One hedge fund worker has his own coach and spent £20,000 on a bike

Richard Branson, are both keen cyclists, the latter taking part in a 109km Cape Argus cycle tour in South Africa a couple of years ago. And my colleagues on the Standard City desk inform me that corporate bosses Mark Wilson, of Aviva, and Legal &General’s Nigel Wilson are known to put competitive shifts in, too. Gavin Darby of Premier Foods, who has run several marathons around the world, recently told the Standard he chooses his hotels on foreign trips on the quality of the gym rather than the bar.

It used to be a game among junior office workers to try to persuade one of their unfit bosses to join a game of squash or play in the summer cricket match — now the seniors are organising gruelling cycling tours in the Alps.

Ex-Sainsbury’s boss Justin King used to ride around London on a Boris Bike when he was running the supermarket and has seen plenty of his friends in the business stratosphere develop a taste for more competitive cycling.

“I know lots of people who really take it very seriously,” he told the Standard. “I do maybe three sprint triathlons a year, and I kind of use the focus of having entered those as my motivation for staying fit.

“A chunk of people who are competitive enough to be successful in business also play competitive sport, but at a certain age we have to give up football, which I did, or rugby, because of the impact, so cycling is good for that.”

When Sainsbury’s sponsored Sport Relief, King was invited to join a kind of reverse triathlon event at the Olympic

‘They like camaraderie they like networking, and they like to be competitive

ark, featuring a lot of CEOs and boardvel City executives. “At the end we did couple of laps of the velodrome,” he ays, “and it showed that, compared to ome of the others, my leisure cycling n’t quite up to scratch!” Last year, entrepreneur John Readman, 8, started a company to cater to the new emand for competitive cycling among ondon’s bosses. He had been organisg international cycling trips to raise oney for charity for a while, and when e realised how great the demand was ecoming, he started Ride25, which lays n expensive c ycling challenges for ntrepreneur groups in nice environents such as the Alps and Italy. “There seems to be a very big appetite om these kind of people for challenging hemselves over three or four days,” he ays. “They like camaraderie, they like the networking, and they like the competitiveness. Get a load of entrepreneurs on a bike and they will want to race up the hill.”

Paul Lindley, CEO of Ella’s Kitchen, and Duncan Cheatle, founder of The Supper Club, have joined Readman on his trips. Other members of the club to get on the bike include Martin Spiller, a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist, and Lara Morgan, who founded Pacific Direct. Readman describes the rest of his riders as “high net-worth individuals, lawyers, bankers and entrepreneurs”.

The events aren’t timed but riders use an app so that if they want to look at a league table, they can. Cycling trips are traditionally done on a budget, so Readman is trying to recreate the skiing trip but on the road, charging his customers £1,200 to £1,500 for four days.

“People in business these days want to tell people, ‘I’m training for this’. It’s not ‘I got hammered last night’ now, it’s ‘I’m training for the Milan to Rome ride’.

“We’re doing that ride in June, that’s 4 5 0 mi le s in fo u r - a n d - a - h a l f d ay s with 100 riders, and we’ve already sold out.”

Th e Ci t y ’s ne w love affair with competitive cycling has been good news for some of the capital’s high-end cycling shops.

Ian Whittingham, managing director of Sigma Sport, sells bikes to bankers in Kingston-upon-Thames, and sales are rising.

“I would say noticeably in the past three or four years that it has really exploded,” says Whittingham.

“The kind of bikes these guys like to buy are custom-built bikes — you build a bike from the ground up, which is how the professionals do it.

“They look at what other people have got and say, ‘What’s the next one up in the range?’ We are regularly seeing people spend in excess of £8,000 for a bike.”

Recently the shop’s record was broken by a fortysomething hedge fund worker who took up cycling two years ago and is so into it he has his own coach.

“He bought himself a time-trial bike for just over £20,000,” says Whittingham. “It is absolute cutting-edge technology — hydraulic brakes, electronic gear shifting, a power meter and state-of-the-art carbon-fibre wheels.”

In comparison, Carney and his band of highly paid marathon pals are getting their competitive fix on the cheap.