This year’s resurrected National 24-hour Championship time trial looks to be in healthier shape than ever, says new organiser Tim Smith.
Smith, who is a Cycling TIme Trials (CTT) director and secretary for the CTT’s Manchester District, stepped up last autumn after the longtime previous organisers, Jon and Sam Williams, stepped down from the role.
Since then Smith has registered the event, held on the roads of Cheshire over the weekend of July 26-27 – as a qualifier for ultra-racing’s blue riband Race Across America.
The event will also mark the final ever race for ultra-riding legend Chris ‘Hoppo’ Hopkinson. It will be his 51st 24-hour race for the former British Best All-Rounder, who has won many national medals both in CTT events and under the World Ultra Cycling Association banner over a 27-year career.
Said Hopkinson: “For a long time, I have tried to promote long-distance cycling, and I was worried [the National 24] was going to disappear. I’m very, very glad it’s not. I think Tim being on board is a fantastic thing. It’d be a great shame to lose it.
“It’s the only one now,” he added, “and it’s unique.”
Chris Hopkinson at the RAAM
(Image credit: Chris Hopkinson)
The riding the National 24 would be a neat bookend to his career, Hopkinson explained – it was, after all, the first race of that distance he was persuaded to do, back in 2001.
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“Jim Turner, who ran the race at the time, came and saw me race, and he said, ‘You look as if you seem to get faster the longer you go’,” Hopkinson says.
“He said, ‘I want you to come and race my 24-hour. Everybody laughed at me and said, you can’t. You can’t do a 24 hour. Don’t be silly. And I went there and I did 441 miles and got fourth.”
The rest is very much history, with Hopkinson going on to become the first Briton to finish the RAAM solo, and becoming a board member – and later president – of WUCA.
And for new ’24’ organiser Smith, further plans are afoot. While it was saving the event that initially prompted him to take it on and by his own admission he probably won’t be doing it forever, he has already begun to garner event partners – cycling weather app MyWindsock is on board – and is working on keepsakes for finishers too. Small ways of making the event more visible and more attractive.
Smith wants to open it up to as many people as possible and says: “Anyone who does it, regardless of whether you do 500-plus miles or 200 miles, has the respect of anyone who knows anything about time trialling.”
‘Massive’ response to new CTT website
With its new website having been in place for more than four months now Cycling Time Trials (CTT) is continuing to add to the platform and says its new features have been well received.
CTT chair Andrea Parish said the new site had “massively outperformed” the old one: “In less than the first three months this year we exceeded the total number of visits for the whole of 2024 on our legacy platform. Our average engagement time has improved by over 600%, so yes, I’m absolutely delighted.”
The site was launched to broadly positive reception back in January as part of a rebrand that the body, which oversees time trialling in the UK, hoped would help attract new blood to the sport.
As with the previous site, the new one offers everything from an event calendar through entry to results, but in a far more joined up way and with club event entry and results on offer too.
The new site, for example, enables users to search a course and see not only course details but previous events on it and their results.
“It’s seen great adoption with more and more clubs and riders taking advantage of it,” Parish said. “Entering events has never been easier – I now just enter via my phone and use Google Pay – just a few clicks and that’s it. Super easy to find events too.”
There were also two major race-results-based developments in the pipeline that were to be launched imminently, Parish said. Watch this space.
