STATE OF THE NATION: GREAT BRITAIN
We look at why cycling took off so successfully in Britain, especially in the years 2008-2012
With apologies to Philip Larkin and the opening lines of his famous poem, Annus Mirabilis, which are butchered above. Writing in 1967 about 1963, Larkin was referring not to cycling but to another physical activity. He was not being literal.
But this is 2021 and we are living in the age of no-nuance Twitter, so let’s ignore that, take it at face value, and call 2008 year zero: British cycling’s annus mirabilis, when its cyclists won eight Olympic golds and Mark Cavendish won two stages at the Giro d’Italia and four at the Tour de France.
That was 13 years ago – a full generation and more in sporting terms. It means there’s as much distance between then and now as between Tom Simpson and Robert Millar, or Chris Boardman and Bradley Wiggins.
What should that mean? Perhaps that cycling as a sport, previously marginal, has come of age. Which in turn would mean that the sport was broadly understood and taken seriously, and that British cyclists were consistently successful internationally.
Caveats apply, but cycling is taken seriously. British riders are consistently successful. Moreover, when major races are held on British roads they attract enormous crowds, the equal of just about any race in the world and a lot better than most.
Yet taking the current temperature of cycling in Britain is not easy. Wiggins, who did so much to help the sport hit the mainstream, is long retired. Cavendish is still racing but a diminished force. Chris Froome, who turns 36 in May, talks of a fifth Tour win that few can imagine. Slightly younger, Geraint Thomas might be a slightly better bet for another yellow jersey, though it seems more likely that he has started a gentle descent.
Hugh Carthy and the Yates twins, Simon and Adam, are at the top of their game: solid and frequently spectacular performers, and yet it is easier to imagine them winning grand tours (as Simon has already done) than becoming household names in the UK.
And herein lies one of the caveats. As the case of Simon Yates demonstrates – he was sanctioned for what the UCI described as “non-intentional doping” in 2016, with his team admitting fault – doping stories are bigger news, even when involving relatively unknown riders, than grand tour wins.
For good or ill, this tends not to be the case in countries where cycling’s roots are buried deeper in the sporting landscape. If cycling in Europe is an old oak, in Britain it can seem more like a sapling, in need of care, attention and time if it is to establish itself.
Still, a tree, even a sapling, is at least more robust than a bubble. For five or six years after the explosion of interest that came with the 2008 Olympic Games there was an assumption that this is what the popularity of cycling amounted to. There was a sense of fragility and a lack of permanence, the British cycling boom an edifice built on sand. As everyone knows, bubbles eventually pop and sandcastles collapse.
There have been scandals – jiffy bags sent to races with unknown contents, testosterone deliveries, bullying – though perhaps a more likely threat, when the sport’s popularity seemed so dependent on individual, charismatic, race-winning stars, was always the simple passing of time.
Cycling’s popularity and status in the UK seemed to survive Wiggins’ retirement – and even the shadows over his legacy thrown up by the now infamous, and never
CYCLING IN BRITAIN BEGAN IN TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHT ( WHICH WAS RATHER LATE FOR ME) BETWEEN THE END OF DAVID MILLAR’S BAN AND BRADLEY WIGGINS’ FIRST TOP THREE
satisfactorily resolved, jiffy bag story – and Cavendish’s decline, partly because in Froome and Thomas, British riders were still winning the Tour de France.
But when Froome and Thomas were left out of the Ineos Grenadiers lineup for last year’s race it seemed a significant, possibly era-ending moment. No longer wrapped in a Union Jack, as they had been since their launch as Team Sky in 2010, Ineos now appeared to have a more international, cosmopolitan flavour. They were led into the Tour by two South Americans, Egan Bernal and Richard Carapaz.
Then came failure at the Tour followed by unexpected success at the Giro d’Italia with Tao Geoghegan Hart, a Londoner.
“An international team with a British heart” is how Dave Brailsford describes the squad’s latest iteration, though the British accent seems even more pronounced in 2021 than 2020 with the arrival of Adam Yates, and the long-awaited unveiling of a 21-year-old, Tom Pidcock, who seems to have been around forever.
