Well way back in the 1880s the bicycle was the fastest thing on the road. Admittedly a horse could out-gallop it but only for a short distance. If you were into serious 'A-to-B-ing', then a good man on a bicycle was the boss!

 

Naturally enough (as today) people with more muscle than sense wanted to see who was fastest and so Cycle Racing on the Highway started. At first it was more akin to what we now know as road racing where all the competitors started together and him who got there first won.

 

Eventually some deluded bright spark invented the infernal combustion engine, fitted it to a carriage, and the motor car was born. At first a wise government, realising that nobody could ever be trusted to drive one of these new-fangled items at more than 4 mph, set a realistic speed limit for them.

 

So a situation arose in which people in horseless carriages started to complain about being terrorised by men, racing about on bicycles!

 

Further, those who could afford this motor car thing, had considerable pull with the gendarmary and so it came about that the aforementioned fuzz declared that if they caught any groups of cyclists RACING on the Highway they would be due for the chop!

 

This upset the Cycling hierarchy of the day so much that it was decided to take all racing off the road and only compete on closed circuits. Events of all distances even up to 24 hours duration, were thus transferred to tracks.

 

However there were those who still wanted to pursue their sport on the road. One of these, FT Bidlake by name, thought up a cunning plan. If each rider were to be dispatched separately and just timed over the course, he wouldn't be seen to be racing, just going about his normal business a bit quick like! Then the person covering the course in the shortest time could be (secretly) declared the winner.

 

So Time Trialling came into being.

 

As with our British Cycling affiliation, being a member of Cycling Time Trials allows us to enter time trialling events under the UEA CC banner, something which is fantastic news for the club, given then vast amounts of Club 10's and similar events across Norfolk.