The relationship of cycling to sport and competition is long and binding. Cycle sport was established in the brief ascendency of the velocipede bicycle in the late 1860s and was to become almost the defining feature of cycling in the 1870s and 80s. This was the period of the high (or ‘ordinary’) bicycle, a machine gendered male and conceptualised around increasing speed over all other considerations. In the UK of the early 1890s cycle competition on the public road had become so toxic to other road users that its own legislative bodies moved to ban it, establishing the more discreet, but equally competitive ‘time trialing’. This paper is in the form of a historical overview of the relationship of cycling to competition and sport during seismic changes to the nature of the activity on the public road in the UK during the 20th century, as it went progressively down market while becoming a genuine form of utility transport, its subsequent eclipse by automobilism and its resurgence in the 21st. This paper considers the legacy of what it argues is an unholy alliance between cycling and competitive sport framed up in the gender conventions and social class structures of the 19th century, which inadvertently contrived, and continues to contrive against cycling in the UK (at least) as a near universal day to day form of utility transport. It takes, as a case study in the present day, the hosting of the UCI World Championships in Glasgow in 2023 and the ‘Festival of Cycling’ that was created around it as an exemplar of the current (mis)understanding of cycling that is a direct inheritance of the way cycling was conceived some 160 years earlier.

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