RETRO: 1982 WORLD ROAD CHAMPIONSHIPS
Before Yorkshire hosts the World Championships this September, the last time the event was held on UK shores was in Goodwood, in 1982. And the landscape for British cycling could not have changed more in the 37 years since
With the Yorkshire Worlds on the horizon, we look at the last time the race came to the UK, in 1982
On September 5 1982, I cycled from North Devon to a friend’s house south of Exeter to watch the World Championships professional road race on his parent’s television. We didn’t have a telly in our house, and, anyway, I needed the training. Then I rode home again. If memory serves me correctly my school friend and I did a little loop before going to watch the cycling on Grandstand, because we wanted to top 100 miles for the day. You tell the kids of today that, and they won’t believe you.
Thirty-seven years later, Britain will again host the Worlds road race in Harrogate, Yorkshire, in a radically changed cycling environment. It’s easy to forget quite how cut off from the European cycling mainstream the UK once was; this is an era when the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France have visited England and Northern Ireland three times in seven years, when men and women’s Tours of Britain are fixtures on the calendar, not to mention legacy events such as the Tour de Yorkshire and Surrey Classic. Back in the early 1980s, it was all very different.
A few weeks before the elite of world cycling turned up in Sussex in 1982, one of the Worlds’ organisers exhorted UK club folk to turn out to watch. “We want people to miss their local ‘10’ for once and local roadmen who moan about their prizes to give their ‘fish and chippers’ a miss also,” said Ian Emmerson, who went on to be British Cycling chair. His killer point followed: “This is the last chance in this decade that they will be able to see their continental heroes in the flesh in this country.”
Emmerson was proved incorrect, because five years later the man who ran the 1982 Worlds, Alan Rushton, launched the Kellogg’s professional Tour of Britain. But his point was valid: the greats of road racing rarely visited the UK in those days. Prior to the 82 Worlds, the Tour had made a brief and almost clandestine visit to Plymouth in 1974 and Leicester had hosted the 1970 Worlds. Eddy Merckx and a few others had whizzed round the Eastway circuit in London in 1977. And that was about it.
Cycling’s almost complete lack of profile nationally explains why the 1982 Worlds was a success in racing terms but a millstone financially. A headline sponsor was named, in a press leak, as the US beer giant Michelob in January 1982, but the deal never materialised. The British Cycling Federation parted company with promoter John Burns in March, five months before the track racing was due to begin at the outdoor velodrome in Leicester.
Matters got worse as the BCF and Burns then embarked on a legal wrangle over how much money the erstwhile head of the championships was owed. A new promoter had to be found overnight; the man who stepped in was Rushton, relatively new to the game but formerly a PR with Viking Cycles. Wisely, he downplayed
expectations, making it clear no headline backer would be winnable in the time, and focussed on smaller deals.
Eventually, sponsors included Campagnolo, the nationalised ferry company Sealink, Longines and Le Coq Sportif, while Leicester University opened up its halls of residence for rider accommodation. Leicester Council put up £78,000 but the biggest subsidy was £120,000 from the Sports Council. The official cars were the hugely forgettable Austin Allegro; the service cars Ladas of the old-school box design.
The 1970 road race course based on Mallory Park had been widely criticised for being too flat; for 1982 the BCF turned to a circuit centred on the motor racing track at Goodwood in Suffolk. The Goodwood figure of eight would be covered 17 times by the pros, 12 by the amateurs and a mere four by the women, with the 100km amateur team time trial on a route based largely on the road circuit.
It was revealed afterwards that had the pro race gone on seven minutes longer there would have been no aerial footage, as the helicopter had to refuel every 45 minutes and was about to run out, an apt metaphor for a championships that seemed at times to be run on a wing and a prayer. Two tales illustrate the culture clash: an Italian fan was arrested by police for painting on the road prior to the race; he was trying to help two American fans write “LeMond” and never completed the final ‘d’. He was imprisoned for two days and nights, charged with criminal damage and fined £99, including “road damages”. The other story told of a ‘clubman’ who cycled down from the north, was told he had to pay £3 to enter the circuit and turned on his heel and headed home again.
DON’T RAIN ON MY PARADE
Amateur officials worked all hours to make the 1982 Worlds happen, prompting Cycling editor Martin Ayres to write, “There were some, high in the BCF, who came to believe that the championships were just not worth staging, so high was the cost in human terms.” Back then, the sport was still relatively small, and major international bike races were a comparative rarity in the UK. The hugely successful Milk Race was the exception but the BCF were unwilling or unable to tap into the obvious expertise. Once racing started, the first headache was the weather. There had been abortive projects through the 1970s to build a permanent indoor velodrome in the UK - Leeds and Birmingham got closest to leaving the drawing board - and the organisers were left counting the cost of using the open track at Leicester. Two days of racing were lost through the August rain, £850 of gate money was refunded and £500 spent on plastic sheeting at a local builders’ merchants to keep the track from getting soaked.
