A humble little report from the Smithfield Nocturne

[Update: Moved to the front page because PodiumCafe heartily approves of reports of domestic pro racing from around the world.]

On Saturday evening, after a nice long ride through the wilds of south Essex, my friend and I high tailed it into London for the Smithfield Nocturne, an elite criterium around the perimeter of Smithfield market (which sells meat) in the City. It featured several well known names in its field of 60, including trackies Rob Hayles and Ed Clancy, national crit champion Dean Downing and Katusha's Ben Swift, (also of Team Red Shorts ;) who proved very popular. All the top domestic teams were in attendance, including the ever suave Rapha Condor, Halfords, Candi TV (on Pinarello Princes in white and pink :O~......) and Plowman Craven.

Before the pros had their turn, there was an amateur support race, which was blitzed by local team London Dynamo. I must say I was very impressed by the turn of speed winner Cam Austin deployed to crack his breakaway partner. Chapeau to him. Here is a photo (none of the photos are great owing to my small and ineffective camera, which is bad in the dark and with moving objects...).

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 There was also a women's race, the watching of which made me feel pretty inadequate. As a point of interest, one of the competitors in this was none other than our sometime contributor Rebecca from ctv. If you're reading this Rebecca, the crazy people shouting for you about 20 metres past the start-finish line were my friend and me.

And so we came to the folding bike race. Hilarious. Competitors, who are supposed to wear office attire, do a le mans start, running to their bikes and unfolding them before setting off on five laps of the course. Some of them were scarily fast actually, but some, like this gentleman, took things at a rather more relaxed pace...

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The meat of the evening came at the end, after further capers such as a fixie 'longest skid' contest (several wipeouts here) and a inter-city firm relay challenge. My photos of the main event are all speed blurs. The average speed must have been whopping as they went totally hell for leather for an hour plus five laps. There were various breakaway attempts, notably by Ben Swift and also Dean Downing, who is on fire at the moment in the Tour Series that's taking place across the UK at the moment. Rapha were also very active with Kristian House, who was fairly prominent in the Tour of Britain last year, and others looking very frisky. Ultimately though, it came down to a sprint from a whittled down pack, which was won by Russell Downing, Dean's brother, ahead of Tony Gibb and Ben Swift.

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I managed to get to the front at the podium ceremony through some skilful elbow deployment. My closeness did mean I got totally drenched in champagne but at least I could finally get some half decent piccies! Geraint Thomas of Barloworld (who won last year) was on hand to present the prizes:

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Grrr, why won't this bottle open?!

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All in all, this was enormously good fun, but I might add the weather was FREEZING! June in Britain...so not nice.