CYVLING: Bangers, boneshakers and the making of Rob

anendra Singh
W hen Robert Oliver started his motor mechanic's apprenticeship in Waipukurau at the age of 16 he was so small he could slide under a Mini to work on it without jacking it up.
It was about then that it dawned on the teenager that rugby, even as a halfback, or soccer was not going to be his domain.
"I used to enjoy running as it was one of the few sports I could do well in because it seemed to have a lot of endurance," recounts the 57-year-old owner of the Hub Cycle Centre, in Hastings.
So once a week Oliver would head off to Russell Park to race with the Harrier Club.
"Basically anyone could take their 'old banger' (bike) along, ride down to the athletics meeting and do the running races. After that we'd have a couple laps of race on the bikes, too. We called them boneshakers because the grass tracks were quite rough and rattled your bones," he says.
One day a Stewart Greers car salesman, Alan Fannin, who was an original Ramblers Cycling Club member from the early 1930s, encouraged him to have a go at cycling.
Using his "old boneshaker" (an English Carlton bought in Burke's Cycles in Wellington for ?35), Oliver modified the machine and started clocking up hours on the road.
From there blossomed a passion for cycling that yielded Oliver national titles and took him to the lofty heights of the 1972 Olympic Games, in Munich, Germany.
Today, he is sponsoring The Hub Two-Day Cycle Tour for the first time since the inaugural one six years ago, although he has sponsored the more-than-decade-old Tour of the Bay, among other multisport events, before.
An A grade qualified mechanic out of Stewart Greer Motors, Oliver was born in Wellington where his late father, Gordon, was a city fireman.
But the family, seeking a change in lifestyle, shifted five years later to Waipukurau where his mother, Marie, still lives.
Between athletics meetings, he met Hastings Athletic Club members Alan Black and Trevor Aitcheson, who invited him to cycle in Hastings. It was grass tracks in summer and roads in winter so Oliver would catch a bus to Hastings on Saturdays and ride back home.
"Luckily in those days there were a lot of dairies around and you'd stop for food all the way home to keep yourself going. I kept doing miles and miles.
"Cycling is a sport where you don't have to have a lot of ability just a lot of application and I was prepared to do that."
Olive and another enthusiast, Neil O'Dowd, were the only riders then so Waipukurau people often thought the pair were a chain or two short of a bicycle, as it were.
"Most people in Waipukurau used to think we were mad. Now there are 100 to 200 bike riders there."
Olive smiles at the thought of the comfortable feel of fine-knitted Italian Sergal wool outfits they wore.
Training at night towards Porongahau, along Wanstead Road, has left a lasting impression.
"You'd be out there on a moonlit night and you'd turn your lights out because you didn't want to waste your batteries. You'd travel down the centre white line but you had to be careful because there would be tramps doing exactly the same thing. There were hardly any cars around so they'd walk on the white line to see where they were going. If you weren't careful you'd take them out too," he says with a laugh. .
He's convinced that riders have a habit of falling off their bikes in the same manner.
"It's probably because of things such as their body shape and the way they are sitting. I always fell elbows first," he says, rubbing both elbows that still bear the scars of his falls.
In the flirtatious stage of cycling, Aitcheson's dad, the late Graeme, believed Oliver had some "tenacity" so he started coaching him. Oliver even lived with the Aitchesons in Hastings for a while.
"He was very good. We used to get great weather here and go to races and do better than anyone else."
Without any special training, Oliver finished fifth at the 1970 nationals in Christchurch in the individual pursuit. "That's when it sort of got me thinking I could achieve something nationally, so I moved down to Wellington," says Oliver, a former national individual pursuit champion in 1972 and a member of the champion Wellington pursuit team the following year with double Olympians Neil Lister and John Dean, and Lin Cooper.
Professionalism was at its infancy in his day.
"We were pure amateurs and the Europeans were so dominant. It's only with the times of Greg Lemond and Lance Armstrong that people outside Europe had a chance of breaking into Europe."
Oliver was an all-rounder in cycling - having the endurance on track, a good tour rider and hill climber and a "very good time triallist". He attributes that to fitness "I enjoyed the challenge of training and getting a result.
It didn't have to be a win, as long as you achieved something from it. I know it sounds strange but it's that interest in knowing what the human body could do and getting the maximum out of it.
Despite his versatility, he classes himself as a "limited" rider "because I had to finish to win".
"Which means that I had to be up the road from the break-away group. If it came down to a sprint of three I generally got third - John Dean and Neil Lister were first and second."
The tactical aspect of racing made cyclists good readers of body language.
In 1982 he and wife Brenda (whom he had married in 1972) bought The Hub off John Sheppard when about a dozen people were cycling competitively in the region and four other bike shops were trading.
The Olivers built a rapport with Hastings cyclist Vern Hanaray's father, Ted, who was a member of the Ramblers club. The timing was perfect as in the late 1980s to early 1990s people injured in, or tiring of, marathons turned to cycling in droves to stay fit.
But in the mid-1990s the business was knocked around a little but in 1998 it boomed again while the club went beyond expectations.
"We survived because we looked after people. The best form of advertising is looking after customers because they encourage other people," he says.