Tim Hilton’s parents were Bohemian communists who had met at Oxford in the thirties. They lived for a time in Edgbaston, the bourgeois suburb of Birmingham and left for France leaving young Tim in the care of his maternal grandparents in Raynes Park. It was the catalyst for his introduction to cycling.

In a lengthy anthology and memoir the author breaks the surface of post-war cycling in Britain and on the Continent. Club cycling reached its zenith in the fifties: memories of reliability trials, track racing at Easter, the Isle of Man, fixed wheels and the BLRC. He sees the classless ideal of communism as making him perfect material for a cyclist and there are many references to the Left.

Fausto Coppi appears throughout, often as a touchstone for contemporary, modish, Italian life. Radical, supposedly atheist, he is cast against Bartali, robust, conservative, Catholic.

Hilton explains the Clarion movement and identifies the link with Percy Stallard – innovation. Introverted club cycling clashed with the extroversion of the Leaguers, their shades, jazz, Italian road jerseys. The Clarion movement encouraged fellowship while the BLRC became divisive and foundered on amalgamation.

Reg Harris was a perfectionist, professionally ruthless, a showman who developed a strong rapport with his audience and cultivated journalists without giving too much away. His reputation, built up by the newspapers, attracted crowds to the tracks. His training was shrouded in mystery, but a ‘true’ story claims that on one occasion he told a twelve-hour time-trial specialist that their training methods were similar.

Tour heroes have their place, especially those of the fifties. Bobet’s metamorphosis from callow aspirant to champion is uplifting. Obsessive and self-centred, he regarded other riders as enemies or as servants. There are vignettes: Koblet, at once romantic and short-lived, yet unforgettable; Robic, aggressive and bad-tempered; the volatile Géminiani; and Vietto, taciturn and influential, but destined never to win the Tour de France. Anquetil, unsentimental, pragmatic, calculating, challenged the received wisdom of how a champion behaved in his professional and private life.

Hilton’s atmospheric accounts of the classic races reflect knowledge of geography, buildings, social history and culture. Despite his classlessness, Hilton is a traditionalist. Cycle races, he opines, belong to newspapers and not TV companies.

A return to Oxford and undergraduate days leads to pondering on village halls and the approaching demise of domestic time-trialling: Ray Booty, the end of a golden period; the eccentric Alf Engers, the determined, gritty, obsessive Beryl Burton paving the way for Chris Boardman, sports psychology and modern technology and training.

Hilton is a clever and erudite writer but prone to unforced errors. In a wordy description of cycle gearing: ‘a complete revolution of the front wheel of a “penny-farthing” would cover the same amount of road as the wheel’s diameter’ – no mention of pi. ‘The League International exists to promote massed-start events for veterans.’ In fact, TLI promotes age-related events for juveniles up to veterans of 75+ years. ‘There are no cyclists in the Navy.’ The Royal Navy and Royal Marines Cycling Association, with over a hundred members, might have something to say about that. There are other examples to irritate the devotee.

However, this book is written with authority and relish. Tim Hilton is more readable by not taking himself too seriously. Sentimental and nostalgic for the past, he seems uncomfortable in a world dulled by materialism and high disposable income.

Gordon Daniels

Copyright © Association of British Cycling Coaches 2005

It’s that time of the year. Mid-January. The phone rings and the mouth goes dry. There is a sick feeling in the pit of the stomach. Your accountant is seeking a meeting to discuss the annual returns. Why do we feel so guilty when the accountant calls and we are paying him a fortune to tell us what we know? I suppose because he reminds us of a commissaire… ‘Everything ok?’ ‘You’ve made a loss.’ ‘I thought we had had a fair year.’ ‘You had. But you have an expensive grandson.’ A chuckle. The phone goes silent.

It has been roughly the same conversation each year since our 19-year-old grandson, who lives with us, took to cycle racing in 1996. On my mountain bike. In what I was told was a little friendly informal event called a cyclo-cross race run by one Bob Hayward for Diss Cycling Club. The lad came very, very last.

For a start, the saddle fell off. The bike was as heavy as lead. And that, I thought, was that. Must try to get him interested in another hobby. Wrong. He had fallen for the lure of the racing bike and his life and that of his grandad and grandmother changed with dramatic suddenness.

