One of the first things I admit to Felix Young, the coach of Great Britain’s cycle-ball team, in our video call is that, until researching this article, I hadn’t known his sport – essentially football on bicycles – even existed. “I’m not convinced the people who signed off [on the championships] did either!” he says. “But it’s partly what David Lappartient [the president of cycling’s governing body, the UCI] was trying to do with Glasgow, to give the smaller disciplines like ours more of a platform. These conversations are only happening because of that.”
The ‘Glasgow’ he mentions are the 2023 UCI Cycling Worlds. Not just a Road Worlds or a Track Worlds, organised individually at different times of the year, but a universal Cycling Worlds, where 13 cycle sport disciplines (winter’s cyclo-cross is a necessary omission) unite under the same championships, with their respective rainbow jerseys – the iconic garment awarded to winners – on the line. This pedal-powered jamboree takes place over 11 days this August (3-13) and, despite its name, is not limited tocombined championships, with over 8,000 amateur and professional cyclists battling for 190 rainbow jerseys. The idea is that it will be held every four years in the summer prior to the Olympics and is a key manifesto pledge fulfilled by Lappartient, who envisaged it as an egalitarian way to spread the wealth across the disciplines, with the giants of the road and track sharing the public gaze with the minnows of cycle-ball and artistic cycling.
