Penny for your thoughts

I’d waited a long time for this. Not just the extra year’s delay, enforced by the pandemic, but many years before that too. As you might imagine, penny-farthing racing, let alone this, a three-day penny-farthing stage race, is hard to come by, so it was to my great delight the event I’d trained hard for and looked to for so long was finally going ahead.

The first-ever Sweden 3 Days would, however, go ahead in a somewhat altered format. Rules and red tape brought about by the pandemic meant the authorities would not allow a couple of stages in town centres to go ahead, as they wouldn’t close the roads, which meant the race – now officially unofficial as deemed by the licensing authorities – would go ahead with the remaining two stages (each containing two races). One of the races was moved away from the town centre to Sturup Raceway near Malmo airport in the southern tip of Sweden. Livestreaming of the event was cancelled, some of the international competitors weren’t able to make it because of the problems of travel and we’d have fewer spectators than planned, due to