Graham Webb

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Graham Webb was a British racing cyclist who won the world amateur road race championship in 1967. Replying to a journalist's shouted comment that the last British amateur world road champion had been Dave Marsh 45 years earlier, Webb retorted: "And they'll have to wait another 45 years before another British rider wins." (Interview, Procycling March 2007). His prediction came true and will now remain true because not only did no British man win a world road race championship in the following 45 years but none will now win the amateur championship because rules separating amateurs from professionals have been scrapped.

Graham Webb was born on January 13, 1944, as the youngest of five children brought up by a war widow in a slum in Birmingham, England. He was given the last rites twice as a child before gaining his health.

He got his first bike when he was eight and soon enjoyed going not only on long rides but rides of such length that they were beyond him. He began riding from Birmingham to Gloucester and back, to see a relative, and persisted until he could do it without literally falling into a ditch from exhaustion.

"I just enjoyed doing it," he said. "I enjoyed suffering, I suppose. I still do." (Cycling Heroes, Les Woodland, Springfield Books UK, 1994).

When he entered his first race at 16, a 25-mile solo ride against the clock, he turned up unaware of what he was supposed to do. Both shy and not understanding why competitors were starting separately instead of together, he waited until someone called him. When someone did, he was late for his time slot and the extra time was added as a penalty.

"I'd got a T-shirt and a pair of cut-off jeans and some tennis pumps," he said. "I was watching them get into this racing gear and eventually I got fed up with all these blokes changing and I thought 'When's this race going to start?' It should have started at six o'clock and these blokes were still getting changed. I didn't know it was every minute a bloke off.

"So I thought bugger this and I rode up to the start. Well, they pushed me off and I was 10 minutes late starting and I thought I had to catch all the blokes in front of me to win the race. I changed into top gear straight away on this old Hercules Harlequin and I knocked my pump off the down tube and I had to wait for the cars to come past, then turn round and pick my pump up.

"I quickly caught someone and waited for him. And he was telling me 'clear off, clear off' - very unsociable, I thought. I rode on, went round the turn in the road, came back; and the chain jumped off between the block [the rear gear sprockets] and the frame. So I had to get off the bike, and I'd got a whole tool kit with me, spanner, oil can, cloth for cleaning my hands and so on, and this was wrapped round my seat tube with a spare inner tube. I had to undo the back wheel, put the chain on, do up the wheel nuts, put everything behind the seat tube and carry on." (Cycling Heroes)

The following Thursday evening he went to his club meeting as usual and, as usual, stood painfully shy to one side. Eventually some asked if he was Graham Webb. Because if he was, he was the winner of the race. He had ridden the 25 miles in 1hr 1min 31sec and, without the penalty of the late start and without the mechanical trouble, he would have broken the hour on an ordinary sports bike. At the time, to ride 25 miles in less than an hour was still the dream of most experienced cyclists.

Webb spent the next years riding other races against the clock, which he now says was a waste of his talent and his time. When he rode massed-start events on the road, he won so often that it became boring. Attempts to ride well in the British national track team, he said, were hindered by the team's persistent lack of morale and ambition.

In 1966, he and his wife sold all they owned and moved to Hilversum, where a Dutch journalist and race organiser called Charles Ruys had offered to find him a club and accommodation.

In 1967 Webb crashed over a river bank in his first Dutch race, a semi-classic called the Omloop van de Baronie, and finished 16th dripping mud and slime. After that he began winning regularly, often lapping the field more than once on round-the-houses circuits.

His attempts at the world track championship in 1967 came to nothing and he trained between 200 and 300km a day for the road race which followed a week later. In that he got into the important breakaway of the day. But when he dropped back to help a fellow British rider, Peter Buckley, up to the front, a handful of riders had broken away.

Webb led the chase to get up to them, dropping Buckley again in the process, and took a short lead in a late corner and accelerated clear to win alone. He confesses to worrying whether he had caught all the fugitives and how much of a fool he would look if someone had already won.

Webb turned professional after that for the Mercier team that included Raymond Poulidor and another French star, Jean Stablinski. But things started going wrong from the moment a shipping strike stranded him in Sardinia, where he had been training, forcing him to miss the team's first race. Then he had mechanical trouble in the Omloop Het Volk, followed by knee pain in Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne. By the time he was fit to ride Paris-Nice, the team's leaders had so much abandoned him that he found himself alone in the rain at the end of the first stage and had to leave his bike in a bar while a spectator gave him a lift home.

Webb rode a further year as a professional but without success. He opened a bar and displayed his world champion's rainbow jersey there. But when it became dirty from cigarette smoke, and as depression rose over what could have been, Webb took it down and threw it in the fire.

He worked after that on the docks in Ghent, as a crane operator. He never lived again in Britain, saying he was glad to leave and that it had too many memories of abuse and poverty.

He raced successfully as an amateur, especially on the track, but came close to dying when his aorta burst while he was riding at Ghent. Restored to close to normal health, he is a regular figure at bike races in Belgium. His two links with his former country are his willingness to help British riders trying to race in Belgium (although he says the British cycling federation never replied to his offer to work without pay as its permanent representative there) and his passion for MG-B sports cars, which he drives from his home at Wachtebeke north of Ghent.