Even the publicity pictures announcing Pidcock’s first day as an Ineos Grenadier on 1 March, at the conclusion to the cyclo-cross season, appeared loaded with meaning. With his confident gaze, little black earring and a medallion tossed over the collar of his team jersey, Pidcock looked like a cross between Pete Doherty and Robbie Williams.
It might seem silly to dwell on the significance of publicity shots, though not, perhaps, in this case. They were the pictures chosen by the team, after all. And Pidcock’s exuded attitude. They conveyed a swagger and an individuality that might have been at odds with the ‘old’ Team Sky.
What this says about the ‘new’ Ineos remains to be seen, but whatever happens, you imagine Pidcock – whose skills range from mountain biking and cyclo-cross to cobbles, stage races and mountains – at the centre of it.
AN EXOTIC SPORT
But before gazing into the future, it’s worth scrolling back and debunking a few myths, including the one about the sport barely existing in the British popular imagination prior to 2008 – not least because it ignores a hugely significant event in 2007, when London hosted a spectacular grand départ of the Tour de France.
As the crowds in London and Kent suggested, there was an appetite for this. And the huge surge in popularity that came after the following year’s Olympics does not seem indicative of a phenomenon that came from nowhere. It suggests instead a latent interest that was just waiting to be realised, like a tap waiting to be turned on.
It had been in evidence before, admittedly on a more modest scale, when Simpson was winning major races in the 1960s, Millar was winning grand tour mountain stages in the 1980s, and Boardman was taking his time trialling talent to the continental stage in the 1990s.
Cycling had a following and a healthy club and racing scene, but its form in Britain was always different and unique. Like a twin separated from their sibling at birth, it developed in a different environment and therefore in a different way. It followed an alternative path, maybe only partly explained by the channel that separates Britain from mainland Europe.
It’s difficult at this point to avoid the B-word: Brexit. If Britain was never quite fully part of Europe, it might help explain why British cyclists always felt that their
sport in its purest form – as represented by the Tour de France, with most of the other European road races some version of it – was exotic and ‘foreign’. There was a cultural gap between the sport in Britain and Europe that could be hard to bridge. Like the languages of the places where the races were held, cycling was difficult to understand and hard to penetrate. Perverse as it may seem, this went a long way to explaining its appeal to those of us who went to considerable lengths to follow it.
The effort could prove rewarding, but it was an effort. There was no Eurosport, no internet, and only the odd mention in the ‘sport in brief’ column in the newspapers. But so much for fans; for ambitious riders it was harder.
Disregarding the politics of Brexit, in practical terms young bike riders today will be given a taste of what Paul Sherwen, Graham Jones, Robert Millar and Sean Yates had to go through to live and race in continental Europe in the 1970s and 80s, before the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht formalised people’s rights to live and work throughout Europe, and before the Eurotunnel and cheap air travel also made it easier.
One such rider is Joe Laverick, who rode for Ag2r’s U23 team in 2020 and for 2021 signed for Axel Merckx’s Hagens Berman Axeon. Laverick intended to move to what has become the international capital city for professional cyclists: Girona in Spain.
This proved far from straightforward. As an EU citizen, he could have moved, lived and worked anywhere in the EU. From 1 January 2021 he couldn’t: a fact that only really sunk in in mid-December 2020, when the Brexit deal’s terms became clear. He could still live in Spain with a residency permit, but although he could complete the first part of the process in the UK, he had to do the second part in Spain.
In summary, and with covid-19 travel restrictions, Laverick couldn’t travel to Spain without his residency papers. But he couldn’t get his residency papers without travelling to Spain. He eventually got there by taking the Eurostar to Brussels then flying to Spain, but it was a nervous undertaking, with Laverick convinced at every stage – leaving London, arriving in Brussels, leaving Brussels, arriving in Spain – that he was about to confront an insurmountable hurdle. Laverick was relatively fortunate; he had a contract with a team and could make a reasonable argument that he needed to be in Spain to do his job. For other riders, amateurs but also on some continental teams, it could prove more difficult. It seems almost certain that fewer riders will be able to take the great gamble of going to Europe to try and turn pro. This comes at a time when, perhaps mainly thanks to the explosion in popularity of the sport over the past decade and a bit, there are more British pros spread among more WorldTour teams than at any point in the past.
