MY ENJOYMENT OF time trialling has always been tempered slightly by a complete and utter lack of success. Contrast that to Michael Hutchinson, who’s enjoyed such success that the number of national titles he’s won against the clock puts him behind only the great Beryl Burton.
While Burton’s 96 national titles across Cycling Time Trials (CTT) events seem like an untouchable figure – and it surely is – Hutchinson hobbles home with 56 national titles. Or thereabouts. Even he isn’t entirely sure how many it is, exactly.
‘I just tend to trust my Wikipedia page, which says it’s 56, and which seems about right,’ he laughs.
Give it a few more years, I suggest, and Burton’s record might hove into sight.
‘I’m not catching Beryl Burton!’ he laughs again. ‘I’m really not. I’m barely halfway there! She won the National 25 [mile time trial] twenty-seven times, or something ludicrous!
‘Plus she started when she was eighteen and was still plugging away in her forties,’ he adds, by way of an ‘excuse’, as if any were needed. ‘I’d already started ten years too late!’
It doesn’t seem appropriate to remind Hutchinson that he’s now crept into his forties himself, although perhaps that’s his point.
Not that he’s showing any signs of slowing down. In 2013, he won the CTT National 10 title for the ninth time (a distance for which he held the British record – 17 minutes and 45 seconds – until 2014, when three-time British time-trial national champion Alex Dowsett lowered it by another 25 seconds to 17–20).
In a display of Burton-esque dominance, Hutchinson also won the 50-mile title thirteen times in a row between 2000 and 2012, but missed out on the opportunity of defending his title in 2013 due to illness, when Matt Bottrill took on the mantle of CTT 50-mile champion. Bottrill fits his training in around family life and working as a postman; Hutchinson is an author and journalist, but did ride the national time-trial circuit as a professional for five years from 2001.
‘Everyone thinks that I still am a pro, but I gave that up in 2006,’ Hutchinson explains. ‘I wanted to do other things. I published The Hour [his first book, about his attempt to follow in the footsteps of Chris Boardman and Graeme Obree to break the Hour record] that year, and had started doing work for Radio 4 as a reporter for the Today programme at one point. I’d started doing my column for Cycling Weekly, then, too; I’d decided it was time I grew up and moved on to other things.’
Hutchinson’s columns for Cycling Weekly provided, and continue to provide, some comic relief in a sport that often takes itself rather seriously, although, whether he’d admit to it or not, his has always been a voice of reason. He’s been there and done it when it comes to racing in Britain, and, as ‘Doctor Hutch’, he tends to tell it like it is.
Hutchinson also explains that one of the other reasons not to continue as a professional beyond 2006 was that it was the year when Cycling Weekly shifted its traditional focus from time-trial reports and results to the more general health and fitness benefits of cycling, and to the burgeoning discipline of cyclosportives – or sportives, as they’re more simply, and increasingly, called: mass-participation rides in the UK and Europe under race-like conditions, that aren’t actually races; the most well known being the Etape du Tour, during which amateur riders tackle a stage of the Tour de France. Soon, British pros’ track and road exploits also took precedence over time trialling.
‘When you started to get people like Bradley Wiggins going to the Tour to try to get a result, and riders such as Geraint Thomas winning the junior Paris–Roubaix [in 2004; Andy Fenn also won it in 2008], I can see why, from a commercial point of view, the idea of giving over half the magazine to domestic bike racing didn’t work any more.
‘My job as a pro was, essentially, to get my name and my picture in the magazine as often as I could, because it produced awareness of a brand. I rode for Giant for several years, and it did amazing things for them in terms of selling their bikes to time triallists. But when Cycling Weekly stopped reporting on time trialling as much, and you just got a picture on an eighth of a page … I mean, before, if you won the Nationals, you’d get on the cover and they’d issue bloody posters of you! A pull-out poster of “Hutch”, and all that stuff! So when they stopped doing that it got harder to justify someone giving you a living wage for a year to ride time trials.’
Hutchinson may no longer be a full-time rider, but he continues to be supported by sponsors in his quest for more titles and faster times.
‘I get help to cover my costs; if people are willing to help, then it’s nice that the sport doesn’t cost me a fortune,’ he says. ‘But I still don’t make a profit on time trialling because I still have to buy lots of equipment; I’m not coming out in front by any stretch. There have only ever been a handful of people who’ve ever made a living out of time trialling in Britain. I was one, and Stuart Dangerfield was another.’
Not that giving up racing as a full-time pro meant slowing down. On the contrary: Hutchinson sees the last few years of the 2000s as his best years, ‘although I’d have won an awful lot more before that if I hadn’t come up against the likes of Dangerfield’.
Dangerfield is a four-time British time-trial national champion, and, like Hutchinson, a six-time winner of the CTT’s 25-mile title.
‘I was lucky in that later period in that I seemed to be on top of most of the people I was racing with,’ adds Hutchinson, ‘and for several years I also felt that I was one jump ahead on the technology side of things as well, which helped. I was one of the first to go into a wind tunnel and take that side of things seriously.’
