Life on the open road is something many people desire, and it ’s perfectly achievable if you ’re a British bike racer, says the Doc
Ienjoyed the Jaén Paraíso Interior race the other weekend . Partly it was good to see that nice Tadej Pogačar easing into his season with a nice relaxing 40km solo break, and partly because like nearly all earlyseason events it was a bit rough around the edges.
There were a few parked cars in the run-in that the lead-outs were swer ving around. The crowds were thin, and interspersed with many people who obviously had no interest in bike races and just wanted to k now why someone was stopping them crossing the road.
There’s a continuum, from the Olympics where a security operation isolates the course for hours in advance and guards the whole thing from anyone who wants to put so much as a foot on it, to the only slightly more relaxed Tou r de France, to smaller races where there’s lots of ever yday life going on around them.
You can fol low this trajector y to races that happen on roads still open to other traffic, with safet y delegated to a few signs zip-tied to lamp posts. In the UK even quite big races have happened this way. I remember an edition of the now-def unct A rcher Grand Prix where the bunch thundered round a corner on a singletrack road at 60kph and met a Land Rover coming the other way.
The race swer ved onto the verges, round the car, and back to the road without casualties, while the Land Rover driver simply saw a cloud of bright colours swirling before his eyes (it was the mid-2000s – kit was a lot less ‘Ineos’ in design).
This was normal. The only people bothered by it were (perhaps) the driver and (certainly) half-a-dozen ashenfaced Belgians, whose experience of extreme Belgian traffic-calming was no preparation for a feral race across the Home Counties.
UK races are normally open-road affairs. The reason is historical. Racing used to be illegal and was carried out in secret, and nothing blows your cover like trotting into the local police station and applying for a road closure order. In the early 1900s there wasn’t much other traffic any way, so it didn’t much mat ter.
How to... break a record
Breaking a record can be one of the great achievements in cycling and a way to put your name permanently in the history of the sport. It ’s also easy to do. All you need to do is pick your record with some care. Look at it this way. The World Hour record is difficult to break, even if you’re blessed with outstanding genetics, cutting edge technology and a huge training history – just ask Filippo Ganna or Ellen van Dijk.
On the other hand, the record for freewheeling down our local hill would be pretty straightforward to bag, especially if you’re quite heavy, and doubly so if your first move is to disregard everyone on Strava as a cheat.
If you don’t fancy go