He is turning into a very good cyclo-cross man, mountain bike rider, road racer and a pretty fair time triallist. He has also tried his hand at grass track at Mildenhall Rally. And he has also been very lucky: he’s found a professional coach who knows how to deal with him, a physiotherapist with the patience of Job, and a doctor always ready to advise. Fortunately they all just love riding bikes. If we had to pay for this back-up team our accountant would have heart failure.

Commitment has been all. In terms of time. In terms of family. In terms of sacrifice of all other interests. In terms of money. And for the young man himself in terms of holidays, in terms of employment prospects - he needs a lot of time to train - and in terms of education. Now he will go to university a year late.

For grandad and grandmother, backing their eldest grandchild means an end to weekends in bed, and an introduction to a new world where for holidays read driving all over the country from one muddy field or forest to another, of boring the neighbours and the rest of the family with tales - and even worse, videos - of cycle races, of spending hours being abused as a race marshal or, for grandmother, of helping with refreshments.

And, if not being abused by other riders, being shouted at by grandson for (a) not handing him a clean cross bike quickly enough or (b) causing him to drop his drinks bottle or (c) not realising he wanted you to clean his filthy cycling shoes and spattered helmet or (d) filming him when he had had a bad day and was being spat out of the back of the pack or (e) stopping him from going home because you had become a member of the regional cyclo-cross committee and were delayed by a meeting or (f) had stupidly agreed to help clear the mountain bike course.

And all this commitment from you and the other volunteers because you are so proud when he wins a £10 race prize which does not even cover the entrance money and would not even buy a replacement set of decent brake blocks. That’s if he used ordinary brakes. And you love it.

Which is all building up to a proud grandfather asking if the powers that be, wrapped up with their World Performance Plans for very, very few, or travelling to exotic climes for training, are really aware of why fewer and fewer parents are willing to allow their offspring to come into a sport which demands such a concentrated commitment and sometimes crippling family sacrifice in such a pressured age.

I wonder how much those in charge of British cycling politics - and of the racing which can demand so much in terms of expensive equipment and time - really understand what that all means to ordinary people. And why so many parents say they genuinely cannot help and come to dread their children’s obsession with racing on two wheels.

My accountant could tell them.

Grandad had his obsession with cycling nearly half a century ago. He bought a £8 frame from a cycle dealer for five shillings a month. Rode it fixed wheel for touring and for attempts at massed start racing. Then he would put the mudguards back on and use it for work. His workouts consisted of long rides and plenty of Elliman’s Rub.

Now, for his grandson he uses a spreadsheet to control a year round seasonal race programme for fixtures from Scotland to Plymouth; has a special account to keep track of costs including subscriptions and a small fortune in race entry fees; organises extra insurance to safeguard about nine bikes (including one Italian road bike, a matched pair of cross bikes, a mountain bike and what is called a’playbike’ with a saddle about two inches from the ground), road rollers, warm-up rollers, tools and tyres which together are worth more than the family’s two battered cars.

Books hotel rooms for national events, buys loads of films and, for some reason, hundredweights of bananas and dozens of bottles of mineral water, bike cleaning fluid, cans of oil, food and drink supplements, lots of tyres and tubes but few puncture repair kits.

Grandad invested in digital TV to watch Eurosport because cycle racing is not football; pays subscriptions to umpteen cycling magazines; buys Lance Armstrong books, training videos, dietary guides and constantly replaces disappearing drinks bottles.

Grandmother daily washes mountains of cycling kit and says she goes to all the races because there is not much joy in staying at home looking at threadbare carpets because a new pair of ultralight wheels, paper thin saddles or a new pair of carbon fibre forks took priority. Grandad keeps his mouth shut. He knows she does not mean it.

All obsessive sports mean family sacrifices. They always have. But when a young person is striving for excellence and results in a situation where national funding agencies are only interested in medal success it is impossible for even the most dedicated ordinary families to match the university technical physiological support and the financial sponsorship enjoyed by the few.

Grandad has heard on race circuits the not-so-subtie pressure put on by some governing body coaches which can drive young talent out of the sport because of the enormous cost of the commitment being called for - and not just in terms of money sacrifices. He and grandmother are lucky - they really enjoy doing it. He hopes grandson can continue to.

Maybe social, economic, relational and financial awareness should be part of every coach’s training curriculum.

My accountant could teach that.

