MAN CUB

Ethan Vernon rose from the ranks of the GB Cycling Academy to the Olympics and is now set to join Deceuninck-Quick Step’s ‘Wolfpack’ in 2022. Vern Pitt finds out how he did it and how he’s avoided getting his room turned upside-down by his team-mate

- Vern Pitt

Every August the top of the Tumble outside Abergavenny in South Wales plays host to the finale of one of the most prestigious junior races on the British calendar, the Junior Tour of Wales. Reputations are formed here on these exposed upper slopes. It’s no coincidence that the fastest up it at this year’s race, Max Poole, has been signed to DSM’s development squad for 2022.

The pros have battled here too. Italian Edoardo Zardini still holds the KOM he set on his way to Tour of Britain stage victory at the top in 2014.

But on the mild Sunday morning of 11 July, the Tumble saw perhaps its most hotly contested battle – that for the title of ‘Best Ethan’ in the British track squad.

“We were racing each other up the Tumble at the holding camp for the Olympics, which probably wasn’t the best prep,” recalls Ethan Vernon. “I’m not sure if he was racing me but I was going quite hard and he wouldn’t give me a pull then he just tried attacking me for the town sign at the top,” he says, with a little mock outrage. “But I rolled him for that.”

As any cyclist knows, bragging rights are very nearly as valuable as actual victories and while Hayter may have won a myriad of pro races in 2021, it’s Vernon that takes this particular crown. It was payback, he says, for Hayter stealing second place, and ‘Best Ethan’ crown, in the omnium behind then world champion Benjamin Thomas by one point at a Berlin track meet earlier in the year.