Barry Hoban

My cousin Cerys messaged me to say Barry Hoban, one of the very brightest lights of British cycling in the ’60s and ’70s, had passed away. They were neighbors.

I discovered this last time I was in Wales, that she was Hoban’s neighbor, and quite close with the former racer’s wife Helen. At the time, I wasn’t completely sure Cerys knew just how successful an athlete Hoban had been. She knew him as a sweet old man, a good neighbor, and she was concerned, because he’d been quite ill over the last few years.

He was 85.

There was a time when Hoban had won more Tour de France stages (8) than any other Britton, a record that was eventually broken by Mark Cavendish (35 wins, the most by any rider). For comparison, Chris Froome, who won 7 Grand Tours, only ever won 7 TdF stages. So, Hoban is in that company.

Of course, his cycling story is, in many ways, inseparable from that of Tom Simpson, who died on Stage 13 to Mont Ventoux, during the 1967 Tour. Simpson was going to be the next big British star, but a combination of alcohol, amphetamines and dehydration killed him in his prime. The peloton, reluctant to continue racing the next day, decided to let a British rider win, and that was Barry Hoban. As I said, Hoban would go on to win seven more Tour Stages, and two in the Vuelta. He continued racing into the ’70 and was a regular podium finisher in the sport’s biggest races, Paris-Roubaix, Ghent-Wevelgem, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, the Vuelta, and more.

In 1969, Hoban married Simpson’s widow, Helen, and after his career he moved to Wales, quite close to the village my family calls home, where he worked with Coventry Cycles, later Coventry Eagle, to manufacture racing bikes, one of them even bearing his name.

I really first learned about Barry Hoban while reading Tom Simpson’s biography, and then the Welsh connection piqued my interest. I even spent a few years trying to find a Newtown-made Coventry Eagle to restore but never succeeded.

When Cerys told me the Hobans lived next door, I didn’t quite know what to say, but it drew two disparate stories together into one. Here was a legendary cyclist, a famous sportsman, whose place in the history of racing I knew, and at the same time, here was an ordinary person, with a modest home in a small-ish town, with my cousin for a neighbor, and neither facet of this story more or less important than the other.

Barry Hoban has passed away. He was a legend and not a legend, and he will be missed by the people who knew him and many who didn’t.