Cometh the hour record, cometh the Bradley Wiggins history-makers

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2015/jan/23/hour-record-bradley-wiggins-alex-dowsett-cycling

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It wasn’t quite the hour Alex Dowsett had in mind when he planned his 2015 racing schedule. After breaking his collarbone last week in an accident which forced him to postpone his attempt on cycling’s hour record, he was told by surgeons that the operation to repair the fracture would take 60 minutes. In that time he could have been circling the track at London’s Olympic velodrome 200-odd times, on his way to glory.

The 26-year-old Essex rider will not be making his record attempt on 27 February, as he had planned. Instead he will be forced to put the last six months of training on temporary hold, waiting for his bones to mend and watching others have their turn in a sudden rush to take on one of the sport’s most hallowed challenges. His chance will come but perhaps not until after Sir Bradley Wiggins has made his long-awaited attempt.

During cycling’s decade-long surge in popularity, the hour record missed out. To a new generation of fans, the sport was all about the yellow jersey and the multicoloured peloton, the 21 hairpins of the Alpe d’Huez and the Mont Ventoux moonscape, the cobbles of Paris-Roubaix and the mud of Flanders, and Britain’s stars of the track acclaimed by flag-waving crowds. The idea of one rider, alone in a velodrome, putting as many kilometres as possible into 60 minutes took a while to make it on to the radar.

The upshift in interest has arrived thanks to the UCI, the sport’s governing body, finally making up its mind on the rules governing the kind of bike that can be employed, thereby terminating the decades-long attempt to hold technological progress at bay by insisting on the use of equipment similar to that used in the 1970s. Eventually common sense prevailed and since last spring would-be record breakers have been allowed to ride the sort of machinery seen in modern track endurance events.

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The logical extension of the UCI’s old attitude would have been to insist on everyone attempting the record on a machine with a front wheel three times the diameter of the back one. That’s what James Moore, the son of a Suffolk blacksmith, rode in 1873 when he established the first official world hour record by covering 23.33km on the cycling track at Wolverhampton’s Molineux Grounds.

Thanks to a sudden burst of enlightenment from a new regime at the UCI, such as Wiggins and Dowsett are free to employ the aerodynamically profiled bike frames, triathlon-style handlebars and disc wheels they use in regular competition. Some of their predecessors, including Chris Boardman and Graeme Obree, have had their records restored. As a result of this gesture, top riders are showing an interest and the spotlight is back on an event with a history featuring some of the sport’s great names.

Moore’s record lasted three years until it was beaten by another Englishman, Frank Dodds, at the Cambridge university track. The first record set outside England, and the first to be ratified by the new governing body, stood to the credit of Henri Desgrange, who covered 35.3km – more than 100 laps of the concrete bowl of Paris’s Vélodrome Buffalo, so called because it had first staged “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s circus – in 1893, 10 years before Desgrange became the first organiser of the Tour de France.

Gradually the record grew in significance. In 1905 it was captured by Lucien Petit-Breton, another French rider, who would become the first man to win Desgrange’s Tour twice, in 1907 and 1908. As the competition heated up the record was swapped back and forth by Oscar Egg of Switzerland, a stage winner in early editions of both the Tour and the Giro d’Italia, and the French rider Marcel Berthet, each taking it on three occasions on the Buffalo track between 1907 and 1914.

Egg’s final pre-first world war mark would stand until the 1930s, the decade in which the scene switched to the Velodromo Vigorelli in Milan, where Giuseppe Olmo became the first Italian to hold the record and the first man to surpass 45km. In 1942 the 23-year-old Fausto Coppi added the record to his achievements, again on the Vigorelli’s boards, a few months before being posted to North Africa with an infantry regiment.

The Milan track – whose reprieve from possible demolition was confirmed this week by the city’s authorities – hosted successful attempts by Jacques Anquetil, Ercole Baldini and Roger Rivière between 1956 and 1959, further raising the record’s profile. In 1972, taking advantage of the thin air at an altitude of 2,250m in Mexico City, Eddy Merckx took the record to 49.431km, where it officially stayed through the era in which Boardman, Obree, Francesco Moser, Miguel Indurain and Tony Rominger were among those who beat it on machinery subsequently deemed illegal.

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Last September the 43-year-old German rider Jens Voigt, approaching retirement from a long career, was the first to exploit the new rules. His reward, at a Swiss velodrome, was to break the 50km barrier. Within six weeks his feat was surpassed by Matthias Brändle, the 24-year‑old Austrian time-trial champion and winner of two stages in last year’s Tour of Britain, who covered 51.852km on another Swiss track.

The gifted Australian rider Jack Bobridge will be attacking Brändle’s record in Melbourne a week on Saturday, followed eight days later by his compatriot Rohan Dennis. In London on 28 February the Paralympic champion Sarah Storey will attempt to break Leontien van Moorsel’s women’s record of 46.065km, set almost 12 years ago. In the coming months they are likely to be followed by the former world time-trial champions Fabian Cancellara and Tony Martin. For a sport that lacks a meaningful season-long series, this promises to provide a compelling extended narrative.

Those who imagine that riding a bike around an empty track for 60 minutes might not be too difficult should read Michael Hutchinson’s The Hour, a gripping and vastly entertaining account of the former British time-trial champion’s two attempts on the record a dozen years ago. The story lacks what Hutchinson calls the Hollywood ending – in other words, he fails – but it leaves the reader in no doubt of what it takes even to give the thing a go.

And if there’s one event this summer likely to recreate the heady atmosphere of the 2012 Olympics, it will be Wiggins’s trip to the Lea Valley in June or July, where every seat will be taken as he tries to become the first man to crack 55km. On the track where Britain’s riders triumphed three summers ago, there will be another assault on history.