In 2010, when Sky launched, there were eight British riders in the 27-man squad (in 2021 there are also eight at Team Ineos), but in establishing that first roster they had arguably signed every British rider capable of riding at that level, except Cavendish, who joined two years later.
These days, as well as the eight British riders at Ineos, there are another 17 riding at the highest level – 25 in total. More significantly, 13 of the 19 WorldTour teams have British riders in their roster. The hurdles imposed by Brexit could see a decline over the next five, 10 years.
Or perhaps not, since teams are now actively seeking British talent in a way that they certainly weren’t five, 10 years ago. And as Laverick points out, there are more Australians and Americans riding for European teams than in the past, despite the hurdles that stand in their way.
THE FOURTH GRAND TOUR
To try and get a sense of the current state of the sport in Britain I spoke to Mick Bennett, the director of the Tour of Britain. Bennett is also a former rider, a medallist in the team pursuit at the 1972 and 1976 Olympic Games, so he is well placed to cast an eye over the way the sport in Britain has changed over five decades.
The Tour of Britain is the country’s flagship event: a barometer, perhaps, for the sport’s health. And in the status and the fate of the race is perhaps the real story of cycling in Britain.
Last year it was a casualty of covid-19, like many races. But it is interesting to consider the events that did go ahead, and why. In Belgium, for example, the classics re-scheduled for October, when the country was suffering the start of a second wave of coronavirus cases, did go ahead. Once the dates were set they never seemed in real doubt.
They were held behind closed doors – a public advertising campaign encouraged people to stay at home – but it was clear that there was serious political capital invested in making sure the races went ahead. It was important – it mattered to Belgium – that the Tour of Flanders, in particular, happened.
“We always had one or two riders who could perform internationally, but never so many at one time, and Bradley, Mark, Geraint - they gave the people local heroes. Bradley is a big part of where we are today” – Mick Bennett, Tour of Britain race director
Similarly in France with the Tour, an event that is clearly more than a bike race, with enormous national and cultural significance. And in Italy, with the Giro d’Italia, and Spain, with the Vuelta a España, there was a sense – previously underappreciated – of a political dimension to these races. Far more than just sporting events, they were national institutions and showcases and expressions of defiance and pride. As in Flanders, it seemed to matter that they went ahead.
I asked Bennett if he looked enviously at these races, wishing there was the same political capital invested in the Tour of Britain. “I don’t think you can compare,” he said. “If you start to think like that you lose sight of the purpose of the race, which is about promoting health and wellbeing and taking the event to the public.
“We couldn’t run the Tour of Britain or the Women’s Tour without the public and the schools there. That’s where we’re different to the Tour of Flanders. So we don’t compare, because we realise how important it is to have a live audience – and I don’t mean one that’s socially distanced.
“If we ran the race without an audience, to me, it wouldn’t be worth doing,” he added. “It’s the crowds that make the Tour of Britain and Women’s Tour the events they are.”
Bennett is proud of the Tour of Britain, re-established in 2004, and the Women’s Tour, which was first run in 2014 and sets a high bar for other women’s races. The men’s tour is the latest incarnation of the national tour, following the original Tour of Britain (1945-57) and Milk Race (19581993), and the Kellogg’s Tour (1987-94) and PruTour (1998-99). It came along just as there were signs that something might be stirring in British cycling.
For one thing, and even before the emergence of Wiggins and Cavendish, the crowds were more than respectable. And they increased every year. In 2012, the high water mark of British success when Wiggins and Cavendish both rode the Tour of Britain, the audience didn’t just materialise from nowhere – Bennett’s race had been helping to grow it, and if anything it has carried on growing since then.
“We proudly call it the fourth grand tour,” Bennett said. “I know other people, and other countries, will probably think, well, it doesn’t come near. But to us it’s the fourth grand tour.”
The Tour of Britain is eight days long, much shorter than the 20-plus days of the three grand tours. But what Bennett means, and how he makes the case, is that the crowds at the roadside compare easily with those in Italy, Spain and France. Watch footage of the race – not just when it is in towns and cities, but also on remote climbs – and it is hard to disagree.
