News: Pedal Club AGM & Lunch

The Club’s 2024 AGM was a quiet and non controversial meeting which saw Bill Houghton take over from Graham Temple as President.

News: Pedal Club AGM & Lunch
January 2024 | by Chris Lovibond

The Club’s 2024 AGM was a quiet and non controversial meeting which saw Bill Houghton take over from Graham Temple as President. Bill is a respected and long standing member; the Club is confident that it has found a capable pair of hands to guide it through the year.

The past twelve months have been a good period for recruitment with eleven new members, all with excellent credentials in the bike world, but perhaps the most notable of these is the least well known. Hope Inglis is by far the Club’s youngest member and at eighteen years of age has hardly had time to become famous, although she is an active competitor and a cyclo cross international, but her outstanding quality is that she made her first steps in cycling politics at the tender age of fifteen.

Dissatisfied with the unequal treatment of women in the sport, she wrote to the then CEO of British Cycling, Brian Facer, and her letter was good enough to achieve an in person meeting with Facer himself. Unsurprisingly, this did not result in speedy radical reform, but Hope is currently a member of BC’s Road Commission and, having started so young, it seems likely that an influential career lies ahead.

The Club does not normally have a guest speaker at its AGM, but this year was an exception. Leigh Timmis is an exponent of the current trend for ultra-endurance riding. As an hors d’oeuvre, he began with a seven year round the world trip, which might be described as ‘touring’, but on returning, he found a desire for something more competitive and set his sights on the TransEurope record. This is a ‘Guinness’ record which he achieved in 2018, riding from the Atlantic coast of Portugal to the Russian Urals, a distance of 3,956 miles, which he completed in 16 days, 10 hours, beating the existing record by the wide margin of 8 days 8 hours.

There are many facets to success in an enterprise like this. Apart from the physical effort there is the financial side, and the fact that he managed to get sufficient sponsorship for the necessary team of helpers seems a major achievement just on its own.

Individuals attempt records for many reasons – some want to demonstrate new techniques, many pros must be interested in the money, others want to inscribe their names among the greats on an old established record. For Leigh himself the main interest is psychological – a journey of self discovery and self identification. Perhaps this is the reason many of us compete on bikes – it’s just that for most of us our targets are far less ambitious.

The meeting was again held at the Civil Service Club in Whitehall and was attended by forty three members and guests.