As a former Six-Day racer who rode with Gary Wiggins in the 1970s, Maurice Burton felt that he couldn’t miss the opportunity of seeing Gary’s son, Sir Bradley Wiggins, take part in his last race at Ghent this weekend.
The former national champion and owner of De Ver Cycles in Streatham in South London, said, “I saw an online article about Bradley riding his last Six-Day. He said I’ve trained really hard for this. And it made me think, although I really need to be in the shop selling bikes and trying my best at this time of year, I thought, you know, I better go to Ghent. Because there’s a lot of history behind all of this, and I was there when Bradley won the tour on the Champs Elysées, and I thought I needed to be there.”
Read MoreFormer pro cyclist and National Champion, Maurice Burton, was assaulted while out riding his bike yesterday. A bank holiday Monday ride through picturesque Kent villages ended up with the De Ver Cycles owner in hospital after a motorist pulled 60-year old Burton off his bike in an unprovoked attack.
The pretty village of Downe, home to Charles Darwin, is on a popular route for club rides and tensions often arise between motorists and road cyclists but the police rarely have to intervene.
Read MoreWatching the play about the life of Beryl Burton, last week, Ride Velo couldn't help but notice some similarities between her and her namesake, Maurice Burton, whose pro cycling life we featured recently. Both riders were from working class families who discouraged them to take up cycling; both showed the same steely grit and determination against the odds but were ultimately not given the recognition they deserved for all their great achievements. And neither could take it when beaten by their own children! Maurice pushed his son Robbie into a hedge when beaten up Star Hill, and Beryl refused to shake hands when beaten by daughter Denise in the National Championships.
Read MoreMany successful sportsmen have struggled with their personal lives at the end of their sporting careers. Who can forget the images of a washed out Paul Gascoigne, overweight and dependent on alcohol, struggling with his demons as he tried to make some sense of his life after a glittering, but not entirely fulfilled, career as a footballer? Of course the cycling world is no different: Marco Pantani suffered a terrible decline into drug addiction that tragically destroyed him. Even the apparently unshakeable Eddy Merckx floundered after retirement for a while, as he sought out a life in business as a prefabricated building salesman before being persuaded to go into the bike building business!
Read MoreWhat is it that makes a champion? What transcends someone from being simply a strong rider to one that has the killer instinct that means it’s their wheel, not their rival’s, that crosses the line of the track first?
Read More"An athletic contest in which participants 'go queer' in their heads, and strain their powers until their faces become hideous with the tortures that rack them, is not sport. It is brutality." The New York Times, 1897
Read MoreA teenage boy wipes the steam from the bus window and peers out onto a grey 1960s street in Forest Hill, South London, on the way to his weekly school swimming lesson. His eye catches a bike abandoned in the front garden of a Victorian terraced house and he realises that he noticed the same one last week. A racing tourer that’s seen better days. But nothing a bit of a TLC wouldn’t put right. “I’ll go back after school,” he says to himself. “I’ll go back and see if the owner wants to get rid of it.”
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