Latest Blog Post

Thank you to Simon for the heads up about this!

Some years ago, I was Chairman of the Trustees of The Karen Green Foundation, a charity that we set up in honour of a friend’s wife who died of Leukaemia.

Mick Green has known cycling since he was born and he is the owner, proprietor and operator of Langdale Lightweights which is a true cyclist’s shop in Nottingham. Both of my best bikes were from Langdale’s and were made to measure.

Mick was a track cyclist, winning the National Track League on one occasion as far as I can remember. He knows cycling inside out.

A few years ago, he supported a team of young hopefuls – ‘The Langdale Lightweights Track Team’. He took up the team pursuit discipline which is a team of four in cycling who ride as hard as they can as a unit swapping turns on the front in the Olympics.

Wiggins won his last Gold medal in Rio in this team. Thomas has won Gold twice in team pursuit.

The Langdale Lightweights team did pretty well but they’re never going to compete against the big guys; the British cycling boys or the New Zealand team. They’re National teams who have all the resources, facilities and staff at their disposal.

So, what do you do with that?

You do what people always do with that.

You disrupt.

Team pursuit is a pretty specific discipline – start off, the good guy on the front pulls for a couple of laps and then roll off as much as you can on the front for as long as you can but everybody does one or two laps. They roll and change, roll and change trying to stay fresh. That’s how it’s done, it’s how it’s always been done and it’s how it always will be done until the Langdale Lightweights boys, now the Huub Watt Bike team, changed the system.

They took one guy who’s a monster and put him on the front. He goes off for eight laps and they smash the opposition to death and kill them almost every time. At the moment we’re in a state of paralysis where no one seems to know how to deal with this disruption.

“That’s not how it’s done around here”

“That’s not the rules we play by”

“This isn’t in the spirit of the sport”

It is and it’s amazing to watch the little guy look from a different angle at a system and break it to make it better.

It’s caused quite an uproar in British cycling as far as Simon tells me. They’re not sure what to do about the Tokyo Olympics because the Huub Watt Bike guys are faster than the British cycling four.

We’ll need to have a trial and we’ll need to pick the best and it might not be the guys who are sponsored by ‘the system’!

All empires fail, sooner or later, and it’s usually as a result of disruption.

Blog Post Number: 1954