Barry Hoban blazed trail before British cycling's boom years

Times

21-04-2025

For 34 years, Barry Hoban was Britain's most prolific stage-winner at the Tour de France. He won sprints, he won in the low Alps and the last of his eight victories, at Bordeaux in 1975, with the great Francesco Moser two places behind him, came eight years after his first.
Considering the circumstances of that first victory, though, Hoban — who died on Sunday, aged 85 — might have been forgiven for turning his back on the race altogether. The 1967 Tour de France has a morbid place in cycling history. On the 13th stage from Marseille to Carpentras, Tom Simpson — a winner of Il Lombardia, Milan-San Remo and the Tour of Flanders, at that point Britain's pre-eminent cyclist — died near the summit of Mont Ventoux.
Simpson was competing in an era when water intake was restricted and alcohol pilfered from local bars because, by a certain point, it was the only liquid going. Riders would inject morphine directly into their legs to dull the pain of racing, take amphetamines to counteract the soporific force of the morphine and then sleeping pills to come down from it all at the end of the day.
His death was the beginning of cycling's long reckoning with drugs. And in the grief and shock of its immediate aftermath, Hoban — who later married Simpson's widow, Helen, and was stepfather to his daughters, Jane and Joanne — was the man required to pay homage.
The 1967 Tour was ridden in national teams — rather than trade, as it is now — and there is some debate as to whether Hoban or Vin Denson, another of Simpson's team-mates, was the peloton's original nominee for victory on the 14th stage to Sète. But that is what happened: Hoban was allowed to escape and to claim a peculiar and painful victory.
Thereafter, though, he won regularly and free from the caveat of tragedy. In a 17-year professional career, he won 27 races, eight of which were stages of the Tour de France, a mark only surpassed by Mark Cavendish in 2009. He is one of only three Britons — including Cavendish and Geraint Thomas — to have won consecutive stages at the race.
In 1968, he claimed the 19th stage to Sallanches, a 200km course with more than 5,000m of ascent, and received a cow named Estelle as prize. 'What are you going to do with it?' Hoban was asked at the finish. 'Jump on its back,' he replied. Instead, he is reported to have given the heifer to a local farmer and kept her bell as souvenir. A contemporary report from The Guardian described it as 'the fifth and finest stage victory ever achieved by a Briton' at the Tour. 'It was in the mountains, which is every rider's ambition; it was with an uncompromising lead of four minutes; it was after a solitary ride of 73 miles.'
Raised near Wakefield, he would show off to his friends by keeping pace with the bus along the four-mile route to school and he honed his talents at the Calder Clarion club. To begin with, his gift was for sprinting.
'I knew I could always sprint,' he told Cycling Weekly in 2020. '[But] in Yorkshire if you couldn't climb a hill you couldn't ride a race. Because the races all went up hills. And of course . . . at the end of the season, there were hill-climbs. I won hill-climbs up the Old Chevin, up Holme Moss, so I realised I could climb. I could sprint. I was pretty good on the track. I was British national pursuit champion twice. I was a very good all-round rider.'
A team-mate of the Frenchman Raymond Poulidor at Gan-Mercier for much of his career, he beat Eddy Merckx to win Gent-Wevelgem in 1974. He was convinced, though, that his best ride was at Paris-Roubaix, where he finished third in 1972.
'I was right up there with everyone. [Eddy] Merckx, [Roger] De Vlaeminck, [Eric] Leman, all the top-notch riders going through the Arenberg Forest,' he said. 'You never want to puncture in the Arenberg — I did. I lost two minutes before a team-mate gave me his wheel. I went, and I rode. Boy — I was passing people as though they were stopped.' Until he needed to replace his rear wheel. 'I put my arm in the air, the team car screeched to a halt, I got a back wheel. So I had another chase again. By the time I got back, De Vlaeminck had gone.
'I know perfectly well, that day, without that puncture, it would have been a different story. I probably spent about 50k of that race chasing to get back on — I still finished third.'
Hoban was the only British rider to finish Paris-Roubaix in 1972. This year, there were 12. A record 34 are spread across World Tour teams this season. British cycling has certainly had boom years since but it owes a lot, too, to Hogan and the legacy of his buckled wheel.