Rolling Back The Years

With the rise of Zwift and e-racing, Owen Rogers takes a look back to a time when roller racing was a hugely popular cycle sport.

- Owen Rogers

These days many of us claiming to be serious cyclists use Zwift. Not only can it help tune fitness on dark winter nights, but there are races to enjoy. Alone in their pain caves, miles from their rivals, there is nothing virtual about e-racing.

It’s even evolved into a spectator sport, with big screens, roaring crowds, television, plus national and world championships. However, though times and technology have changed drastically, indoor racing is nothing new.

For nearly 20 years from the beginning of the 1930s through one of British cycling’s heydays, when computers were little more than coloured beads on a wire, roller racing was a hugely popular, if slightly eccentric sport.

Events would fill theatres and village halls alike. In the 1940s crowds beleaguered by war were royally entertained by anyone from average clubmen to the sport’s best.

Thanks to Cycling mag

At the beginning of the 1930s this very magazine stoked up the craze. Each January at their Grand All-Rounder Concerts at the Royal Albert Hall,

Cycling magazine would stage races, adding even more impetus when, in 1935, Belgian track world champion Jeff Scherens came over to ride a demonstration event.

And, rather than have its equipment lying idle for the remaining 364 days of the year, the magazine lent their roller sets to event promoters, allowing the sport to grow, if only mainly in the region of its London base.

However, considering its part in promoting the sport, Cycling was strangely quiet when it came to roller racing coverage. Scherens’s display was completely ignored in the post-concert edition, the evening’s competition summed up with a few short lines.