International Amateur
West rode the Milk Race, the Tour of Britain for the first time in 1965, riding as a late selection for the Midlands. His local bike shop owner jokingly promised him a free bike if he won. West said: "I remember seeing my first Milk Race in Chester. I was about 16. It impressed me. And never did I imagine that I'd ride. My first one was in 1965 and I won it. Circumstances!" He won the points competition as well but he won overall, he says, only because several riders, including a leading Spaniard, were thrown out in the race's first positive dope tests. West's prizes for winning were a gold watch and a combined radiogram and cocktail cabinet.
That year he beat the national hour record, set a 25-mile time-trial record, won the Tour of the Cotswolds next day, won the national road championship and came second in the Isle of Man International.
In 1966 West lived in the Netherlands, riding round-the-houses races. He said: "Fantastic, that was. Very, very fast." He rode Olympia's Tour, the amateur tour of the Netherlands, which he said averaged 29 mph. "But Holland left me legless for the climbs on the Milk Race" and he came sixth. "To me, that was nothing", he said.
That autumn he finished second to Evert Dolman of the Netherlands in the world championship on the Nürburgring circuit in Germany. The two had slipped clear of the field but West cramped in the sprint. He has refused to speak further of Dolman, going little further than saying "Well, he didn't ride exactly clean. At the end he told me so. Let's just say things were not right." Keith Bingham, writing in Cycling Weekly went further when he spoke of a rider so ill through the drugs he had taken that he no longer recognised journalists he had known for years. The description approaches Dolman, who was caught for doping as a professional. Dolman said "I couldn't win races without that stuff, that was obvious."
West said an official from the British Cycling Federation approached him after the championship and said: "Good ride, son. What's your name?" West was to have joined Jacques Anquetil's Bic team, at the recommendation of British professional Vin Denson, but his contract didn't arrive and he stayed in Britain.
West won the Milk Race again in 1967, in what Keith Bingham of Cycling Weekly described as "astonishing style."
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Famous quotes containing the word amateur:
“The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favourite; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.”
—Freya Stark (1893–1993)