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A disembodied hand passes three visitor passes from behind a one-way tinted booth and raises a steel barrier, granting access to Goonhilly Earth Station. Once a major satellite communications teleport built by the UK Post Office in 1962, Goonhilly

famously received the first ever trans- Atlantic satellite TV images. Now owned by BT, the sentinel-like array of dishes simply process reams of business internet data, and the once-bustling visitors’ centre is closed for ‘on-going’ refurbishment in pursuit of a grander ‘Space Science Center’. It is difficult to envisage: Moss, rust and over-grown shrubbery now holds the

majority stake in the expansive and eerily- quiet complex which dominates the Lizard Peninsula skyline. The only sign of activity is from local time-trial veteran Tony Farnell unloading his bike from a red Volkswagen van under the monolithic shadow of Arthur, Goonhilly’s resident superstar whose 26-metre dish was the receiver of the historic TV images.

Tony’s son runs a small Segway hire and café business which from inside the Earth Station and so has priority access. Like the enduring structures around him, ever- defiant in the face of salty air and entropic disorder, Tony is as timeless as they get:

a well-worn tester who, at the age of 67, is still one of the top time-trialists in Cornwall, and he makes no apologies for it: 

“My first time-trial was in 1992. I turned up there on this old second hand bike that I had bought from Clive Mitchell’s in Truro: it was just a standard road bike and I turned up wearing just a pair of running shorts and a vest. That caused quite a lot of amusement amongst the cyclists there, who had all these aero TT bikes and everything. Anyway I beat most of them, which shut them up.”

The Goonhilly Downs are a regular training haunt for many local strongmen, including Tony, thanks to its flat segments of (relatively) smooth tarmac and, luck- prevailing, roaring tailwinds. Although Tony’s initial foray in to time-trials was a success, it wasn’t his first choice of discipline. It wasn’t until later on in life,

after having dabbled in competitive running and triathlons, did his testing abilities shine:

“I started in my mid-40s after I gave up the competitive running that I used to do; after I moved down to Cornwall it was just too far to travel. Plus, your performance starts to go downhill pretty quickly after the age of 40. So I bought a second-hand bike and started riding to work to keep fit. One time my son came home from university and said: ‘do you fancy doing a bit of swimming as well?’ So I started going swimming with him, and whilst I was doing that I met

a triathlete who suggested that I tried a triathlon, and I really enjoyed it. Of course you do time-trials as part of your training for it, but the other training I got very fed up with. You have to be doing three different sports, so I always seemed to be trying to squeeze in another training session somewhere. My results of the time-trialling were quite good so I decided to concentrate on just cycling and that was it: I’ve been doing it ever since.”

Tony is somewhat of a local legend whose time-trialling reputation precedes him, with younger competitors clamoring to beat the old dude with the legs carved from Cornish granite. When it comes to performance and training however, he likes to keep things simple – some might even say old school.

“Just get out there and do it,” he says, gesticulating with a coffee in-hand inside the Segway hire café, “You don’t need really expensive gear to do time-trialling, because a lot of these guys with the most flashy and expensive equipment are often the worst riders. In my experience a lot of cyclists are miles behind other sports when it comes to training. There seems to be this obsession of going out and getting the miles in, and not enough, in my opinion, specific training for what they want to do. What I would say – and what I have noticed over the years, not only in cycling – is that you get new-comers who start training for it and make a big initial improvement but then plateau off, then after about a year they give up. What they don’t realise is, like any endurance sport, it’s a long-term thing. It takes several years of proper training to keep improving and reach your full potential.” 

Time-trialling started as a rebel sport to thwart the National Cyclists’ Union’s ban on racing on the road in the 1890s. Men like Frederick Thomas Bidlake helped craft ‘the race of truth’ as we now know it. Not one for idolising however, Tony eschews the idea of TT poster boys and childhood heroes: 

“I’ve never been a big one for spectating really; I’d rather be doing it myself than watching other people. If I had a chance to ride in a race or go and watch some Olympic cycling or something, I would choose to race. It’s very much a personal thing - it’s quite difficult in cycling because back then a lot of the top performers were on drugs... if anyone I admire the more amateur cyclists, people like Michael Hutchinson who’s been a very good time-trialist, but does it as more of a hobby than a profession.”

Tony is a steadfast member of his local cycling club, One and All Cycling, and has organised their time-trial races since its inception – not just a competitor, Tony has always been keen to give something back to the cycling community at large:

“I suppose those instincts relate to my very dim and distant past when I trained as a PE teacher – I am used to organising sport as well as doing it, so whatever sport I’ve taken part in I’ve always tried to do a bit of organisation as well.”

Admirably modest he fails to mention the fact that he is the chairman of the South West Time Trial Association, the discipline’s governing body in Cornwall and Devon responsible for drawing up the annual fixture list, measuring courses, risk-assessing, and sending representatives to national meetings to decide on rule and competition changes. On the subject of “developing the sport along the right lines” Tony is particularly opinionated, pausing with a wry grin before saying: 

“One thing you’ve probably noticed is that there are hardly any youngsters doing TTs, it’s become very much the sport that people graduate to once they’re done with road racing. The Vets scene is undeniably the strong, and I think that’s partly due to the fact that most of the races are at the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning – 6am starts in some parts of the country. And because most time-trialists are obsessed with speed, all the fastest and therefore most popular courses are on dual-carriageways, which obviously have a lot of fast-moving traffic. Most parents don’t want to be getting up at 4am on a Sunday in order to drive their kids to a traffic-filled TT course. I think the way that time-trialling should be going is on circuit courses on B roads with a few hills thrown in, but that’s not going to happen because most of the riders are too obsessed with going for fast times all of the time.”

When questioned on the prospect of road closures, he is even more astute:

“It aint gonna happen, not in this country. I mean they do it for things like the Tour of Britan, but on a local level it won’t happen. We’re too densely populated and there’s too much traffic.

“I’ve been living in Cornwall for about 25 years now. When I first came down here in 1989 the summer holiday roads were jammed, but for the rest of the year they were really quiet. Even the A30 going right up through Cornwall; in fact we used to have time-trials that went across Chiverton roundabout – it’s a massive roundabout with about four lanes. You could never do that now because the traffic is just too much. That’s the reason why most of these races are early on a Sunday morning because that’s the time when there is the least traffic on the roads.”

Portreath Airfield, Cornwall

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