Typically, the minute after the plastic was nailed into place, the sun came out. On the plus side, there was not the pressure of live television, as the coverage was limited to highlights on the BBC shown late at night, with the weekend’s road races shown live on Grandstand. Eventually, a total attendance of 25,000 at Leicester for the six days, with 6,000 turning up for the Sunday session, left the organisers happy.
The Leicester highlight was expected to be the ‘pursuit battle of the century’ - former UK champion Sean Yates against 1980 world champion Tony Doyle, Frenchman Alain Bondue and Dane Hans-Henrik Ørsted - but in something of an anticlimax, it went to Bondue from Ørsted, with Doyle pipped for bronze by the Italian Maurizio Bidinost.
Japan’s Koichi Nakano won his sixth pro sprint title with the Canadian Gordon Singleton involved in a spectacular last-lap crash; the East Germans dominated the amateur racing, and the Russians won the team pursuit in 4:23, 33 seconds slower than the current world record. British pro Phil
Had the pro race gone on seven minutes longer there would have been no aerial footage, as the helicopter had to refuel every 45 minutes
Thomas was fined £750 for having two lines of advertising on his shorts, while the Russian sprint gold medallist Sergei Kopylov was smuggled out of his hotel by the US team and taken to a disco, where he spent a happy evening dancing until his KGB minders came to get him.
At Goodwood there had been the inevitable panic among the locals, who were initially unaware of the scale of the road closures; when they got on board the residents began cashing in with tea and refreshments. One asked for £100 to allow marshals to use his toilet and tried to sell advertising space on his house for several thousand pounds. The finish did not meet regulations, which stipulated it had to be straight for a kilometre; it was remodelled a few days before racing, at a cost of £1,000.
There were, however, no complaints that the course was too easy this time. The team time trial on the Tuesday, September 1, became a lottery as heavy rain washed flints on to the roads causing a spate of punctures and crashes. The Poles had six punctures; GB seven; the US five. Among the teams who were immune was the Dutch quartet, two of whom, Gerrit Solleveld and Maarten Ducrot, went on to be mainstays of the Superconfex team under Jan Raas. Among the Swiss quartet that won silver medals was the future Tour star Urs Zimmermann, while the East German team that finished fourth included future Tour green jersey Olaf Ludwig.
On the Saturday the amateur road race was won by an exhausted Bernd Drogan of East Germany, with the British hero Pete Sanders figuring strongly in the race-winning break, his blue and red jersey soaked with sweat on a torrid Sussex day. That morning was the high point for home fans, when Lancashire’s Mandy Jones won the women’s road race. It was a title foretold for Jones, who was still only 20, and who had taken bronze two years earlier on the tough Alpine circuit at Sallanches. That season she won the Circuit du Loiret, but more importantly in British terms she had finally made Beryl Burton look human, after her quarter-century dominance of every UK time trial title going.
Burton, the only British woman to win a world title prior to Jones, was interviewed by the BBC during a rain break at Leicester and expressed her disappointment at non-selection even though she was 45. But that summer Jones inflicted defeats on the Yorkshirewoman in both the ‘10’ and the ‘50’ titles, the first time Burton had been defeated in a championship head-to-head in 20 years.
On the day, Jones won Burton-style; going solo with eight miles left of a distinctly brief 38 miles. She made an initial attack on the descent, on the second of the four laps, gaining 30 seconds before she was caught by a chasing trio of Maria Canins, Gerda Sierens of Belgium and the German Sandra Schumacher. That was followed by a final move over the top of the climb to the finish with a lap remaining.
The professional road race was started by Jimmy Kain, one of the founding fathers of the British League of Racing Cyclists, aged 98, who died the following spring. It was brutal - “a burn-up of a ferocity never seen before in Britain” reported Cycling - with a lead group reduced to 26 contesting the finish. The early move was made by Bernard Vallet, supposedly to soften up the field for Bernard Hinault, but the four-time Tour winner had been out of sorts in the run-in after taking the Giro-Tour double. He duly abandoned, along with the defending champion Freddy Maertens, who was enduring the latest of his perennial crises of form and confidence.
“Abiding memories will be of straining riders flogging themselves to stay in contact while the men at the front, Saronni, Kelly, Raas and company, climbed on the big ring at astonishing speed,” read one report.
