Hour record regret?

Dowsett held the Hour record for 35 days in 2015, and tried to reclaim it in November 2021, but fell 534 metres short of Victor Campenaerts’s 2019 record of 55.089km. Attempting the Hour at altitude in Aguascalientes, Mexico, Dowsett and his small team of three had to do all the logistics. “The stress of organising the second Hour became a significant loss – instead of looking for marginal gains I was stressing myself towards maximal loss,” he says. “There was always other stuff to do and training became an afterthought. I do wonder if attempting it at altitude was a mistake, but I lived at the same height as Aguascalientes at home in Soldeu, Andorra, and it made sense.” Dowsett claimed the Hour in 2015, his first attempt, riding 52.937km at Manchester. Comparing the two attempts, he says: “For the first Hour, I felt I did too much track work which compromised the rest of my training. An 8am track session meant I had to get up at 5.30am, and when you have the track booked for an hour you only really do 40 minutes of riding. I was wrecked for the rest of the day. I was keen not to do that again the second time, but in hindsight perhaps a compromise between each would have been better. “I thought I’d be OK, as every time I’d been on a track, I’d been on the money straight away, but it’s true that cost was a factor; Chanel [Dowsett’s fiancée] and I paid for the shortfall of what we didn’t have in sponsorship – and track time isn’t cheap.” The record is now 56.792km, set by Filippo Ganna last year.