Altitude training in Andorra, turbo sessions in 45°C heat, and a lifetime’s worth of revision have all gone into Charlie Tanfield’s latest bid to join cycling’s history books.
This Thursday, the 28-year-old will attempt to break the UCI Hour Record, a benchmark held by Eddy Merckx, Bradley Wiggins, and most recently Filippo Ganna, whose 56.792km, set in 2022, remains the distance to beat.
For Tanfield, holding the record, and joining the list of greats, is a career dream. “I’ve watched every single attempt in the modern era. I could tell you the way that they rode them, and the splits they were riding to,” he says.
“A lot of things have changed over the years, but the thing that’s stayed the same is the idea that I would do it at some point. I’ve got the opportunity now, this year after the Olympics, to focus on it and give it my best shot.”
A former world and European champion in the team pursuit, and Olympic silver medallist, Tanfield will make his Hour Record attempt inside the velodrome in Konya, Turkey – at 1,200m altitude – as part of a special event organised by British Cycling.
It’s a goal of his that dates back to 2018, he explains over a video call, when he used to pore over the data needed to break Wiggins’s then benchmark with his housemate and team-mate at the time, Dan Bigham.
“Dan would have his spreadsheets and stuff. We’d put in the numbers and fantasise about how fast you could go over the hour. That sounds so sad,” Tanfield laughs, “but it did light a spark in me that it could be a thing I could do in the future.”
(Image credit: Alex Whitehead/SWpix)
Bigham himself would go on to break the record in 2022, then an engineer at Ineos Grenadiers, creating a blueprint for Ganna’s attempt. The Brit’s distance of 55.548km is still a national record.
Have the two friends spoken about Tanfield’s bid? “There’s been a bit of banter,” Tanfield says, but no advice or help; instead he has decided to carve his own path – “I quite like to learn things for myself. It’s quite important that I develop as a rider myself through this process.”
That process began shortly after the Olympics in Paris last August. Used to riding four-minute events, Tanfield began working on extending his threshold power, with his sights set on the Hour.
“My preparation has been a mixture of heat training and altitude, and not as many track sessions as you probably think,” he says.
Earlier this year, he went to Andorra, where he stayed in the apartment of British Cycling coach Cameron Meyer. “I was basically riding down the mountain, training on the turbo trainer, then riding back up the mountain, back up to 2,200m, where I was staying,” Tanfield says.
When he returned to the UK, he then trained inside a heat tent in his back garden. “When the sun’s out it’s pretty hot – it’s like 45 degrees in there,” he says.
“The heat is a massive part of dealing with it… [During the attempt] your core temp starts to get quite high by 40 minutes, 45 minutes, so that’s the make-or-break point at which you either fail or you manage it to the finish,” he adds.
As such, Tanfield will be setting out with a ‘negative split’ strategy, meaning he’ll start below record pace, and then speed up in the second half of his effort. “It doesn’t make sense to go out flatline, because you will just overheat,” he says. “As soon as your core temp gets up to like 38, 39 degrees, you’re losing 20 or so watts off your threshold. It really compromises you.”
When Ganna set his record in October 2022, he did so in Grenchen, Switzerland, on a specially developed, 3D-printed Pinarello Bolide F HR bike, fitted with custom components galore.
Tanfield’s set-up will be similar to the one he rode to team pursuit silver at the Paris Olympics – a Hope-Lotus HB.T bike – plus a new skinsuit.
“Currently it’s quite up in the air,” he says, asked about his target distance. “I’ve done a lot of training on slower kit, so it’s quite hard in your head [to know] what’s going to be race pace, the conditions in Konya – the air density is so much lower – it’s very hard to map that out.”
Still, now with less than 24 hours before he turns his first pedal strokes, Tanfield’s positive he’s in the form of his life.
“It’s a beast, it’s such a hard event that unless you are passionate about it, I really don’t think you would be willing to put yourself through the suffering and the preparation you have to do to actually get to the start line,” he says.
For him, that journey has been “a very rough road”.
“There have been a lot of times where I’ve thought, ‘What the hell am I doing? This is absolutely outrageous.’ It’s so difficult. I cannot describe how hard the mark has been set up. But as I’ve got closer and closer, I’ve got a little bit more confident. It’s exciting, just to see exactly how quick I can go.”
If Tanfield breaks the record, he’ll follow in a more than 30-year line of Brits to have done so, including Graeme Obree, Chris Boardman, Alex Dowsett, Wiggins, and his friend Bigham.
“It’s a really iconic event, and the history of the people who have done it over the years, they’re all, within their own right, legends of the sport,” Tanfield says. “They’re all the best riders of their generations, really, all the top guys. It would be cool to compare myself against those and give it my best shot.”
Tanfield will begin his UCI Hour Record effort at 10:15 UK time in a behind-closed-doors event in Konya, Turkey. There will be no live stream of the attempt.
During the same event, track sprinter Matthew Richardson will try and break the flying 200m world record, while para-cyclist Will Bjergfelt will attempt the UCI Hour Record in the C5 category.
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