A VERY BRITISH BIKE RACE
The Tour of Britain is to the Tour de France in the same way that there is no adequate translation into French for ‘sausage roll’.
That was the conclusion I reached a decade ago when I wrote a book about the very particular cycling culture which has grown up on these shores. The history of British road racing is so peculiar, so arcane, so wilfully different that it’s tempting to say the sport had Brexited itself about a hundred years before Brexit was even a word. A governing body that effectively banned mass road racing, subjugating the development of the sport in Britain to clandestine time trialling and giving birth to a spirit of difference which has seeded itself in the nation’s flagship stage race. The Tour of Britain, in all its various guises, is a race apart.
Unlike almost every codified sport – rugby, cricket, tennis, golf – in which Britain played a leading role in establishing the rules and governing bodies, this nation can lay no claim to road racing. Quite the opposite. Bike races are, or certainly were, deeply alien to our sporting culture, mysterious continental affairs littered with foreign language terms that make little sense. Road races still are deeply