Copyright © Association of British Cycling Coaches 2001

Note: 2008 edition now available from Amazon

Based on the writer’s ‘25-year addiction to this unique event’ (half of my own), this is, says Fife, ‘an attempt to get inside the Tour’s mystique’ rather than a history. History is there, but in snapshots or brief video clips. Much of it is well known ( Les Forçats de la Route ), some of it less well-retailed, much necessarily left out. I’d have liked to read again the story of Hubert Opperman’s 1927 Tour, one man against trade teams in a series of team time-trials. The rest is a series of accounts of Fife’s own climbs of the major Alpine cols: L’Alpe d’Huez, Télégraphe, Glandon, Galibier, Izoard, Vars. As he climbs his thoughts stray to the great riders who preceded him. The accounts of what and who he’s thinking about are much better than the story of his own struggles, which are often done in a sort of writing-by-numbers, tricked out with literary quotations unnaturally transplanted. Fife is too good a writer to need these pretentious, supporting devices. Why quote in French and then translate? Settle for one or the other.

My heroes are not always the same as Fife’s. I recognise talent in any performer, but my admiration for Virenque’s attacking style is tempered by the suspicion that it’s easier to keep attacking when fuelled by steroids and EPO; I reserve my respect for those who can hack it without a fix. Fife almost despises Indurain (’Lovely man; no brain’ he comments) for husbanding his resources and playing to his strengths; but Anquetil, who did exactly the same, plus being a druggie and a cheat, gets his wholehearted admiration. Incidentally, the latter emerges as the most talented shit cycling has ever seen – perhaps the instinctive recognition of this is why the fans never took him to their hearts as they did Vietto and Poulidor.

It’s an attractive book. There’s an insert of eight photos and a useful index. Georges Ronsse (not Rousse) was world champion. Big sprockets (the ones you climb on) give you a smaller gear, not a larger one. Incidentally the story of Bartali searching the route for Coppi’s discarded bottle isn’t apocryphal – Bartali tells it himself. Despite minor faults, a thoroughly enjoyable book to add to your shelf of addictions.

Ramin Minovi

Copyright © Association of British Cycling Coaches 2001

A MAGNIFICENTLY-PRODUCED COLLECTION of photos by Pellizzari, illustrating eighteen of the world’s professional stage races, many of them little-known to your average fan: Guatemala, Qinghai Lake, Qatar, Japan, Burkina Faso (where Coppi caught malaria), the Canadian Tour de Beauce, Langkawi, Ireland (fine picture of the Mamore Gap), Bolivia, Martinique, and the Golan, as well as France, Spain and Italy - though not the Scandinavian or Swiss tours.

The pictures are all in wide, panoramic format: sometimes 4″ x 10″ on a single page, sometimes 7″x 18″ across two pages - the book is landscape in format. Within the limits of this format the variety is enormous: entire fields on a stretch of coast or desert, bunches or individuals climbing well-known cols, the pattern of hundreds of bikes in a bike park, cyclists glimpsed through the girders of a bridge, spectators in the African bush, a naff Australian roadside ‘decoration contest, time-triallists, curious shadows, riders resting after the stage in a school dormitory, a storm over the Altiplano,

The translation of the text (a 25-page intro) into English, presumably from the original Italian, is a bit creaky, as are the captions: Africans begging at a team-car window are described as ‘a riot to receive presents’. But it’s of little consequence alongside the stunning pictures. Published three years ago, the book is still available from Amazon.

Ramin Minovi

Copyright © Association of British Cycling Coaches 2008

What defines ethical behaviour, particularly as it applies to children in elite sports? Behaviour becomes unethical when the child’s best interests are placed below the interests of others. No guidelines exist to identify improper behaviour as applied to children in intensive sports training, but it may be possible to adopt rules of conduct from other areas in which the rights of children to be protected from harm are already recognised.

This article looks at three areas: children as research subjects, child abuse laws, and regulation of child labour. Several initiatives are suggested. These include the establishment of an umbrella Organisation serving to protect children from exploitation in elite sports.

Copyright © Association of British Cycling Coaches 2001

A YOUNG MAN on strange bike cycles into a gloomy forest, parks his bike, and heads into the trees with a rope. From this point on the story of Graeme Obree’s triumphs and disasters are told in an extended flashback, and it’s an hour before the rope breaks and he survives his attempt to hang himself.

