Two wheels good

The men’s Olympic road race runs out from and then back to the centre of London but on Box Hill in Surrey it dos eight circuits of the Hill. This is the place to see the race.

Which is obviously what the thousands who lined the route thought. The crowd was divided into two broad camps, those who were there to get close to an Olympic event, and cycling fans. You could tell the cycling fans, they had come on their bikes, in lycra. Middle aged men should not wear lycra, no matter how sport appropriate it is, it’s not age-appropriate. The only way to make a middle aged bloke with a gut look worse than he would naked is to put him in a skin tight lycra tee shirt and shorts that are brightly coloured.

The event itself was breathtaking. Just as you have no appreciation of what a horse race is like until you have stood against the barriers and felt the ground tremble as the horses thunder home, so you have no idea of the speed and scale of a mass cycling road race until you’ve seen it up close, and it does get close, with cyclists passing inches from the tip of your nose and the wind from the rushing peleton rippling flags and banners as they sped past.

Encouragement came in cheers and applause for the riders, as well as good luck messages of encouragement scrawled on the tarmac. I’m not sure what they say about Britain in Iran, but when the Iranian cyclist, who was a little behind the pack on his own, goes home his image of the Great British Public will be loads of people clapping and bellowing ‘come on Iran!’. We may not like their nuclear programme, but we like a plucky cyclist.

Also starting to wonder if there is some sort of nickname index for how posh a sport is. Basically, if your name is shortened and ends in ‘…ers’, it’s a posh sport, like cricket (Tuffers). If it ends in ‘…o’, it’s a bit less posh, like cycling (Wiggo, Cavo). And if it ends in ‘..ker’, you play football.