A legend of the track and road alike, Tony Doyle’s life was cut short by cancer earlier this year – but as you’ll read, it was a life led very much in the fast lane
In the finale of one 1986 Nissan Classic stage, the Irish crosswinds were howling and the race was on. Sean Kelly and the rest of the bunch were in the gutter, finding shelter. Except for one man for all seasons, competing with an eye on the forthcoming winter track season. He moved a metre out of the paceline and stayed there. His peers moved behind to get some cover. After finishing in Limerick, former world champion Hennie Kuiper shook his head in disbelief and said admiringly: “Ohhh, Tony Doyle.” It was a fitting image for an outlier who didn’t follow the crowd. Two-time individual pursuit world champion Doyle, who passed away at the age of 64 in April 2023 with pancreatic cancer, was sufficiently tough, strong and stubborn to do things differently.
Frame of mind
Growing up in the Surrey town of Ashford, Doyle showed an early entrepreneurial streak, taking frames from the local dump and selling bottom brackets for a fiver. There was no history of cycling in the family and he was a promising young goalkeeper. He started riding with the Clarence Wheelers at the age of 14 after bumping into a club rider and was taken under the wing of Alf Whiteway.
Whiteway’s dogma was training and racing on low fixed gears, teaching how to ride at incredibly high revolutions. Doyle’s later 56-minute 25 at Crabwood CC on a 72-inch medium gear became the stuff of local legend. “When Alf, and his idea of how things should be, met Tony, it was this perfect synthesis,” Doyle’s friend and clubmate Ben Friend says. “I think Tony’s success is in no small part due to that.”
After attracting leading pro teams with his successful amateur year in France, the 1980 Olympic Games lit a fire under Doyle. The sole spot for the individual pursuit (held over 5,000 metres then) went to Sean Yates – despite Doyle leading by half a second in their ride-off, which his rival ended early. Yates didn’t win a medal and the team pursuit quartet, including the pair, bowed out early too.
Doyle used this “kick in the teeth” as motivation. He turned professional, put in 600 miles a week of training and won the World Championship pursuit, spinning 53x16. It began years of regular contention, never finishing out of the top four between 1980 and 1988.
Back then, British world champions were few and far between – and they rode among us. Friend remembers Doyle coming to a club night at Shepperton scout hut to show his rainbow jersey, which was like a treasure from another universe.
Doyle would do club runs and help out at time trials, later becoming honorary lifetime president of the Clarence Wheelers. “He had this incredible
