This Island Race

Les Woodland. Mousehole Press 2005. 205 pages paperback, £10.05. ISBN 1-874739-36-6

Once upon a time a young Englishman living in Paris won the first bicycle race in the world, over half a mile in the Parc-de-St-Cloud. The bike's in the city museum at Ely. Then he won the first road race, Paris to Rouen, taking ten and a half hours for the 134 km, without tyres, on unsurfaced tracks. Endurance was the name of the game, and the first ‘track' races in Smithfield Agricultural Hall were the same – 1000 kilometres.

The Bicycle Union, later re-named the NCU, founded in 1877, held their 25-mile championship the following year. About the same time, for no known reason (envy?), cyclists became the most hated people in Britain and fair game for everyone – horse police threw sticks into their wheels, and an attempt was made in 1878 to make cycling actually illegal. There's no doubt that the present-day irrational persecution of cyclists started here. In 1888 the NCU set its face against racing on the road; but ‘you can't forbid things without people taking exception – a lesson the NCU never learned'. In 1894 a trivial incident (in which the cyclists were the victims !) led to more police threats and the RRA's voluntary ban on road racing which lasted until 1942 and Percy Stallard. Instead, the eccentric and autocratic Freddie Bidlake stuck Britain with secret early-morning time-trials, at once the strength and weakness of British cycling. Think of all the pleasure and health benefits for hundreds of thousands of club riders. Think of all those great riders lost to international cycle sport. Imagine where football might be if it had faced the same obstacles.

In this elegy for British racing, his best book to date, Les Woodland traces the history of British cycling and cyclists (it's subtitled ‘Inside 135 years of British bike racing') from James Moore in 1868 to the present day: time-trialling, Reg Harris, the London six-days, Ray Booty, the Tour de France, the Milk Race, the British pro scene from the 1960s until its demise when ANC went belly-up. Graham Webb tells his own story of the last British men's world road title in 1967. Women cyclists – Sheridan, Burton, Jones, Cooke – get a chapter and there's another for the Millars and Boardman.

The skilled fluency of the writing conceals the work which has gone into making it so readable. Woodland has something to say, a point of view, and the history is accurate and scholarly. I haven't previously come across an assembly of all this material in a single book, and it should form part of any library of cycling history.

There are a few infelicities: Hughie Porter won the World Pursuit title four times, not three; Bob Maitland actually beat Ken Joy in the 1953 Nations, but isn't mentioned; Tom Feargrove should be Feargrieve.

Incidentally, that £800 that Tom Simpson told Colin Lewis he paid for his year's amphetamines in 1967 (Lewis was getting £4 a week) strikes everyone I know as a grossly exaggerated figure. Why so much? Should it have been francs? Did he exaggerate for effect? We're unlikely ever to know.

For Great Britain the golden age of competitive cycling was the 1950s – just look at the photos of road race finishes, the packed stands at track meetings – the sort of crowds you still see at European classics. Yet the fundamental preference of the English for games of skill, with lots of standing about (as in football and cricket), a horror of strenuous exercise, was always there: ‘Riding a bike's too much like hard work'. Everyone in those crowds was a cyclist – millions cycled to and from work every day – but they were just waiting for the people's car, and in 1959 the Mini came along. Since then utility cycling has virtually disappeared and all branches of British cycle sport have been in a slow decline.

Even in the days of Bidlake, Woodland concludes, ‘cycling was shown up as a sport that Britain didn't want. It didn't have the courage back then, for reasons we find hard to understand now, to stand up and say: “Here we are and here we stay”. It has conducted itself ever since in fear and paranoia, like a dog permanently expecting a fatal kick.' Road racing was banned before it got established, and we never had the big professional national Tour that could have been the foundation stone.

Ramin Minovi