British League of Racing Cyclists

The British League of Racing Cyclists (BLRC) was an association formed in 1942 to promote road bicycle racing in Great Britain. It operated in competition with the National Cyclists' Union, a rivalry which lasted until the two merged in 1959 to form the British Cycling Federation.

The National Cyclists' Union (NCU) had, since the end of the 19th century, banned racing on the roads, fearing the police would ban all cycling as a result. A call for a ban "evoked hardly any opposition because road conditions were such that the possibility of massed racing on the highway was never even envisaged." "The position of cyclists on the roads of England and Wales had not been established and police forces had objected to cyclists racing. Matters came to a head on 21 July 1894 during a timed race on the North Road, then the main road north out of London, in which 50 riders competed with the help of other riders to pace them. A group of riders passed a woman and her horse and carriage at a point about 57 miles from the capital. The horse panicked, the riders fell off and the woman complained to the local police. They in turn banned cycle-racing on their roads."

The NCU administered not only road racing but track racing and ruled that its clubs were to move their races off the road and on to tracks, the forerunners of modern velodromes. Some clubs did but most were too far from any track and so a rebel movement began to organise not massed, paced races but individual competitions against the clock, over standard distances and held out in the countryside, in the early hours and in secret to avoid antagonising the police.

The NCU and what became the Road Time Trials Council eventually became colleagues, each administering its own section of the sport, neither allowing massed racing.

The National Cyclists Union was the international body for cycling in England and Wales and sent teams to the Olympic Games and to world championships. It also licensed riders to compete abroad in races such as Bordeaux–Paris. But teams had to be selected not in races akin to which they were being entered but in competitions held on private roads such as airfields and car-racing courses.

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