Wyatt and Ian Cleverly

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Giro d’Italia Adrian Megahey and Colin O’Brien

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British National Road Championships Olaf Unverzart and Jack Thurston

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Tour de France Stage 1: Leeds-Harrogate Sebastian & Simon Schels and Olivier Nilsson-Julien

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Tour de France Stage 2: York-Sheffield Sebastian & Simon Schels and Olivier Nilsson-Julien

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Tour de France Stage 3: Cambridge-London Sebastian & Simon Schels and Olivier Nilsson-Julien

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National Championship 25 Joel Hewitt and Michael Breckon

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RideLondon-Surrey Classic Paolo Ciaberta and Richard Williams

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Women’s Tour Oundle to Bury St Edmunds May 7-11 Stage 1: Oundle-Northampton, 93.8km Stage 2: Hinckley-Bedford, 118.5km Stage 3: Felixstowe-Clacton-on-Sea, 90.5km Stage 4: Cheshunt-Welwyn Garden City, 87.8km Stage 5: Harwich-Bury St Edmunds, 108.3km

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HAPPY

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now invite you to join me briefly, on a trip back to May 2014, when, in a series of slightly anonymous counties towards the southern end of the United Kingdom, a small piece of history was made.

If, by chance, you have climbed a ladder on your creaking knees to retrieve this, by now dusty, edition of the 2014 Rouleur Annual from the top shelf of your library (yes, I can now reveal to you that, 30 years hence, you will have a library in your retirement), then I am about to bewilder you with a popular cultural reference that will have been rendered meaningless by the passing of the decades.

It pertains to a Mr Pharrell Williams, of Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA. In 2014 Mr Williams was a widely celebrated popular entertainer, whose particular musical leanings oscillated gently between the closely aligned genres of R&B and soul. Sometimes, for all the world, his music simply sounded like pop.

In the summer of that year, his hit Happy swept the charts.

Resolutely breezy, and upbeat to the point of euphoria, it was the archetypal earworm. Once it had bored itself into your auditory subconscious, it stayed there, gnawing away at your synapses, until it penetrated still deeper into your physiology, eventually migrating into the nuclei of your cells and minutely altering your DNA, until you yourself became Happy.

That summer, Happy was everywhere. It spilled from café doors onto the pavements.

Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth.

Happy dropped sweetly onto the hot tarmac from the rolled down windows of passing cars.

Clap along if you know what happiness is to you.

And, one warm afternoon in Suffolk, it washed benevolently over the huge crowd gathered in front of a podium, at the end of a significant bike race. The music agitated the good folk of Bury St Edmunds into a uniformly executed swaying to the beat. It produced in every individual a Pavlovian, evangelical smile. They beamed up at the riders, who returned their hypnotised gaze.

This was an occasion that had fallen in love with itself. But it had every reason to. And for as long as I live I will associate it with just that: Happy.

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he genesis of the inaugural Women’s Tour (not, you will note, the Women’s Tour of Britain: a deliberate omission suggesting that their ambition is more global) was not easy. Raising funds, persuading partners and clearing the TV schedules must have been a tightrope act for Guy Elliott, Mick Bennett and Hugh Roberts, the three wise men of Sweetspot, who run the top end of the British road racing scene. The cart-horse/horse-cart dilemma has been the resolute sticking point for decades, frustrating the growth of women’s cycling. How can you attract sponsors without television coverage? And how can you attract television coverage without sponsors? Caught helplessly in the middle of these mutually exclusive positions are the athletes themselves; the women who race, who have been dedicating themselves to a brutally demanding schedule of training for almost no reward, and only sporadic outlets for their talent.

Many have just shrugged their shoulders and got on with it.

Others, like Dr Emma Pooley (the Olympic silver medallist from 2008 has now completed her PhD in geotechnical engineering), have been more vocal. But the fact of the matter is that, without the goodwill of various well-placed executives both in the public and private sector, this would not have happened. Everyone had to jump together.

It was, after all, quite a punt.

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ace headquarters happened to be a hotel in Kettering.

The day before it all started, as I was trying to explain away another week-long absence to my family, I had found myself rather at a loss when it came to Kettering, and had resorted, rather cheaply, to quoting from The Meaning Of Liff, that irritating book which, twenty years ago, graced the toilet in every British home. We had our copy of it next to the loo roll. Kettering, according to this faux dictionary of British place names, was a term used to describe the red marks left on your arse after you’ve been sitting in shorts on a whicker work chair. I am now forty four, and still find this funny.

But, mercifully, the Women’s Tour has allowed me to replace those imaginary red markings with another association. I will always recall, and so will history, that this was the chosen venue for the launch of Britain’s first ever internationally recognised women’s stage race. A taxi driver picked me up from Kettering station, and took me to the hotel at the edge of town where the Women’s Tour had set up shop. As we approached the reception, he marvelled at the sight of dozens and dozens of police motorbikes lined up and gleaming in the late spring sunshine.

“What’s this, mate? Are you a copper? Is there a police strike?”

