Les West - Professional

Professional

Les West said
I mean, you never earned a fortune . But I bet my earnings and winnings were equivalent to the pros of that day. I really turned pro for the competition. For a change. I could have joined other teams for a lot more money and I never did. I was faithful to Roy . Great chap, Roy is. Nice bloke. But I got too friendly with him. I suppose money isn't everything. When you talk of money, I suppose you are talking about £1,000 extra Well, your friendship over the years is worth more than that, isn't it?

Professional racing had developed in Britain but West held on for the Olympic Games in Mexico in 1968. He punctured early, waited for the mechanics in the service car behind the last rider, changed bikes twice, chased for 30 miles and gave up. The writer Clement Freud said West was so depressed that he hadn't noticed he was sitting on his banana sandwiches. He turned professional for the Holdsworth team, managed by a shopkeeper called Roy Thame in west London. It paid no more than he had been winning as an amateur, he said, but there were compensations.

His first win was the Tour of the Isle of Wight, held over three days at Easter. "That's my first pro win and probably my last", he said. He had four more wins and came second nine times.

His best international performance was fourth in the world championship in 1970, held in Leicester, England. West got into the winning break with Jempi Monseré of Belgium, Leif Mortensen and the Italian Felice Gimondi. Monseré won and West came fourth, troubled once more by cramp in the sprint. West won the British championship, broke the London-Portsmouth, London-Bath-London records, won the Tour of the Peaks and then in 1978 retired as a professional.

The rule was that professionals had to have a season out of racing before the British Cycling Federation would consider a return to the amateur. West said: "The BCF punished you.... You'd be surprised by how much form and interest you lost. If you'd turned professional it was like you had a disease in them days. So that was it, such is life." He regretted that amateurs and professionals had not been allowed to ride together. He said: "A few years after I'd packed up racing, they let the pros ride the Milk Race, which could never have happened in the 1970s. It seemed like my generation were punished in that way, and it's a shame because it would have been good all round if we could have ridden it."

He started racing again, as an amateur, in 1980, rode for two years, then retired.