Up the junction

It’s the quandary at the heart of road racing: roads weren’t made for racing

Before car ownership became the God-given right it is today, roads were regarded as exotic. People from nearby villages turned up with deckchairs and picnics to watch the first section of the M1 being built in 1959, and postcards regularly featured scenes of car parks, service stations and one-way systems with captions such as ‘High Street, Frimley’ or ‘Traffic Interchange, Town Centre Redditch’.

Part of the attractiveness of these scenes can be attributed to the Roads Beautifying Association, founded in 1928 to deal with the kind of roadside clutter that prompted angry letters to newspapers, including one from the Archbishop of Canterbury, who ‘found it impossible to find a suitable adjective’ for the scenes he had witnessed.

Although the ‘petrol pumps, tea kiosks and bungalows’ that horrified His Grace would be considered picturesque today, roads used to be more than mere functional arteries for transporting people and goods from A to B, according to Joe Moran in his dissection of Britain’s highway culture, On Roads: A Hidden History. But enjoyable though it is, Moran is missing one detail – how the history of roads is inextricably linked with bicycle racing.

Those everyday strips of concrete and tarmac, with their precision-engineered curves, scientifically calibrated gradients and strategically positioned bollards, are regularly used as sporting arenas. Few, if any, other sports in the world take place at the mercy of such an assortment of wildly incongruous infrastructure.

It is a conundrum of our sport: how to safely put 200 elite athletes in an arena more commonly used by buses, trucks, delivery vans and parents on the school run, and ask them to cope with potholes, speed bumps, roundabouts and other street furniture while trying to outmanoeuvre their rivals.

‘Road cycling is unique, from amateur to elite level,’ says Andy Hawes, route director for the Tour of Britain and Women’s Tour. ‘It’s held on public roads that are in use right up until just before the race passes through.

‘Our Route Risk Assessment can be up to 60 pages long for a 180km stage. Absolutely every bollard, lane splitter, speed limit, speed hump, level crossing and cattle grid is in there.’

The big plus of holding races on public roads is that fans can watch them for free. We also get some stunning landscapes on TV, whether it’s the D974 winding its way towards the summit of Ventoux or the SS242 crossing the Dolomites. But the hazards for the riders can be graphically illustrated. Simon Carr’s spectacular collision with a signpost at this year’s Tirreno-adriatico was an echo of Johan Vansummeren’s ugly crash into a lane splitter during the 2014 Tour of Flanders, which left a female fan paralysed.

Yes, fans are at risk too. While you may think a mankini-clad Borat impersonator getting in the way of riders on a Grand Tour stage deserves to be taken out by a flying Guardia Civil, spare a thought for spectators enjoying a spring Classic only to have to flee for their lives as a rouleur in full flow hops onto the pavement to avoid a section of cobblestones or cut a corner. It’s the equivalent of seeing Welsh rugby captain Alun Wyn Jones – all 122 kilos and 6ft 6in of him – storming towards you as you enjoy your pie and pint in the stands.

However, it would be a shame to confine racing to outdoor tracks – as it was in the UK for more than half a century after mass-start road racing was banned – or reduced to time-trials up and down town centre bypasses.

‘I don’t want to see racing banned from the public highway,’ says Hawes. ‘But rider safety is paramount. We do all in our power to make them safe. One of their bugbears is that motos pass through the peloton all the time. But they have to – we have 16 bikes that leapfrog the riders to flag up hazards. And we say to the riders, “You have to take some responsibility too. You drive cars and train on these roads, you’ve seen the hazards. Just because we’ve closed it and you’re racing, it doesn’t mean those obstacles suddenly aren’t there.”’

The Archbishop of Canterbury, meanwhile, was unavailable for comment.

Few, if any, other sports in the world take place at the mercy of such an assortment of wildly incongruous infrastructure