Gold medal winner got on his bike for a new career

Dec 8 2008 by Andrew Mernin, The Journal

After two Olympic Games, a Commonwealth Gold and a near-death experience, Joe Waugh now leads one of the most successful independent cycling shops in the country. Andrew Mernin reports.

MONTREAL 1976. The rain lashes down on the Canadian hills as the breaking pack in the Olympic road race whistles towards the finish line.

Among the leading elite is a young North Easterner who has been tipped for gold by his multi-national rivals.

With two thirds of the route gone, things were looking good for Joe Waugh – he came into the race on the back of blistering form and morale was high in the GB camp.

But then in the driving showers, his dream turned to disaster. At a routine refreshment pitstop, his tyre hit a metal gutter, he was thrown to the ground and his golden chance disintegrated into the roadside surface water.

Today Waugh is philosophical about one of the biggest set backs of his formidable cycling career.

And, as owner of one the oldest, and most highly regarded independent cycle shops in the country, he has little time to dwell on the ifs and buts of the past.

Although, even three decades after that wet summer day in North America, the disappointment is still etched on his face.

“I was in the winning break and then I crashed. There were about 10 of us away and it was bucketing down.

“I went to take my feed from the pit and the wheel hit a metal grid and I went sliding on my backside and that was the end of that.

“You can’t live on ifs, buts or whethers, but I knew I was there and know how I felt and you just have to take it on the chin – I had been told I was classed as one of the favourites on the break.”

Since the Montreal Olympics, Waugh has pedalled through numerous peaks and troughs including a second Olympic Games in Moscow, a Commonwealth Gold in Australia and a near-death experience caused by a drunk-driver.

He has also steered a 114-year-old business – which can trace its routes back to its inception as a blacksmiths that made penny farthings – into the 21st Century.

M.Steel Cycles, of Gosforth, Newcastle, has evolved from the road biking boom of the sixties and seventies, through the advent of cheap overseas imports in the nineties into the modern day, where technological advancement has taken the two-wheeled machine onto another level.

Waugh first joined the biking institution in the early eighties, although his love affair with cycles was born many years earlier.

“Cycling must have been in my blood because I didn’t get my first bike until I passed my eleven plus.

“I then got a paper round to pay for a sports bike and eventually bought a second-hand lightweight racing bike. I joined a cycling club, purely for social reasons and in two or three months I was doing time trials and the bug was bitten.”

In 1973, despite being a relative unknown on the international cycling circuit, Waugh was selected to ride in the Milk Race – the British equivalent of the Tour de France.

“When a fairly novice rider is selected for something like that they either sink or swim, and I made a name for myself overnight.”

After finishing a respectable 15th, the youngster went on to spend a couple of years in Northern France riding for VC Metz before returning home for the 1975 Milk Race where he took the King of the Mountains jersey and finished 7th overall.

Four years after the disappointment of Montreal, came the Moscow Olympics in 1984.

“I was disappointed as I thought we could make the top six. I didn’t finish the race I was full of cold. I knew I had the form because I had won a big race a fortnight earlier in Luxembourg – I just wasn’t right on the day and if you don’t have the chemistry that’s it.”

Alongside his cycling career, Waugh had chosen accountancy as a means to pay the bills, but in the early eighties, as he faced the twilight of his international cycling career, he reached a crossroads.

“When I finished my accountancy exams I had to decide whether to go back to accountancy or work in a bike shop – I opted for the bike shop.”

Having built up an international reputation on the cycling scene, Joe’s move to the age-old Tyneside business proved a major factor in its growth as a nationally-recognised brand.

His accountancy skills coupled with his contacts at the higher echelon of cycling resulted in some of the UK’s leading riders using M.Steel frames.

“I had loads of contacts so we would manufacture for other shops outside the region and we supplied to champion racers and had a number of professionals and teams riding our frames in the UK – Olympic riders and national riders.”

“There were three brands, M.Steel, Joe Waugh and Dave Yates, who was the engineer behind the business.

“Dave Yates now has the same following that Claude Butler had in the fifties. Claude Butler was THE frame of the fifties and Dave Yates now has that name in the framebuilding world today.” With his partners, Geoff Dobson and Dave Yates, Waugh helped establish M.Steel into trailblazing independent punching above its weight against multinational giants like Halfords.