There appear to be two extremes when it comes to how people view time trialling in the UK. There are those that treat it almost like a poor man’s Formula One, with all the carbon-fibre kit that comes with it, and for whom failing to beat their previous best time is viewed as abject failure. And then there are those who see it as a semi-friendly, once-a-week summer meet-up next to a dual carriageway where they have a bit of a ride and then a slice of cake and a cup of tea afterwards.
And then there’s every combination of the extremes in between, as people realize that they’re improving, and so perhaps invest in better equipment, or find they’re slowing down with their advancing years, or are getting a bit faster thanks to improving fitness. Hutchinson concurs – to a point.
‘I think that the first thing to say about time trialling is that it’s an historical anachronism. It really only exists in the UK, because of the history of racing in Britain and how it developed. And I think that one of the reasons why it seems to mean something different to almost everybody is that it is genuinely something different to almost everybody.
‘You go to a “club 10” and see it all,’ he continues. ‘At one end, all modesty set aside, there’s me: the reigning [2013 10-mile] national champion. I’m not as good as I once was, but I’m not a bad bike rider; I can go to a world championships and hold my own. At the other end, there are riders in their fifties and sixties who’ve just taken up cycling recently and who have just turned up on their road bikes to ride round.
‘I’m not doing the same thing they’re doing, yet we’re doing what we’re doing at the same place and at the same time. We’re all doing the same sport, and there’s almost nothing else I can think of that’s quite like that.
‘Except perhaps sailing,’ he adds, having thought for a moment. Hutchinson had been a keen dinghy racer as a teenager, and recounts rediscovering his love for sailing in his second book, which was initially published as Hello Sailor – a title Hutchinson describes as ‘a mistake’ – and later reissued as Missing the Boat.
‘Hello Sailor had just been a working title, which then turned up on the contract, and which I couldn’t dislodge,’ Hutchinson laughs. ‘The publishers thought it was a hilarious title, but if I’d been able to come up with Missing the Boat, which is much better, a bit earlier, I reckon I could have swung it.’
His point about sailing and cycling is that they’re quite similar in terms of the breadth of people who take part in it. ‘At one end you’d get people in carbon-fibre boats who’d spent an enormous amount of money, and at the other end you’d get people who were just out to sail around a bit.
‘Similarly, you can even go to the National 10, and at one end you could find Alex Dowsett, and at the other end someone in their early sixties, who has a full-time job and fits training in when they can, and who’s there looking for the age-group championships, but who’s going to be four or five minutes slower.’
Time trialling, in other words, says Hutchinson, offers everyone the opportunity to achieve goals on their own terms. Unlike road racing. ‘If you do a road race and get dropped on the second lap of an eight-lap race – if you’re a middle-aged guy of no particularly extraordinary talent with no particularly extraordinary amount of time during which to train – then you’ll spend an awful lot of time driving to road races, getting dropped early and then driving home again,’ says Hutchinson. ‘But in time trialling, if you want to actually go and race, anyone can do it, and anyone can get a result. That’s the attraction, I think. It’s a bit like playing amateur football: no matter how bad you are, you’re often still getting ninety minutes.’
Indeed, time trialling has to be one of the few sports where the less ability you have, the longer it takes you, and so the better value for money it is.
They call time trialling ‘the race of truth’. A few people do, anyway. Something to do with there being nowhere to hide: just you against the clock. For some, it’s this loneliness – this lack of relying on anyone else – that appeals. But do you have to be a certain type of person to enjoy racing on your own? Is it cycling’s ‘lonely’ discipline?
‘“Lonely” isn’t really the word I’d use; it’s no different from running,’ Hutchinson points out. Running on your own, he means, which for some reason isn’t viewed as being ‘lonely’ in quite the same way as cycling on your own seems to be.
Besides, he says, there isn’t exactly a lot of social life going on in the middle of a marathon, either; everybody’s running in the same direction at the same time, but there’s nothing particularly social about it. ‘There are plenty of road races like that, too. Not a lot of yak goes on in a criterium.’
He certainly doesn’t think that people choose time trialling over road racing because they just want to be on their own.
‘The thing I like about it is that in order to win a time trial you just have to be the fastest person there. I’ve always liked that purity to it,’ he explains. ‘I definitely don’t consider myself to be antisocial or a loner or anything like that!’
Followers of the faster end of British time trialling may or may not be aware that, since 2011, Hutchinson has held an Irish racing licence. That makes no difference to his continuing quest for, and probable taking of, further CTT records or titles; a person of any nationality can become a British CTT national champion, providing that they’ve resided in the UK for two years, while anyone – including Switzerland’s four-time time-trial world champion Fabian Cancellara or three-time world champion Tony Martin of Germany – is free to come and set the British record at any of the CTT distances. Which would be interesting to see.
But what having an Irish racing licence does mean is that Hutchinson is no longer eligible for the separate, British-Cycling-run time-trial national championships, which he won three times, in 2002, 2004 and 2008. He’s now won the Irish time-trial championships three times in a row – in 2012, 2013 and 2014.