But the police bikes were not the only vehicles there. The teams had arrived, with their varying calibres of transportation. Some of the less well funded teams had hired Transit vans for the bikes and campervans for the riders, on which they had stuck hastily prepared signage. Others, like Boels Dolmans, the team of Lizzie Armitstead and Emma Trott, had parked up their specially customised mobile homes. They glared across the car park at the Wiggle Honda outfit, where Emma’s sister Laura was drawing a crowd each time she ventured out into the public. United Healthcare, benefiting from the fact that they didn’t have a men’s team at the Giro, had brought their full spec European battle bus. Even if they failed to win a jersey (Sharon Laws took the mountains competition) they had already won Team Bus Top Trumps, before the race had even got under way.

A press conference on the eve of the Grand Départ was the first hint that the race would not unfold in a vacuum, ignored by the world at large. Now, I have some experience of these events. On the men’s race, there was a time, just a few short years ago, when I could realistically expect to be the only journalist in attendance. I have felt that toe-curling pressure to keep up a respectable flow of questions, in order to maintain the charade (for the benefit of both the riders and the sponsors) that anyone really cared.

Yet here in Kettering, it was self-evident that people cared.

The room was packed. Camera crews and journalists from both national and specialist press jostled for position alongside a range of snappers and typically parochial local newspaper reporters (to Lizzie Armitstead: “What do you know about the potholes in Hertfordshire?”)

Into this well-intentioned chaos walked Giorgia Bronzini, the two-time road race World Champion, Emma Johansson, the world’s number-one rider at the time, Lizzie Armitstead and Marianne Vos. As Johansson stepped in, she turned to Bronzini, and said simply: “Oh. We’re not used to this.”

Too right. Frankly nor were we.

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he following morning we found ourselves in Oundle.

It is a pretty market town in one of those counties that would be impossible to place on an unmarked map with any degree of accuracy; Northamptonshire, as it happens. It is dominated by a public school that has inexplicably decided that its female students should wear voluminous culottes instead of trousers or skirts. But this is neither here nor there (although I urge you to Google them).

The sight that greeted the Women’s Tour that morning was unexpectedly perfect. The sun burst out shortly before the sign on to reveal a high street in which not one shop window hadn’t been lovingly adorned with bicycle-themed decoration. There were iced Union Jack cakes, yellow jerseys, polka dots, bunting and bikes wherever you looked. It was remarkable; better than I would have expected to see in the heartlands of French cycling. It was an expression of enthusiasm, which, try as I might to muster up my worldly cynicism, quite exceeded expectations. Why, there was even a café on the corner with a skeleton on a bike, wearing a full US Postal kit. I could not have wished for better.

And neither could the riders. One by one, they climbed cleatfooted up the perilous three steps to the sign on for the race to be greeted by a sea of faces, and a wave of cheering. There was standing room only in Oundle, which is a sentence that has probably never before been committed to print. Straight away the Women’s Tour started to break new ground, and everyone knew that the race would be in safe hands.

You could read it in their eyes. Some looked blankly into the crowd, suddenly wrong-footed by all the uncommon attention.

Others discovered straightaway an extrovert approach, blowing kisses and throwing smiles. And other, more seasoned campaigners, like Vos, knew now that their commitment to deliver a race and to win it had just become serious. The deal was sealed, and pact between the public and the riders was complete. And off they set, with Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson dropping the Union Jack, and professing, quite genuinely, to have been moved by the occasion. So don’t take it from me. Take it from her.

Then we, too, rolled out of Oundle in our cars, the passage of the convoy only interrupted by an irate resident trying to get to the shops and instead slamming into the fag end of a bike race. She screamed at us from her car: “It’s just a bunch of dykes on bikes.

Get over it!” Hers was the sole dissenting voice I heard all week, and even she had made us laugh.

The rain whipped across the course. The French national champion Élise Delzenne rode off the front of the bunch, and nearly made it to the line in Northampton alone, had it not been for a malfunctioning gear-shift which left her working either too hard, or not hard enough. As she waited to collect her consolation Combativity prize, I watched her teeth chattering from the sudden drop in temperature. She was cheered to the rafters, outside the Derngate Centre and the old town hall with its Victorian Gothic stained glass.

The next day, it poured. By now, Geoff, Rouleur’s man with the lens, had honed in on his target. “I quite like the Mexicans, Ned. I think I’m going to focus on them for a bit.” And off he went chasing after Central American cyclists who were milling around, trying to keep warm.

I could see what he meant. The team from Estado de MéxicoFaren, clad in day-glo pink, were largely Italian riders, as it happened. But their exotic presence outside an uninspiring row of bookies and pubs in Hinckley town centre was drawing attention.

In an effort to prepare for the ordeal of the race to come, the riders

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Lincoln Grand Prix Lincoln May 11 194.4km

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YANTO AND THE YELLOW BELLY

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an Emmerson OBE first organised the Lincoln Grand Prix in 1963.

There are no end of amazing statistics related to this race, but the fact that the man responsible for building the finest one-day event in Britain first took over the reins in the year of my birth is striking and puzzling at the same time. I’m no spring chicken. He’s looking good. He must have still been in short trousers back then, by my calculations.