It is impossible to measure the impact of events in developing a culture around a sport. But as well as the Tour of Britain, the Tour’s grand départs in London in 2007 and Yorkshire in 2014, and to a lesser extent the Tour de Yorkshire and 2019 Worlds in the same county, must have helped cycling establish a stronger foothold. Bennett is broadly in agreement with that assessment, as you might expect, though he concedes that people have been perhaps more significant than events. Specifically Wiggins, Cavendish, Thomas and Froome – but especially Wiggins.
“We always had one or two riders who could perform internationally, but never so many at one time and Bradley, Mark, Geraint – they gave the people who came out to support our race local heroes. I think Bradley is a big part of where we are today.”
THE NEXT GENERATION
In mid-February it was announced that for the second year in a row, and again because of the ongoing pandemic, the Women’s Tour would not be held in its usual June slot. Bennett and his team are trying to secure a date in October instead.
He remains hopeful for the Tour of Britain. But unlike some of the major races in Europe, he refuses to consider an event that’s closed to the public, mainly because it wouldn’t satisfy funding partners who are dominated by local authorities.
“We’ve managed to keep our slot in September [5-13] for the Tour of Britain,” said Bennett. “But a lot might depend on the vaccination programme and the covid precautions that are in place at that time. We’re looking at about £250,000 to implement all the covid precautions for the men’s and women’s tours. It’s difficult to get your head around that.”
To redeploy the tree metaphor to illustrate the difference that remains between the sport in Britain and Europe: if covid-19 is a storm raging through a forest, with only the biggest, sturdiest and oldest trees left standing, then the younger saplings are extremely vulnerable. This applies to lots of smaller races in Europe, too, but not to events of national significance in countries where cycling is considered important.
“I think we’re in a better place than we’ve ever been,” Bennett said. “Covid is a big challenge to everyone, but I think when we get back to normal the sport will be in a better place and the public will be hungry for the Tour of Britain and the Women’s Tour.
“When we started the Women’s Tour seven years ago, we wanted to be the best women’s stage race in the world. And we achieved that. We didn’t do anything different to the men’s tour: we just provide the same facilities, the same prize money and the same logistics.”
The Women’s Tour, which had no problem attracting large crowds from day one, tells us a lot about the culture of cycling in Britain. In mainland Europe, women’s events tend to be newer and held in the shadow of the men’s events, and they can struggle to create the same buzz: as though they are competing against history. Consider the differences between the Women’s Tour and men’s Tour of Britain: one is recognised as the best in the world in terms of organisation, crowd support and prestige; the other is among the best in the world in terms of organisation and crowd support, but not prestige What do the coming years hold? It almost certainly comes back again to individuals. Could Geoghegan Hart, Ethan Hayter and Pidcock – or Fred Wright, James Knox, Mark Donovan or Jake Stewart – be the new Wiggins, Thomas and Cavendish? Pidcock, since he won junior world titles in cyclo-cross and time trialling in 2017, has been marked out as the next big star. It’s his versatility that impresses; he’s as adept in the mud of a cyclo-cross race as on a mountain pass – in 2019 he won at La Planche des Belles Filles in the Tour Alsace, then in 2020 won three stages and the general classification at the Baby Giro. Think Mathieu van der Poel crossed with Remco Evenepoel.
“I remember when Pidcock rode the Tour of Britain,” said Bennett. It was 2018, Pidcock was 19, a first year senior, and the moment that sticks in Bennett’s mind is stage 6, to Whinlatter Pass. It was a brutal stage of crosswinds and climbs ripped apart by Quick-Step Floors for Julian Alaphilippe as he tried to take the leader’s jersey from Primož Roglic.
Pidcock shone, finishing sixth on the stage, 0:21 behind a group containing the winner Wout Poels, Alaphilippe and Carthy, and ahead of many big names. “He didn’t quite make it into that elite group at the end,” recalled Bennett. “But he almost did. At 19, it was pretty astonishing.”
Though Bennett doesn’t say it explicitly, history would suggest that Pidcock, or one of the other very promising young riders coming through, could hold the keys to the future popularity of cycling in Britain.
As Bennett does say, the biggest lesson is to not compare. Cycling in Britain is, always has been and perhaps always will be different. It can be a weakness – the Tour of Britain will never be the Tour de France – but also a strength, best embodied by the Women’s Tour.