THE CALL OF THE ROAD
THE HISTORY OF CYCLE ROAD RACING
Chris Sidwells
William Collins
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London SE1 9GF
This eBook first published in the United Kingdom by William Collins in 2018
Text © Chris Sidwells, 2018
Photographs © individual copyright holders
Cover image © Roger Viollet/Getty Images
The author asserts the moral right to be
identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 978-0-00-822077-8
eBook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 978-0-00-822078-5
Version: 2018-06-18
Table of Contents
Chapter 2: The First Road Races
Chapter 4: Racing Into the Sky
Chapter 5: Growing the Roots of Tradition
Chapter 7: Rainbow, Yellow, Pink and Polka-Dot
Chapter 8: Women’s Road Racing
Chapter 9: Behind the Iron Curtain
Chapter 10: The Great British Anomaly
Chapter 11: Brentry, Britain Joins Cycling’s EU
Chapter 12: Time Lords and Ladies
Chapter 13: D Is for Domestique
Chapter 19: Dark Side of the Road
A road race is many things. It includes many aspects of life, but magnified; a maelstrom of ambitions, plans, desire, cooperation and treachery. A road race ebbs and flows through the countryside like a living thing, a kaleidoscope of colour, a visceral mass of muscle and machine, a chess game played on wheels. And it doesn’t matter what level: whether it’s the Tour de France or evening league, road races share the same basic qualities. Only speed, distance, stakes and the sophistication of the game are different.
Road races are battles, pure battles where social norms are replaced by personal or cohort needs. Basic needs like food and drink to re-fuel and shelter to save energy, and higher needs like peer approval, money, victory and admiration. It’s rare to experience physical battles in everyday life, and on that level the fight to succeed brings out something primitive, making road racing wonderful to experience and wonderful to watch.
But the best professionals raise road racing to an art; the art of warfare maybe, the art of a hunter perhaps, but still art and glorious