Jock Wadley

John Borland (Jock) Wadley (1914 – March 1981) was an English journalist whose magazines and reporting opened Continental cycle racing to fans in Britain. Wadley covered 18 Tours de France from 1956. He worked for the British weekly, The Bicycle and then started and edited the monthlies Coureur (later Sporting Cyclist) and International Cycle Sport. He also wrote a number of books.

Wadley began cycling with the Colchester Rovers club when he was 14. He and a friend, Alf Kettle, were between the towns of Kelvedon and Coggeshall when they took a wrong turning into a farm track by moonlight, riding by the light of acetylene lamps. Kettle called Wadley "Willy", because it was what all new members were called. He said it was "like the Tour de France". It was the first time Wadley had heard of the race, which was still in the era of daily stages that started at dawn and rode on unsurfaced roads. He wanted to know more. He went to the world track championships in Paris when he was 19 and came home starry-eyed over riders like Jeff Scherens and Lucien Michard. He ordered the daily paper L'Auto, which organised the Tour, from a newsagent in Colchester. The man warned him it cost 1½d (1p or about 3 US cents) and that the cost was extravagant.

Wadley joined The Bicycle soon after it started, in February 1936, and became the magazine's foreign correspondent. The paper opened in opposition to Cycling, to counter Cycling's perceived establishment views, which included not covering massed racing on the open road after the Second World War and giving what some readers saw as little attention to professional cycling, such as the Tour de France. Cycling was originally dismissive of a breakaway organisation, the British League of Racing Cyclists and campaigned against it and did little to cover its races; The Bicycle saw itself as neither for or against the BLRC but saw massed-start racing an exciting part of cycle-racing. The Bicycle appeared on Tuesday rather than the Friday of its rival.

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