When Sir Bradley Wiggins claimed the UCI hour record at the Olympic velodrome on June 7, it is fair to say it was big news. And not just on the back pages. 'The Perfect Hour’, 'Cometh the Hour’, 'Wiggo defies the pain barrier’ were just a few of the headlines the following morning. They were well deserved, too.
The hour is one of cycling’s most iconic landmarks and Wiggins, who described the pain as the closest he would come to knowing how it felt to give birth, had smashed the previous mark by more than 1.5 kilometres.
What you might not have realised, unless you read the accompanying stories very closely, was that the previous record holder was a Briton, Alex Dowsett, and that he had set the mark just one month earlier at the velodrome in Manchester. Dowsett could have been forgiven for feeling a little miffed at the lavish coverage of Wiggins’s ride. When on May 2 he recorded a distance of 52.937km to beat the mark set by the Australian Rohan Dennis, it got relatively little traction. But the Essex rider’s feat was no less impressive.
And he did it despite a hugely inauspicious start to his sporting life. Diagnosed with a severe form of haemophilia at 18 months old, Dowsett spent his childhood being told by doctors not to push too hard. In joining the ranks of greats from Fausto Coppi to Eddy Merckx, the 26-year-old deserved to have his name up in lights as well.
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