Emmerson in a local man, born and bred: a Lincolnshire yellowbelly — not the derogatory term it may appear. The likeliest explanation for the nickname stems from the bright-coloured waistcoats worn by the local regiment in battle. Some get to wear yellow jerseys to stand out in a peloton; the local militia liked to look smart before a dust-up. Fair enough.

It turns out that this particular yellowbelly first ran the Lincoln GP as a teenager. It’s hard to imagine an 18-yearold taking on such a mammoth task now.

Emmerson took over from race founder Mike Jones, stepped away for over a decade then returned in the ’80s, making 2014 the 59th consecutive edition of the Lincoln all told. The foot and mouth outbreak of 2001 could have been problematical, but aside from spectators being banned from the lanes, the race went ahead as usual.

There’s no stopping the Lincoln.

Emmerson and his team have striven — and succeeded — to present a prestigious event that any British rider worth his salt would be proud to have on his palmarès.

The long list of previous winners throws up outstanding riders from every generation: Albert Hitchen and Doug Dailey in the ’60s; Phil Edwards and Bill Nickson in the ’70s; Steve Joughin, Malcolm Elliott and (four-time winner) Paul Curran from the ’80s; prolific Northern hardmen John Tanner, Kevin Dawson and Mark Lovatt through the ’90s and into the next century.

For long-time followers of the UK racing scene of a certain age, these are the greats.

For younger (or newer) fans, Peter Kennaugh’s fine solo victory in 2013 showcased the Manxman’s capabilities, repeated with aplomb at the national championships in Abergavenny a year later.

Rouleur This Island Race Lincoln Grand Prix

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photographs ROBERT WYATT words IAN CLEVERLY

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Giro d’Italia Northern Ireland May 9-10 Stage 1: Belfast-Belfast TTT, 21.7km Stage 2: Belfast-Belfast, 219km

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photographs ADRIAN MEGAHEY words COLIN O’BRIEN

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PINK PARADE

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oliath and Samson loom large in bright yellow, the H&W of Harland and Wolff clear to see for miles across the skyline of the last great industrial city in the British Isles to be straddled by a shipyard. The Lagan pours into the lough after meandering north from County Down to Antrim, into the heart of town and to Queens Island and its garden of slipways that, once upon a time, launched the ocean’s most famous liners. Now, it launches cyclists, inland, away from the gleaming monument to the Titanic and towards the Stormont estate, the Prince of Wales Avenue and Edward Carson on his plinth, arm aloft, still towering over Belfast below.

This is Northern Ireland’s Grande Partenza, the Giro d’Italia’s Big Start. A sign of the times, for both the competition and its host.

Foreign starts for cycling’s Grand Tours never fail to spark debates among fans, but this time, it’s beside the point. Say what you want about what commercialisation, bottom lines and highest bidders do to the identity of an event like this. It’s almost irrelevant, because the 2014 Giro is about something a lot more important than a bike race. It’s about a city’s renaissance, a region’s rebirth, the emergence of a new vitality and an optimism about the future in a place that, for the longest time, looked incapable of wrestling itself out from under the weight of its own troubled past. It’s about one of the world’s biggest sporting events, broadcast to 170 countries, with hundreds of thousands of people lining the streets to see top cyclists compete on a weekend that cost millions of pounds in tourism investment. Belfast, the colourful, complicated city on the mouth of the River Lagan, hitherto a synonym for unrest and agony, was finally given a chance to show the world what it’s really like.

Is it still a little rough around the edges? Sure, but the best ones always are. It’s changing at quite a pace, but the idiosyncrasies remain and Belfast’s charm lies in the fact that there’s nowhere else like it in the world — something that you can’t say about many places in the British Isles. Most urban areas have become so insipidly uniform that they’re almost indistinguishable from one another. The Great British high street is a homogeneous hell, full of empty, changeable values and the sort of people who leave the price stickers on the soles of their shoes. With every new chain chemist or franchise coffee shop, the grand malaise spreads, drowning anything decent under waves of Tesco and H&M. Give me the murals, the working-class redbrick streets, the dockyard cranes looming overhead and the political messages — fine dominio britannico, writ large in Italian on the slopes of the Black Mountains — any day. Not all of it is ideal, from a tourism perspective anyway, but at least it grabs the attention, and every so often, rattles the cage.

The last time a Grand Tour came to Ireland, both the sport and the island, were very different. Back in 1998, cycling was fetid with the disease of doping and when Willy Voet was stopped by customs officials at the French-Belgian border, they inadvertently exposed a putrid wound to the air that would fester and cripple the sport for more than a decade. Then, the Tour de France departed from Dublin and passed through Enniscorthy before finishing in

Cork, to the south, because it would have been unimaginable to head north. Just a month later, a bomb in a red Vauxhall Cavalier tore through Market Street in Omagh, County Tyrone, killing 29 and injuring hundreds. The horrified reaction was unanimous, the atrocity universally condemned, and from there, a corner was turned in the long and thorny peace process. Sixteen years later, all is utterly changed. The Giro, and the myriad other events that have tourists flocking to Northern Ireland, are a sign of that change, and it’s worth celebrating.

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