Club gets young off to flying start

IN THE summer of 1995 Debbie Wharton was a 22-year-old receptionist at Maindy Leisure Centre in Cardiff.

Debbie, her dad and her sister were a rare breed – they were keen cyclists. Unlike today, when the sight of a lycraclad peloton on the streets of the Welsh capital is a regular occurrence, cycling was very much a minority sport then.

People only got into cycling if their parents were cyclists. It was a rich person’s game and there was little out there for children.

“Young people would turn up at cycling clubs where they would have been expected to have all the correct kit and do a 50-mile cycle ride,” recalls Debbie. “That is how it used to be.”

It was because of this that Debbie decided an inclusive, kids-only club was needed.

This is how Maindy Flyers Cycling Club was born. Now almost a quarter of a century later, there are several Olympic gold medals in the cabinet, thousands of children have passed through the club and there is the small matter of a Tour de France winner you may have heard of.

It has not been an easy climb, but the views from the top are great.

But this is not just a story of elitelevel success. It is a story of little cycling club which changed the way a sport is perceived in Britain and which has ridden the wave of the UK cycling explosion.

“I was working at Maindy in 1995 but not for anything to do with cycling,” said Debbie. “I was actually a receptionist at the leisure centre.

“I used to race all around the country and did it really competitively for quite a long time. I had a great time cycling and made loads of friends and just really loved it.

“Because the leisure centre was new, the cycle track was really underused and no-one really knew what it was and it was only a few of us who really used it.

“As people knew I loved cycling, they asked if I wanted to set up a club. I thought that was a fantastic idea because the other clubs in Cardiff at the time didn’t let kids in.

“You could only really get into a cycling club if your parents were cyclists.”

The club quickly gained members, but the fact that they were not your “typical” cyclists was pretty obvious.

“Some would turn up with a mountain bike or BMX, but it didn’t matter,” said Debbie.

“We had a girl turn up one day with a bike which didn’t have a headset in it! Imagine if she turned up at a cycling club with that! It just never would have happened.

“It was the opportunity for any kid on any bike to have a go at cycling and that was what was so unique about it.

“It was all about inclusiveness. The children who wanted to race could go and race, but the children who didn’t want to could stay on the track. We would have them going under limbo bars or around cones! Until that time, that was unheard-of and people never did that.

“It sounds like it was in the Dark Ages but it was only 25 years ago. We just wanted to make it more fun and it just sort of blossomed from there.”

The first time few times the club turned up at races, they were turning heads.

“We went to all the local tracks around the country,” said Debbie. “We went to Nottingham, Portsmouth and Reading, and we would turn up with 20 Maindy Flyers who were keen to take part.

“However, they were using these track bikes which had been cobbled together with any old frame we had been able to find from the scrapyard or a second-hand bike shop which had been converted to a fixed-wheel bike.

“You would turn up at the race and people would think, ‘That’s not a proper track bike, that can’t be allowed’!

“We were converting old BMXs and tiny little kids’ racing bikes into track bikes and putting them on to the track, and this was just never done.

“We were adjusting the perceptions of what a club was.”

The club’s success spoke (excuse the pun) for itself. Numbers swelled and parents gladly gave up their time to grow the club to its present 155 child members.

There are too many world-class cyclists who have flown around Maindy to list here. Included are Owain Doull and Elinor Barker, who each won team pursuit golds in Rio.

The scale of what she had built was brought home to Debbie when she watched former Flyer Geraint Thomas ride down the Champs-Élysées last weekend and listened to Olympic gold medalist Chris Boardman’s commentary.

“I was listening to the commentary on ITV and at the end of the Tour de France they talked about the Maindy Flyers,” said Debbie, who is now 45.

“Chris Boardman said that since the club started he had watched it and watched it.

“He said that he and British Cycling used to think, ‘What are they doing there? How are they getting all these kids? And how are they making them so fast?’

“He said that gradually he realised that we were making them passionate about the sport and wanting to be part of the sport.

“When I heard Chris Boardman say that, as probably the most influential man in British cycling, it made me cry. It really meant a lot.”

It wasn’t just Debbie from the Flyers who was quite emotional to see Geraint win the Tour.

“It’s emotional really, I get emotional just thinking about it,” said 44-year-old Jo Phillips, who has been the club’s chair for a decade.

“It is because he is just ‘the bloke down the road’ and he is giving so much back to the club. It is emotional because of how he is and the kids can relate to him fully.

“Regardless of all the success, he is who he is. Everybody’s so chuffed for him.

“It’s the biggest race in the world and an incredible achievement, but because he is so accessible, grounded and true to his roots, it makes it extraspecial.

“Since we have been around he has been quite a few times.

“He popped down to one of our sessions and just jumped in and started riding. The kids didn’t know he was going to be there. He came down on another occasion and we all rode over to Cowbridge together as a club and he was with us. That was exciting.

“After the Tour of Britain last year, Team Sky rocked up with their tour bus to Maindy.They spent time with them and that is just priceless. He actually donated his yellow jersey to us last year.”

When you speak to people from club, even after all the success, they do not talk about “elites”, “gold medals” or “Olympics”.

What they actually talk about is family, togetherness and friendships.

This sense of camaraderie has been infused into the club’s DNA from the start. One man who has seen the process from the very beginning is 62-year-old Alan Davis.

He has been involved in the club for 23 years, first as a parent and now as a coach.

“The club had been going three months when my son Michael joined in October 1995,” he said.

“My son and Geraint knew each other before because they used to swim together.

“British Cycling was not like it is now. It was basically just two blokes! They had won a gold in 1992 with Chris Boardman, but then fell apart.

“The track at Maindy then was concrete and overgrown, it had not been