Levin Domain cycle track centenary celebrated with exhibition

Estovan Gapper riding The Bell. He was the first to use Levin's new hard cycling track at Levin Domain in 1923.

Precisely 100 years ago this month, a bitumen cycle track was laid, brushed clean and then raced on at Levin Park Domain for the first time, and it has served Horowhenua’s two-wheeled sportsmen and women honourably and continuously ever since. Levin Cycling Club still meets there two evenings a week for training and is organising a racing carnival early in December to celebrate the centenary.

Labour Weekend 1923 marked the transition of this increasingly popular new sport from racing on an oval of compacted earth and grass, that was dangerous when wet, to a ‘hard’ track. It was narrow at first, but was soon widened by three feet, and its turns were virtually uncambered. The banked track we see surrounding the rugby pitch today replaced the original in 1964, then hosted the national hard track championships four times in the 1970s and 1980s.

Racing on the original track showing the old grandstand.

With just occasional running repairs, it remains good enough for racing today, although it no longer meets the international specifications of velodromes fit for championship competitions.

A youthful Levin rider at that first hard track meeting was Estovan Gapper, just short of his 18th birthday. He placed second in a heat of the open one-mile handicap. Four years later, in 1927, ‘Est’ purchased a new fixed-gear track bike, ‘The Bell’, which he would race for another 15 years. His family never parted with it, and his son Brian, still living in Levin, has loaned it for a centenary exhibition to run throughout November at Te Takeretanga o Kura-hau-po.

At the opposite end of the history scale is a bike previously owned by Olympic and Commonwealth multi-champion Sarah Ulmer that took Levin’s Gemma Dudley to medals at the world under-19 track championships in 2009, and another carbon-fibre framed example ridden in the 1990s by national team pursuit champion Eamon Gilbert.

The career of the district’s most successful track cyclist Bryce Preston, a sprint and tandem champion who twice rode for New Zealand at Commonwealth Games in the 1970s, will also be remembered.

There was a period in the 1950s when the track, and cycling’s future here, was almost lost. Levin Borough Council contemplated turning the entire Domain site into parkland dotted with trees. Rugby, cycling and athletics would all have been forced to find new homes, probably at the A&P Showgrounds but negotiations, eventually led to a renewal of the rugby union’s long-term lease and a complete revamping of the Domain.

Mel Cook (left) and national sprint champion Bryce Preston on the new track in the 1960s.

Up until then, the grandstand and start/finish straight were on the northern (Queen Street) side of the grounds, but in the new deal, a much bigger grandstand housing modern changing rooms and clubrooms would be erected on the southern (Bath Street) side - right on top of the cycle track’s back straight.

To save the day for cycling, up stepped a local contractor, Laurie Roberts, who was working mainly on laying the town’s sewer pipe network. A national champion track cyclist in the early 1930s who raced at Levin several times before he came to live here, Laurie undertook integrating brand-new track with the rugby union’s plans, creating now-obligatory banked turns using spoil from the pit dug out to form Horowhenua College’s swimming pool!

All would be done at no cost to the council. Laurie kept his word, and racing resumed – and indeed was enhanced – in 1964. He went on to serve three terms as Horowhenua’s mayor in the 1970s, and later it was agreed, quite rightly, that the track should bear his name.