There have been few successful fictional films made about sport, for what seems to me to be an obvious reason: sport is itself so inherently dramatic - melodramatic, even - that fictionalising it can add little or nothing to the tensions upon which drama depends for its effects. The results have ranged from worthy but rather dull (Le Mans) to undeniably laughable (American Flyers). The triumphs, like Raging Bull, have been few and far between, and they, by and large, concentrate on the off-the-field nature of the central figure. Fortunately for the film-makers many sportspeople, like artists, are a mess, psychologically, and therefore innately ‘interesting’. There are other problems, like finding actors who can make convincing athletes. Boxing can be faked, but a whole Tour de France field? The truth is that the only good sports films have been documentaries like the great A Sunday in Hell and the more recent Hell on Wheels.

To produce a biopic of Graeme Obree little more than ten years after his glory days looks like asking for trouble: how do you find someone who looks sufficiently like the athlete? Well, it works. That the result is towards the ‘triumph’ end of the continuum has a great deal to do with the inspired casting of Jonny Lee Miller who looks the part (uncannily at times) and rides Obree’s bike convincingly.
Obree’s supporters are equally convincing, Billy Boyd as the faithful helper through everything, Brian Cox as the local minister and boat-builder who provided equipment and a workshop, a role which suits Cox, one of the best-known hams in film-making.

The theme has always been a gift for film-makers: the determined individual, single-minded to the point of obsession, alone against the representatives of authority who, if they’re lucky, do no worse than withold their aid - High Noon and a hundred other Westerns spring to mind. In Obree’s case the UCI maintained an active campaign against Obree, constantly changing their rules with the sole purpose of eliminating the challenge he represented to the established order.

Logic tells us that it’s no surprise that the UCI hated him: after, all there was no commercial mileage in the career of a man who showed that in order to beat the best in the world you could do it on a bicycle you knocked together yourself in a mate’s workshop. Thus the film makers didn’t have far to go to find a villain, personified here in the person of Steven Berkoff as a sort of Nazi who derives a positive relish from wrecking Obree’s chances - less subtle perhaps than the real Hein Verbruggen, who was a much nastier bully, but just as satisfying here. We know that Obree is a sufferer from bipolar disorder, but some of the treatment which he had to put up with in real life might have driven anyone to attempt suicide.

Despite this, those who have met Obree always comment on his openness and sense of humour, an aspect of his character that’s played down in this film. Scots are traditionally supposed to be dour, but not necessarily grim.

Most enjoyable moment is when the Scotsman, largely ignored in his own country, visits France and finds the entire small town turned out in his honour. There’s a message there somewhere.

Ramin Minovi

Copyright © Association of British Cycling Coaches 2008

ALTHOUGH IT WASN’T published until this year, 2007, a skim through this manual suggests that it was completed several years earlier. The general feel is of something the BCF might have produced back in about 1998 when it tried to hijack coaching in Britain, and developments in training methods, feeding and equipment of the last few years haven’t yet found their way in. The bizarre caption to a picture of Lemond (retired 1995) advises that ‘he is one of the best wheels to follow and even the pros will take his wheel.’ A training manual shouldn’t perhaps have too much on equipment, but the carbon revolution seems to have passed the authors by, and there’s little useful advice about what kinds of materials to choose from.

For a first basic training manual it’s not bad - most of the advice is sound, but in seeking to avoid being too detailed and prescriptive the authors may have strayed too far in the other direction and made it too general.

Some of the advice runs counter to received wisdom, which is frequently wrong: for instance, your TT bike may need a lower saddle position for maximum power output, instead of higher, which is what most riders think.

Some advice seems outdated: do coaches frown on café stops on long rides? Alcohol the night before a race is better avoided than merely reduced; and cross-training won’t do much for your specific sport. There’s a photo of a bad hamstring stretch, but only a description of the correct version. And not every coach would agree without demur that stretching is ‘vital’. Some is plain wrong: we’re told that cycling is a weight-bearing activity - the opposite is the case; 500 metres is 1625 feet, not 310 feet.

Nutrition advice is adequate, but adding fructose has been shown to increase CHO absorption from around 70 gm to over 120 gm per hour, significantly altering race feeding arrangements.