Hutchinson is from Northern Ireland, which means that he holds dual citizenship – he can hold both an Ireland and UK passport – which in turn means that, in the sporting world, he can hold either an Irish or British licence.
‘The first race I ever did was in England, and so I had a British racing licence simply because I’d taken up racing in the UK,’ he says. ‘But at that point I didn’t think, “I shall take up cycling and I shall become an international cyclist!”’
That thought came soon enough, however, once he realized how good he was.
‘When I became interested in potentially representing Ireland, in about 1999 or 2000, I was told that if you had dual nationality you could only ever race for the nation where you’d done your first race, although I was never completely convinced about that.
‘But I just stuck with the GB licence I had, and not long after that the Great Britain national squad came and asked me if I wanted to go and train with them, so I did. This was 2000 or 2001 – when I wasn’t quite on and wasn’t quite off the GB track squad.’
Despite going on to win the British national pursuit championships in 2002, Hutchinson was never funded by the British programme as he didn’t meet the standard time to qualify for funding. ‘The frustration was that it was perfectly obvious to both me and the coaching staff that I had the physical ability to make the standard time, but I never quite seemed to do it,’ he explains. ‘I was within a couple of tenths of a second of getting it on several occasions, but these things just don’t click sometimes.’
If he’d moved to Manchester in order to be able to train on the track every day, then he thinks he might have been able to make the standard time he needed to qualify for funding.
‘I definitely thought about moving, but at that point I owned a flat in the south of England, and was also making a living riding time trials, which I would have had to have stopped doing to do the GB track thing properly. They don’t go well together, despite Chris Boardman’s success in both. At the time, it just felt like quite a big risk to me – to give up my job and to move house.
‘I look back at it now and think I should have done that: obviously I should have,’ he admits. ‘But you’ve also got to bear in mind that I could have made the standard, and got on to the squad, and got the funding, and then could have spent two years barely riding an event because at every individual pursuit, at every Olympics or world championships, Brad Wiggins was going to get the first squad place and Rob Hayles was probably going to get the second, as you were looking at two guys there who were cracking out 4–18s [four minutes and 18 seconds for 4,000 metres] and 4–19s fairly regularly, while my all-time best 4km PB was only ever about 4–24.’
In the Commonwealth Games, British athletes compete for their constituent country: England, Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales. Hutchinson rides for Northern Ireland.
The Northern Ireland coach at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi – where Hutchinson finished fourth in the time trial, just as he had at the Melbourne Games in 2006 – was also the coach for the Irish elite squad, and told Hutchinson that he’d certainly never come across the supposed policy of not being able to represent a nation that you were eligible for just because you’d taken part in your first race in a different country. ‘Certainly, it wasn’t enforced any more, I was told, and so they asked me if I was still interested in racing for Ireland,’ says Hutchinson. ‘Remember, I’d always originally wanted to represent Ireland internationally, so I said yes.’
He wasn’t ever agonizing over whether to give up his British licence to take out an Irish racing licence, then?
‘Not at all. Cycling Ireland had said that they were happy to have me, I had the nationality, and I clearly wasn’t about to be representing GB internationally any time soon, so why wouldn’t I do it?’ No one from the British or Irish cycling establishments has ever raised an eyebrow, he says, and neither would he expect them to. ‘None of it’s really an issue,’ Hutchinson continues. ‘I think that in any of the home nations at the Commonwealth Games there’s quite a bit of fluidity: you find people from England with a Northern Irish background who represent Northern Ireland, or people living in Ireland with a Northern Irish background representing Northern Ireland.
‘And I’ll always remember at the 2006 Commonwealth Games watching Shane Sutton [an Australian] wearing a Scottish jacket to hold up Chris Hoy at the start of the kilo [1-kilometre time trial], and then the next rider up would be Jason Queally, and Shane would put an English jacket on to hold him up! Yet at the time he was actually the Welsh coach, so I think he’d grasped the fluidity of it all …’
On the theme of international competition, ‘Doctor Hutch’ is perhaps less well known as the three-time winner of the Brompton World Championships. The annual race, duked out between competitors on bikes built by the British folding-bike brand, is raced on the Goodwood motor circuit in West Sussex, and involves riders – dressed in business attire – running to their Bromptons and unfolding them before starting on their four laps of the circuit. Like time trialling, it’s a peculiarly British form of racing, although the 2008 edition did attract Lance Armstrong’s former US Postal teammate Roberto Heras from Spain, who was so disappointed to finish second (to Britain’s Alastair Kay) that he returned in 2009 to make sure he won it, which he did.
Hutchinson was second to Heras that year, then won it in 2011, and Hutchinson has dominated the competition ever since. There was no suggestion that it was going to be any different in 2014, provided he actually made it to the start line; he was just awaiting a phone call to find out whether he was going to be heading to Glasgow instead.
‘The Brompton world champs clash with the Commonwealth Games in 2014,’ he explains, glumly, and I’m left seriously contemplating which event he’d rather ride.