CTT seeks new calligrapher for comp records

Have you got the write stuff? Scribe needed as Christine Minto's 45 years comes to an end

- James Shrubsall

How's your handwriting? Assuming you're several steps above a doctor's prescription-level scrawl and have an affinity for cycling - or even better, a love of cycling history and an interest in time trialling, there may well be a job going for you.

Christine Minto has spent the last 45 years carefully transcribing every time trial competition record into Cycling Time Trials' (CTT) historical record: a thick, leather-bound ledger filled with everything from Alf Engers's landmark first 49-minute '25' to Finley Tarling's recent short '18' - the juvenile men's 10-mile record that he took from his older brother Josh, now with Ineos Grenadiers.

Being a rather handy bike rider herself, Minto has even had cause to transcribe a few 'comp' records of her own. But now, at 81, she has decided it's time to hang up her calligraphy nib and let someone else take over the voluntary role.

"I've been doing it long enough, haven't I?" Minto says matter-of-factly. In fact she thought she might be forced to lay down the pen a few years ago when she fell off her bike and smashed her elbow on a kerb. But, with plastic and titanium holding things together, she was good to go.

"I really didn't know whether I would be able to do decent writing after that, but I could. But that was really what made me think I had done it long enough," she adds. "It's about time they found someone else."