Dave Mellor knew he had a problem with his hearing after finding himself avoiding conversations for fear of humiliating himself. “Going out in a group, riding side by side, is all about having a bit of craic with your mates,” he tells me over the phone. “But over time, I had stopped engaging. I’d be out on social rides and forever saying, ‘Say that again’.” Struggling to hear clearly enough to chat while cycling is a common problem, but it’s one many riders are reluctant to admit.
“I’d also find myself saying, ‘Yeah, yeah’,” continues Mellor, “pretending to have heard and hoping that ‘yeah’ was a suitable answer. It got a bit embarrassing and I was missing out on all the banter.” The final straw came when Mellor – owner of Dave Mellor Cycles in Shrewsbury and a former Great Britain team manager – was returning from a cycle show with a female colleague in 2017. “Driving along in the van, she said, ‘not many emails today’. I asked if she had checked her emails on her phone, and she looked at me
