To what extent does cycling need myth? The ICHC has, since its inception in 1990, set out to question accepted factual history. Its successes have been significant and it seems appropriate that as the conference ‘comes of age’, it does so on the 150th anniversary and on the native ground of the oft claimed ‘invention’ of the front-driven velocipede, an anniversary that is now discredited at academic level, but is still ‘live’ in the public mind. It is not the only one. Almost all cycling myths live on in popular accounts regardless of revisionism. Once they have been established they seem almost impossible to eliminate.

The nature of myth and constructed history for popular consumption has been a topic of academic debate since the rise of the theme park and costume drama as significant disseminators of popular history in the 1980s. It was an interesting coincidence that the first ICHC was organised at the close of a decade that more or less opened with the publication of Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory (1979) and then had seen the publications of works such as Hobsbawm and Trevor-Roper The Invention of Tradition (1983), Patrick Wright On Living in An Old Country (1984), David Lowenthal The Past is a Foreign Country (1986) and a host of others, including the polemic by Robert Hewison The Heritage Industry (1987). In all of these works, in spite of their questioning stance, there is an underlying acceptance that myth is both an embedded part of culture and a saleable commodity.

This paper does not set out to enter the debates surrounding the sequence of historical events, but rather considers the nature of myth as it relates to cycling. By exploring the constructs of the heroic individual, the seminal invention and the machine in use, it examines the nature of popular history and the development of simple, linear narratives punctuated by events as a key tool of understanding.