IT was an inspiring moment and it came at around 5pm. Eddie Richards, the Merseyside Wheelers multi-time trial champion, was hurtling towards us at 30mph plus, head on one side, sweat streaming off him, his legs pounding a massive gear, racing flat out in the closing minutes of a 12-hour TT.
I stood there dumbstruck that summer afternoon in 1964, as I realised he’d been racing for over 11 hours.
Someone had said; let’s see how Eddie is doing in the Liverpool TTA “12”.
Why not. And it got me thinking back to the start of our day. Eddie had started the “12” at 6am; about the time we were loading the bikes onto the roof rack, the Merseyside Wheelers road racing team bound for Shrewsbury, to ride a 50-mile road race.
He’d already covered 100 miles before our event had even started.
One of our guys was placed in the top six. I was in the second group to finish.
I felt very tired but fulfilled. I’d done my best in a race which had been full of attacks and had lasted about two hours. It had felt much longer than that.
So we were done. But Eddie wasn’t. He was still out there, six hours into one of the best rides of his life.
Except we weren’t even thinking of him at that moment, had not given the “12” a moment’s thought, so consumed were we by our own endeavours.
We lay around at the dressing rooms, revived ourselves with tea and cake. Got changed, loaded up the bikes, drove off. We had lunch somewhere.
It was 3.30. And someone said, let’s go back via Chester and cheer on Eddie. Oh, yeah. Eddie!
Jeeezus! 10 hours. Racing for 10 hours. Still not finished!
So it was we located the 15 mile finishing circuit, and waited for Eddie to come storming into view. To be able to ride that fast after over 11 hours hard riding – it blew my mind.
The realisation that he, indeed, the entire field in the 12 had clocked up nearly six times the distance we had covered in some two hours, made our efforts feel puny by comparison.
The experience was a revelation for this young road racer, providing different perspectives on the demands of two distinctly different disciplines.
The road race, ridden at a tempo quite often out of your comfort zone, is dictated by tactics and bursts of sheer high speed. You ride in a closely packed bunch, or in smaller groups as the race splits up. You need cornering and descending skills, climbing prowess.
If you are to break clear alone, you need time trialling skills, the special toughness required to outpace the rest, to escape alone and race ahead on big gears, unaided, in the manner being demonstrated by Eddie Richards.
For the time trial is one rider alone against the watch, able to sustain the effort for hour after hour.
Some riders are more suited to one than the other.
Eddie Richards gave a faultless demonstration of the art, and won the Liverpool TTA championship that day, a title he would win three times during the 1960s.
I often recall that moment and write about it here as a tribute to the memory of a clubmate and friend, Eddie George Richards, who died in July 2011, aged 72.
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