Long ago I got my first racing licence. I was surprised that there wasn’t any sort of exam or test. I simply handed over a significant proportion of my student funding, and in return British Cycling sent me a bit of paper and ba-boom! I was a fourth-cat.
At my first race it was clear that there was no exam. The Venn diagram of ‘People who want a fourth-cat racing licence’ and ‘People who are technically competent to ride a bike race’ would have had no overlap whatsoever. There was no ‘dom’ to get to the next level either. There was just a winnowing down until at the end of the season all the survivors were third cats. BC had everyone’s money, and the fourth-cats who didn’t make it were buried in a mass-grave in the Essex countryside.
Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week
I can’t imagine a test would ever happen, but it set me off wondering exactly what a driving test for a pro bike rider might look like. “When I blow my whistle,” the examiner would say from the team car, “I want you to respond as if the race is on and the road has narrowed suddenly in a Belgian village.”
The rider Jonny stops sideways onto the pavement, slaloms through a pavement café, avoids a elderly lady with the Zimmer frame, doesn’t crash into the civic flowerpots, and rejoins the road.
“Good!” says the examiner, “but you forgot to knock a 60kph Spanish neo-pro off his bike when you rejoined the race, so I have to put that down as a minor fault.”
The examiner pulls the car alongside the rider and holds a ‘sticky’ bottle out of the window. The rider takes a quick look behind, grabs the bottle, and hangs as the examiner accelerates and tows him up to 60kph.
“Well,” said the examiner, “You remained stable under acceleration, and you remembered to check behind for a TV moto or a race commissaire. But I’m afraid you didn’t check for TV helicopters. That’s another fault.”
The rider would then need to make sure they threw the bottle back through the window of the car with the spout open so that the examiner would get his mouth soaked in energy drink. There are few enough opportunities for a rider to get one back at whatever bossy boots is driving the car, and they have to learn to take them.
I would hope that the examiner would set up a feed zone on a 60kph descent, manned by a row of inexperienced helpers, swinging musettes like wrecking balls. A rider would pass if they avoided ending up in an ambulance. There’d be a merit mark for taking anything at all. There’d be two merit marks for emerging with the hat, sunglasses and beer of a spectator.
And there would need to be some media tests. There would be basics, like looking sad that you’ve just broken your collarbone and now have to go on holiday instead of riding the Tour of Poland. There would be shooting and editing an Instagram reel to promote the interests of a dodgy Middle-Eastern sponsor.
And there would be a post-race interview test, where you have to cheerfully and sincerely tell the world just how much better a rider than you Tadej Pogačar is without it being obvious that really, secretly, you long to do nothing as much as soak those little tufts of helmet hair in petrol and set fire to them.
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