The book is good on periodisation of training, how to ride in echelons, RPE, and how to plan your training schedules. There are 15 or so detailed ready-made schedules which riders can easily adapt for their own needs. The matrices for skills, fitness, etc are excellent. The authors recommend plenty of long slow distance training combined with intervals. Turbo training is recommended but despite the huge variety of methods available, only the standard pyramid is actually described. Six training zones are used, and the use of the heart rate monitor is based on max heart rate, a measurement many cyclists will find difficult to find. The formula of 220 minus age for max heart rate isn’t merely a ‘rule of thumb’ - it’s so misleading as to be worthless. A more useful datum for most cyclists would be something like the average of your Average Heart Rate in three 10-mile time-trials. Weights are recommended but no details given.

The short section on finding and using a coach is excellent and was clearly written by someone with firsthand knowledge.

There’s an adequate index. Production is very glossy and in full colour, and the tables are very good, clear and comprehensible. Otherwise there’s little here that can’t be found in Jim Hendry’s 1987 BCF Training Manual.

Ramin Minovi

Copyright © Association of British Cycling Coaches 2007

IN 1982 PHIL ANDERSON wore the yellow jersey in the Tour de France for nine days and finished fifth overall. The following year an Australian company made a film of his ride, hoping that he’d win. Circumstances combined to thwart him. First, there was never a realistic chance that Anderson could ever win the Tour - he just wasn’t a good enough climber; and second, he was a member of the rabidly Francocentric, disastrously mismanaged Peugeot team. Anderson, Millar and Roche, not being French, were all wasted in trying to protect Pascal Simon whose broken shoulder blade, everyone knew, must result in his abandon as soon as the race hit the Alps, and he duly abandoned, and everyone’s efforts were wasted. But they were pros, and one assumes that they got paid for doing what they were told to do.

The fact that their man didn’t pull off the big win is, if anything, an advantage. The result is a really excellent movie (designed, I assume, to fit into a one-hour TV slot) which is about the Tour, rather than of the Tour. I think the washed-out colour is deliberate and meant to evoke nostalgia, rather than merely being a faded print, but it works either way.

The extras are an interview of Anderson by Phil Liggett, which is much too long - you really needa historian’s motivation and concentration - but which nevertheless contains a number of interesting insights: the sheer pain of professional racing and even training, going to the Alps to train over 12 cols in four days, turning pro rather than wait a few months for the Olympics, because you want a career, not a one-off. Most curious is Anderson’s view that re-introducing amateurs to the Tour would ‘kill the sport’. There’s some unintentional humour too, caused by leaving in all Liggett’s fluffs and stumbles.

The other extra is half an hour’s really excellent footage of the 1985 Amstel Gold, run off in the most wretched conditions of rain and cold, steel frames, toeclips and straps, flapping brake cables, nearly all filmed at road level in the mud and wet, from a motorbike, the rawest racing you ever saw: vélo verité.

Ramin Minovi

Copyright © Association of British Cycling Coaches 2008

I ENJOYED THE first half of this book. Well-written accounts of childhood and youth are usually attractive. Life at home must have been misery for the young Graeme: his 5 ft 3 inch ex-army father, bitter because he no longer had lower ranks to order around and with a huge inferiority complex, took out his frustration on his son in the form of frequent beatings. He escaped, and at school and university he encountered cycling, rowing and girls, especially French girls, taught in a couple of public schools, lived the life of a freelance writing bum in London (ten addresses in as many months). So far, so good.

A sixty-page account of a cycling trip to Timbuktu takes hold of the reader because it’s life on another planet, rather than because of superior tale-telling; but the signs are creeping in, of over-writing and a belief that absolutely everything that’s ever happened to you should be retailed to everyone else. I mean, if you don’t tell them that your mate adjusted your brake while you paid the hotel bill, how will they get through their day? Around page 200 I found that enjoyment had pretty well ceased and reading had become a chore. Then comes a rather tedious account of the Raid Pyrenean (16 pages), followed immediately by another one (13 pages) with his mates, obviously written for his club magazine. It’s written, says Fife, with a nod at Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel. I must be one of the few people who thinks they’re both tedious and dated, the humour heavy-handed and laboured and, unfortunately, used as models by generations of would-be English comic writers: ‘Kevin … asked whether he was having a good time, reflected for a while, took a gulp of lager, belched daintily, glazed over and said: “What was the question?”‘ Hilarious. This was worth writing and printing? It’s not even worth thinking.

