Jerry wrote:
> Well of course, for UK you should be looking for world time trial champions, not
> track events. As to US, what happened to Major Taylor and all his
> contemporaries in the late 19th and early 20th century? Perhaps UCI only lists
> the world champions since the formation of UCI. But even more recently I'm
> pretty sure Marty Nothstein has won at least a couple of world championships.
> And I certainly thought Sheila Young, Sue Novara and Rebecca Twigg had a few
> world championships between them.
The three greatest professional time trial events as sanctioned by the world cycling body, in the pre-1983 period were: Grand Prix des Nations in France, Coppa Baracchi in Italy and the Gran Premio di Lugano in Switzerland. Check out the results, I did and couldn't even find a single placing by a Brit and only the 1983 result by Greg Lemond for the USA. The actual Time Trial World Championship postdates the CR period so is off-topic.
As for Major Taylor, he is one of the 4 pre-WWI American World Champions that I listed. Nothstein is far post-1983. I admit that I did not go look through the women's results.
The UCI website lists all professional World Championship results since the inception of World Championships. It does not however list all of the Amateur results on their website, so if anybody was so inclined to search them up, they could probably find some other World Champions. But then again, these amateur distinctions were never considered on a par with the Professional results in any country where there were no obstacles to turning pro. If all you want to do is find World Champions podiums, I can personally claim a third place finish in the "Ice Tricycling World Championship" held on a frozen lake in Ottawa Canada in 1982. The organizers of the event informed the UCI of the event requesting sanctioning and awarded a rainbow jersey to the winner. This does not however make the results relevant. This search for justification of the lack of significant results by Britons and Americans reminds me of when I spoke to Jonathan Boyer back in 1983 about the RAAM Race Across America. Boyer knew that the company I worked for had Lon Haldeman as one of our spokesmen. He scoffed at RAAM as a race between failed racers. Two years later, in 1985, he entered the race and blew away all the competition without any specific training on his first attempt!
--
Steven Maasland
Moorestown, NJ