Les West

Les West joined Tunstall Wheelers at the age of 16 and in his first full season won the 1960 North Staffordshire junior road race title. He spent most of his first three seasons competing in and around his native Stoke-on-Trent, but once he ventured further afield, the cycling world soon got to know the name Les West as he went in to become Britain´s best-known road racer in the 1960s and 70s.

West won the 1964 national road race individual 50 miles time trial title and that same year broke the British one-hour track record. After a series of impressive wins in that year, West was selected for the Tokyo Olympics. Unfortunately, he never went to the Games after suffering from phlebitis, and his place was taken by reserve Mike Cowley.

After winning the 1965 amateur road race championship, West had the first of many truly memorable moments in his long career that year when he won the Tour of Britain Milk Race. The following year, West finished second to Eaf Dolman of the Netherlands in the 1966 World Amateur Road Race Championship at Germany’s Nürburgring. Dolman went in to win the 1967 Dutch title but was later stripped of the title because of a doping charge, something West had always suspected during the previous year’s World Championships.

West won both the Milk Race and national road race for a second time in 1967 and then, following the disappointment of 1964, got his chance to go to the Olympics in 1968. Unfortunately, he punctured on the first of eight laps of the road race. After a lengthy two-and-a-half minutes wait for a new machine to arrive he eventually got a replacement, but it was too much for him to make up and West pulled out of the race.

West turned professional in 1969 with the Holdsworth-Campagnolo team. He spent his entire pro career with them and enjoyed more than 50 professional wins, including the three-day Tour of the Isle of Wight, just weeks after joining the paid ranks. West won the national professional road race title in 1970 and 1975, and in the first of those years broke Ken Joy’s 17-year-old record for the 107-mile London-Brighton-London run by over seven minutes. On home soil, at Leicester in 1970, West finished fourth in the World Professional Road Race Championship, three seconds behind the winner, Jempi Monseré of Belgium.

West retired in 1979 but returned to racing as an amateur in 1980 before a second retirement two years later. He got back into the saddle once more several years later to compete in veterans’ races, and he once again enjoyed considerable success. After that, he took up running and competed in the 1989 Potteries Marathon. A telephone engineer by trade, West was one of the original 50 inductees into the British Cycling Hall of Fame in 2009.