Stuttaford of The Times slams competitive cycling

In a July 25th article entitled ‘A cycle of danger for women’, a "medical briefing by Dr Thomas Stuttaford", the famous medico used the obscure piece in the BMJ to attack road cycling in general.

Here are three choice quotes:

"The best known threat to potency is that posed by cycling with a narrow saddle such as those used by racing bicyclists. This can cause recurrent mild trauma to the nerves to the perineum, which is quite enough to blight the cyclist’s marital life."

"The risks to women cyclists have been less extensively investigated. There were coarse jokes about women cycling around the Radcliffe Camera and other areas of Oxford in my youth, but I always assumed — wrongly, as I have since discovered — that there was no sound scientific basis for them."

"If the cyclists persist in their sport, the swelling may later extend to their legs. The moral is obvious. Only walking is a better exercise than cycling, but in health terms cycling is best undertaken as a form of transport, rather than as the type of competition that turns the public highway into someone’s private gym."

Nice.