Formerly known as Pete the Cyclist

I time travelled yesterday for some 51 minutes and 32 seconds.

That will certainly sound like an outrageous and wholly implausible claim to everyone but hear me out.

It was midday in a local town and I was caught in the worst traffic congestion that I had ever experienced in that place. Rather than just enter the queue and take my chance for perhaps an hour or more in the crawling mass I decided to find a parking space, pay the 60 pence for the next sixty minutes and grab a coffee.

I was sure that this would give enough time for the congestion to sort itself out.

It had been a year or more since I had frequented a cycling themed establishment run by a former cycling acquaintance and as it was the nearest coffee servery to where I had left the car the decision of venue was pretty easy.

Gary and his wife had set up Cafe Velo as a new venture a few years ago now.

 Cafe Velo, Beverley, East Yorkshire

In his youth he had been a very accomplished amateur racing cyclist and the Pro Ranks may have beckoned but at a time in the British scene when the prospect of making a living on the bike was very far away from the present day opportunities in sponsorship and commercial endorsement terms.

In order to make ends meet it was imperative to have a daytime job and race as an amateur.


My time travel was facilitated by Gary in that he knew me from my involvement, way back, in the sport of cycling rather than from anything else that I have done in my 56 years on the planet.

I thought that in the mid 1980's I had offended him mortally by outsprinting him to the line in a competitive sprint.

In my mind it was a glorious moment, one of those rare full gas sprints when you feel immensely strong and almost immortal.

I should clarify that
1) it was not in a race and
2) the line was in fact a road sign marking the boundary of a nearby town and
3) there was a group of us out on a wednesday afternoon ride which inevitably involved a few adversarial manouevres fuelled by a coffee and cake stopover at a popular roadside eatery.

The intervening decades had, in my minds eye, elevated this one incident to the equivalent of a Gold Medal contest at the Olympics, the winning of the final Tour de France Stage on the Champs Elysee or any one of the great European Monuments Races such as Paris Roubaix or Lombardia.

Turns out that my pipping him at the post, so to speak, had earned me the respect of Gary and upon entering his Cafe yesterday afternoon I was transported back to the 1980 as he welcomed me back as he knew me.....Pete the Cyclist.

Don't get me wrong. I would not live my life in any other way to that I have been blessed with but that brief and transient phase of my life has some value and influence on all things that followed.

The conversation covered all of the names of former bike racers and events of that bygone era.

I could not recall some of them as Gary was a significantly more accomplished cyclist than I could ever have hoped for. He competed against all of the great and good such as Boardman, Elliott, Herety, Sherwen, Doyle and many others. I was more in the third and fourth tiers with just one win to my name.

In spite of this vast difference in abilities, skills and successes our participation in that great sport was and continues to be a great and rich seam of memories and anecdotes.

We were so engrossed in our collective recollections that the time passed by effortlessly.

In fact, at the arrival of the 32 seconds past that 51st Minute I had to say my farewells and make a dash to the car before the notoriously keen town centre Parking Enforcement Officer had a chance to enter my details into his notebook.

Yep, hard to believe this was me 36 years ago. Still have that machine