The first British cyclist to win a major international stage race
Ian Steel, who has died aged 86, was one of the pioneers of British cycle racing and the first Briton to win a major international stage race – the 1952 Peace Race from Warsaw to Prague via Berlin.
That 2,135km event had a scale that is hard to comprehend today; 1,000 white doves were launched into the air at the start, Steel recalled, adding that “factories stopped work to see the spectacle. People lined the streets in their tens of thousands. Others were up on the roofs, walls and trees.” A crowd of 220,000 waited in the Strahov stadium in Prague for the climax, where Steel finished 2min ahead of the local rider, Jan Veselý, having relieved the Czech of the race lead on stage eight through East Germany to Chemnitz.
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