From here on it’s downhill: name-dropping (boy, can he drop names) rides in France and the UK, and a trip to New England in which he spends 17 lines, half a page, describing his choice of sandwich. He orders a beer, and tells us that the barmaid asked whether he wants ’small’ or ‘tall’. Every piffling thing that’s ever happened to him has to be included, along with verses and a song lyric.

Mr Fife is clearly well-read and fluent in French. But he’s not a man who wears his learning lightly and sometimes you think, ‘Another dip into Google, another visit to the encyclopaedia’. There are endless unnecessary explanations of word and phrase origins (some of them wrong), especially in French, a bit like those old boys’ stories of Africa, in which ‘lion’ and ‘elephant’ are given in both Swahili and English. On page 252 he translates ‘Merci’ for us. But at lunch in the Pyrenees we’re given poulet and fromage de brebis untranslated. Most English people can manage ‘thank-you’, but are unlikely to know the French for ‘ewe’. Fife’s pedantry grows on him, until on page 279 he has a Lynne Truss-type storm (she wrote about how the English mangle their grammar) about how Americans can’t use subjunctives, but would never say 12 p.m. And then, a few pages later, he uses ‘nugatory’ as a synonym for ‘negative’. Sorry, Graeme, when you start laying down the law about people’s language, your own has to be perfect - and anyway life’s too short for all this didacticism. And no, I won’t tell you what it means, you can bloody well look it up.

I suppose no writer can be blamed for recycling his work: several passages are reproduced word for word from his Tour de France of 1999. While less inaccurate than in this earlier book, he can still be careless: Kelly’s four Green Jersey wins were overtaken by Zabel (with six) years ago, Mandy Jones won the World title at Goodwood in 1982, not 1985; and he tells us, ludicrously, that ‘infantry’ originates with a Scottish general who called his soldiers ‘mes enfants’.

The last chapter, an account of cycling up and down hills in Kent, is surely only of interest to a few locals.

Graeme Fife is reflective and perceptive. He can observe life, and then write about it - a talent that’s less common than you might think - and there’s undoubtedly a lot of good stuff here. What a pity his publisher didn’t employ an editor to reduce it by about a third.

Ray Minovi

Copyright © Association of British Cycling Coaches 2008

I WAS SITTING in the Departure Lounge of Marco Polo airport, Venice after the 2008 world cyclo-cross championships in nearby Treviso. Every lap of the Elite race had been exciting with ever-changing patterns in leadership. Lars Boom had won the Elites, Hanka Kupfernagel dominated the women’s race. But my thoughts constantly returned to what I’d have done to redress the somewhat dismal performances of others carrying their national colours, along with the hopes of their sponsors and supporters.

Focused, cross-specific coaching would have surely helped with their preparations. The previous evening an American fan had asked if I could recommend a good book on coaching cyclo-cross. The two I could think of were useful but long out of print. Anyway, the written word is a world away from working with riders, analysing their strengths and weaknesses and combining numerous issues and individual characteristics in order to optimise results. Moreover, in bike racing education takes numerous forms and a good book written by someone with experience could help to avoid costly errors.

At the check-in desk I was joined by an old colleague - Simon Burney. We shared observations on individuals, the small marginal time differences between groups of riders as well as performances by national representatives. We had witnessed impressive skills, speed and exciting initiatives by the leaders, but with ample scope for improvement by many of those left trailing in their wake, riders whose repertoire barely extended beyond ‘good average’. I passed on my question. From his bag, Simon pulled out a copy of a new and updated version of his earlier book. I believe that it should be required reading for anyone participating in cyclo-cross. It contains a wealth of information, valuable advice and guidance from a man who is an acknowledged expert in this branch of cycle sport. Simon Burney, has been a professional cyclo-cross rider, worked as a mechanic and managed teams around the world: he’s a man who has been there, done that, and probably has a drawerful of T-shirts.

Beginners and cyclo-cross veterans alike should study this book. If only a fraction of it is absorbed, the rider/ coach will surely be rewarded by improved performances. Needless to say, no one can guarantee that the rider will go on to wear a rainbow jersey, but there were many competing at Treviso who, if they had applied only a few of the lessons this book contains, might well have been a step nearer to that goal - perhaps even with one foot on the podium.

Although Velo Press is an American publisher the book is available in the UK for £13.99 - or from Amazon for less.

Lewis Hall

Copyright © Association of British Cycling Coaches 2008