“They were charging off the motor circuit to be first up the climb. If you weren’t first on that climb you got whiplashed at the back; on the motor circuit they opened up and scorched for the hill,” said British pro Phil Bayton.
The then British national champion John Herety echoed this: “I just remember it being really hard. There was a myth that everyone cruised around for the first few laps and it got faster and faster, but it was just too fast for comfort from lap one. The circuit wasn’t difficult but it was windy round the motor racing circuit and it hurt.”
As with Jones, the professional winner, Giuseppe Saronni, was widely tipped beforehand. The ‘Buster Keaton of cycling’ was at the height of his powers at 24; he had already taken Tirreno-Adriatico, the Giro del Trentino and the Tour de Suisse that season, along with three stage wins in the Giro. His rivalry with Francesco Moser was at its height, as the powers of ‘the Sheriff’ gradually faded. On that day, Moser put the rivalry to one side and gave Saronni the lead-out that led to the sprint known as ‘la fucilata di Goodwood’ – the Goodwood gunshot.
On the final lap, the main moves came from Kelly, who had just taken the first Tour points win of his career. The Irishman attacked twice, once with Hennie Kuiper and again with the Belgian René Martens, Anderson and Moreno Argentin. Behind, the Dutch and the Italians did the most to frustrate the likes of Kelly, who had punctured with four laps remaining and later bemoaned the fact that he and his lone team mate Stephen Roche were up against 12-man teams from the Netherlands and Italy.
Saronni kept an eye on Kelly through the final lap, but he owed his victory also to LeMond, who put in a mighty
and controversial effort on the climb to reel in his compatriot
Jonathan Boyer, who had gone clear approaching the final kilometre.
About 500 metres from the finish, LeMond made his move: “I attacked and caught Boyer just like that, absolutely nothing to it, which showed how strong
I was and how much he was weakening.” But Saronni had latched on to LeMond’s wheel and the American gave him the perfect lead-out, hence the Italian’s searing sprint and his dramatic winning margin. It was a perfect example of the old training manual maxim for an uphill finish: go late, win big.
LeMond had the strength to latch on to Saronni as he came past, but faced brickbats afterwards, with Boyer accusing him of playing foul even though the agreement before the race had been that they would race for themselves. At the time, LeMond said, “We aren’t on the same team and we are not friends; I would not like to see him world champion.”
The crowd for the pro field was initially estimated at 60,000, revised downwards to 20,000. It was rumoured that half entered for nothing. “We were sold the idea of Goodwood on the basis that it was secure and this proved incorrect,” said the championships’ financial director Norman Shelmerdine. A contingent from Lincolnshire were among the many to camp out the night before, including a young lad named Rod Ellingworth.
Saronni proved himself a worthy world champion: in the next nine months he won the Giro di Lombardia, Milan-San Remo and the Giro. Ellingworth - who was photographed outside the grandstand in a Sean Kelly racing hat - went on to become Great Britain Academy coach and is widely regarded as being instrumental in the rise of the UK as a cycling nation in the 21st century. Another future GB and Team Sky coach was also present: Shane Sutton of Australia was the last finisher, 12:20 behind Saronni. For LeMond and Kelly, Goodwood marked the start of their best years.
Maertens’ career at the highest level effectively ended on September 5 1982. Jones retired at the end of 1983 after finishing fourth in defence of her rainbow jersey, then made a comeback a couple of years later. The women’s silver medallist Canins, then a mere novice with two months’ racing behind her, would remain prominent into the 1990s and won both the women’s Giro and Tour de France. Incredibly, she combined cycling and crosscountry skiing at the highest level for another three years.
The financial fall-out was considerable. The BCF was still arguing with the UCI over the money two years later, but it was BCF members who were left counting the cost. The loss was eventually revealed to be £26,000; BCF reserves were used as a loan to pay some of the promotion arm’s debts and at the annual general meeting at the end of 1983 there was anger at the directors. At the end of that year, it was agreed to tender for the 1988 championship.
The big winner was Rushton, the promoter who stepped in at the last minute to run the commercial side of the event. Having cut his teeth internationally with the Worlds, a year later Rushton put on the first of a series of Kelloggs-sponsored circuit races that would lead to the first fully professional UK Tour in 1987. In 1985 he promoted the first Nissan Classic in Ireland. The roots of today’s UK cycling boom lie in those events; to a large degree, Goodwood was where it all began.
A contingent from Lincolnshire were among the many to camp.. including a young lad named Rod Ellingworth