The Call of the Road: The History of Cycle Road Racing. Chris Sidwells

      THE CALL OF THE ROAD

      THE HISTORY OF CYCLE ROAD RACING

      Chris Sidwells

       Copyright

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      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.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 978-0-00-822077-8

      eBook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 978-0-00-822078-5

      Version: 2018-06-18

      Table of Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Chapter 1: Call of the Road

       Chapter 2: The First Road Races

       Chapter 3: The Tour Is Born

       Chapter 4: Racing Into the Sky

       Chapter 5: Growing the Roots of Tradition

      

       Chapter 6: The Freelancers

      

       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 14: E Is for Echelon

      

       Chapter 15: Round the Houses

      

       Chapter 16: Aussie Roules

      

       Chapter 17: American Flyers

      

       Chapter 18: The Greatest

      

       Chapter 19: Dark Side of the Road

      

       Index

      

       Acknowledgements

      

       About the Publisher

       1

       Call 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