Faster than 60kph for an hour: British cyclist smashes 10-year-old track record

British track cyclist Jessica Disley broke the women’s UCI Derny Hour Record on Friday afternoon with a staggering distance of 60.160km.

In doing so, she beat the previous benchmark by almost 8km, and surpassed Filippo Ganna’s unassisted world best by more than 3km.

The UCI Derny Hour Record is a separate category of the legendary effort which involves two riders on the track: one on a standard bicycle, and the other motorpacing on a derny.

Disley set her record inside Newport's Geraint Thomas National Velodrome of Wales with derny rider Tony Cassidy.

Speaking to Cycling Weekly an hour after her record-breaking feat, Disley, who works for aerodynamics company AeroCoach, described the effort as “pretty wild”.

“It’s massively overstimulating behind the derny,” she said. “You’re going so fast, you’ve got the speed, the wind, some of the fumes from the derny as well. The concentration and the arm pain are the biggest things. The G-force pushes you into the banking at that speed; that’s the thing that’s the most painful – the upper body, arms, triceps, shoulders, everything.”

It took only a handful of laps of the 250m track for the 35-year-old to get up to world-record pace. With seven minutes to spare, she surpassed the previous benchmark, and took aim at the 60km barrier.

“Ganna’s record was 56[.792km], so I thought, ‘If I don’t do 60km, but I can beat Ganna’s record, that’d be cool’,” she said. “And then Magnus Bäckstedt did a 58.250km at Newport behind a derny in 2005, so my next goal was that.

“[To break the record] like this, adding a decent chunk onto the record, and doing what I really wanted to do, is the best case scenario,” Disley added.

An accomplished time triallist, The Worcestershire-based rider’s first taste of derny racing came last June when she competed at the Welwyn DernyFest, “and absolutely loved it”.

She then went on to place fourth at the British Derny Championships in London in October, where she and her derny pacer agreed to have a tilt at the Hour Record.

“Since then, it’s just been training for this,” Disley said. “I did a mixture of track sessions with Tony, building up the length of time at the pace I wanted to do.

“I also did other general track sessions to get stronger, heat training on the turbo – jacket on and heating on – and a few rides outside where I was doing an hour straight at a power well above what I needed to do for the record.”

Compared to the unassisted Hour Record, power is not as crucial when motorpaced, Disley explained, saying it feels “very different”.

“Heart rate is the main thing,” she said. “The physiological effort of concentrating on everything for an hour just means your heart rate’s massively higher than it would be for the same power outside.”

A lot of that concentration is spent on riding just centimetres from the derny rider’s wheel. For Disley, this is the hardest part.

“If you were doing an [unassisted] Hour Record by yourself, and you were struggling at some point, you could slightly ease off, have a little micropause, and then go again,” she says. “You can’t do that when you’re behind the derny because you’ll get dropped. If you ease off even a fraction, the derny is gone and that’s it.”

Did Disley ever feel like she might lose the wheel? “Yes, definitely,” she laughed. “If that had been a training session that wasn’t a critical one, I would absolutely have bailed.”

Instead, she held on for more than 240 laps of the track, at a blistering 60kph, and put her name at the top of the honours list.

“I think it should be quite difficult for someone to beat that now,” she said. “I just wanted to feel like I’d done as well as I could do, and Tony did as well, and we’ve done that.”

The previous women's UCI Derny Hour Record was 52.406km, set by South African Adélia Neethling in 2016. The men's record is 66.639km and belongs to Dutchman Maas van Beek.