Forged In Sheffield

The city in South Yorkshire can’t stop churning out top-rate cycling talent. Hugh Gladstone finds out why

- Hugh Gladstone

Joey Walker doesn’t have any trouble finding training partners. Whenever the national circuit race champion wants to go out for a ride, he picks up his phone and simply fires out a message on a group chat. “We’ve now got a WhatsApp group with about 12 of us in,” he explains.

There’s nothing unusual about that. What is notable, however, is the calibre of rider in this local clique. “We’ve got Ben Swift, Connor Swift, Russ [Downing], ‘Mountain Bike Tom [Stewart]’, Dan Pearson, you know what I mean?” he says, trailing off his list of names. “It’s just nice to get out with other pros who have a like-minded approach to training.”

Walker and his contemporaries are just the latest in a long line of road cycling talent that has emerged from the area around Sheffield and Doncaster. There is a lineage here that dates back right through Jonny Wainwright, Tom Simpson, Pete Ryalls, Doug Bond and Brian Trippett to the Wilson brothers. But at least since his father Chris Walker was racing with the likes of Malcolm Elliott, Simeon Hempsall, Phil Axe, John Tanner, Mark Walsham, John Charlesworth, Wayne Randle, David Baker, Gary Speight and Kevin Dawson in the 1980s and 90s, this area has been churning out champions by the bucket load.

Others who’ve followed after this include Dean Downing, Graham Briggs, Shaun Snodden, Adam Blythe, Penny Rowson, Jake Tanner and Lizzy Banks. The list is far from definitive and evermore expandable depending on how far into Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire or West Yorkshire you’re prepared to accept the local scene extends. But of the four most recent men’s national road race champions, three of them are very much products of the area.