Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Hawkins shows all his spirit
Cycling
Adrian Hawkins, of Thanet Road Club, represented Great Britain at the UCI Gran Fondo World Championships – the highest amateur level cycling event in the world – at Albi in France.
A Gran Fondo is a long-distance road race which originated in Italy in 1970, and roughly translates into English as “Big Ride.”
Still relatively new in the UK, where most endurance cycling events are called “Sportive” and rarely exclude vehicle traffic, there are now several Gran Fondo events that feature roads closed to traffic.
One of these is the Tour of Cambridgeshire, at Peterborough in June, which is one of a a series of qualifying events held across the world where the top 25% in each age group have the honour to represent their country in their age group at Gran Fondo World Championships.
Hawk i n s , 48, from Wi c k h amb r e a u x , near Canterbury, rode the 128k Tour of Cambridgeshire in 3 hours 16 mins 48 secs, finishing 100th out of 841 riders and qualified in the 45-49 age group. Albi is in southern France – famous for the 79m tower and massive walls of Cathédrale Sainte-cécile, a UNESCO World Heritage Site – and Hawkins arrived a week before the race to acclimatise himself to temperatures in the mid-to-high 30s and to do some much-needed hill work.
The race itself was 155k and took in two punishing climbs and a total of 2039m of climbing, as well as the vineyards of Gaillacbefore finishing on the famous Circuit d’albi motor racing circuit. The first 10k was frantic, with riders jostling for position, making it difficult to settle into any sort of rhythm through the narrow streets.
Hawkins was forced to stop at 15k as six or seven riders crashed in front of him and was unlucky to be hit by another rider. He had damaged his shoe and was unable to tighten it or to clip into his pedals, with a resulting loss of power.
Some running repairs allowed him to continue and he gained places on both climbs as riders started to suffer in the heat.
He said: “When I saw the 50k
‘Each kilometre seemed to get longer and longer’
to go sign it felt good but that last 50k was the longest, hottest, hardest 50k I have ever ridden.
“Each kilometre seemed to get longer and longer, it felt like I was going backwards at one point.
“But then we headed onto the circuit to ride the last kilometre around the track and I found some energy for a final sprint across the line.”
Hawkes finished 124th out of 279 in his age group in a time of 4:22.27, an average speed of 35.4 km/h for the 155k distance and was 20th out of 111 GB riders in the 45-49 age group.