'I'm just happy to have new friends to ride with' - meet Bhima Bowden, Cycling Weekly's local hero of 2025

Bhima Bowden is Cycling Weekly's local hero of 2025. This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 4 December 2025. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.

Bhima Bowden describes the scene: he's standing at the finish line, his oversized jersey billowing in the wind, its chequered black-and-white design signalling the end of another ride for the Macclesfield Wheelers.

"I can stand at the finish line and be the chequered flag, and it's one less thing we have to carry," the 37-year-old chuckles down the phone to me. Bowden has carved out a break in his work schedule to talk to Cycling Weekly.

He's a busy man. When he's not working as a computer programmer or making elaborate, impeccably edited hill-climb promo videos, he's organising bike races.

The first race our Local Hero organised was held nearly a decade after he moved away from Manchester, swapping the northern metropole for the Macclesfield hills. Bowden had started serious road cycling while still living in Manchester, after his commuter bike was stolen.

Replacing his utility steed with a road bike, he was soon hooked on hill-climbing - and his favourite hills? They were in the Macclesfield area. "Macclesfield has some of the most well-known and most popular climbs," Bowden tells me. "I wondered why we weren't using this amazing landscape, and shouting from the rooftops about how good it is. I wanted to race up some of these hills, but nobody was organising anything. I just thought, how hard could it be? Maybe I should have a go."

In this way, Bowden's route into his local club was topsy-turvy. Before he'd even joined them for a group ride, he was plotting how to create his own event and how to get the club to line up on race day.

That first hill-climb, in 2020, held not in the hit-or-miss autumn weather of traditional hill-climb season, but in May's warmth, drew more than 40 entrants. "Everyone was asking when the next one was going to be," Bowden remembers.

But the Covid-19 pandemic had other plans for Bowden and his fledgling hill-climb race community. The race's second instalment was shifted to August, "and that one was even more successful. I think 85 people turned up on a random Friday night in August."

As Bowden talks about his community and the events he helped ignite, his voice brightens and speeds up, excited. "The atmosphere was euphoric. Everyone was really happy we could do that again," he says. "I just went all-in with it. I said, 'Right, every Friday night in the summer, we're going to do a different hill and a different race'. I thought: it's going to spectacularly fail, or it's going to do really well."

People who had never raced before turned up to Bowden's events. One gravel-bike commuter won almost every race in the summer series, having raced for the first time only a year before. "He never thought it would be for him, because he was just riding to work, but the untapped potential was within him. Who knows who else has that potential as well?"

For other local riders, the battle for the top step was a more calculated affair. Bowden tells me about Alice Larkin, who also turned up to a race having never raced before. With each race, she was more prepared than the last, her strategy more refined, her training more focused. She has taken the female overall win two years on the trot, and has become one of the series' chief cheerleaders: "She's out there telling everyone you've got to give it a go, because that's what she needed to get her into it as well in the beginning."

Amid the organising, his own racing had taken a backseat, but seeing seasoned riders and beginners alike surpassing themselves motivated him to join them. His club is evidently proud of him, while Bowden is overjoyed to have drawn together a bigger cycling community. "I'm just happy to have new friends to ride with," he smiles.

Macclesfield Wheelers nominated Bowden for CW Local Hero with a long testament to his work, from which the below is a short excerpt:

"Bhima runs the weekly hill-climb series in a way that I just don't think can be topped. Before it starts, he works on photoshoots of every hill, writes compelling narratives about the climbs, and rallies a great team of volunteers. While cycling home, we receive individual messages with our time and placement, which then goes into his fancy website and series leaderboard — he truly celebrates everyone."