THE SPORTIVE REVIVAL

After a turbulent two years, the UK sportive scene is set to come back into full swing. Paul Knott speaks to those at the forefront hoping the Covid-19 road bump will prove an unwitting launchpad

- Paul Knott

Somewhere, possibly in a lost shipping container, possibly in a corner of a factory in the Far East, sit boxes of finishers’ medals for the 2020 Etape du Dales. They are forgotten relics of a sportive season that never was, their purpose unfulfilled. Trinkets of goals never achieved, and smiles never cracked.

“We all got caught out,” says Etape du Dales organiser Nigel Bishop, recalling the effect the pandemic had not just on his 2020 event but the summer months, when cyclists of all types take to their bikes to pit themselves not against others as much as the clock and the terrain just for the hell of it.

For Bishop the pandemic caused a raft of logistical headaches, postponements and cancellations – he never saw those finishers’ medals he ordered, the ones we presume are missing – before his event’s delayed return in August 2021. “I’ve organised it for the Rayner Foundation now for eight years, and it’s probably the most stressful one that we’ve had to deal with, and all the fallout from it did make it a very stressful time,” he recalls.

Having been “caught out” by the onset of the pandemic, a booming domestic holiday market nearly saw him, and his riders, well… caught short.