The Olympic Medallist Who Ran a Bike Shop on Your High Street

For thirty-six years, if you needed a bicycle repaired or a new set of tyres, you could walk into a shop on Kings Heath High Street and be served by a double Olympic bronze medallist. He wouldn't have mentioned it unless you asked. That was Tommy Godwin.

Godwin was born in Connecticut, America, to British parents in 1920. The family returned to England when he was twelve. His first bicycle was a delivery bike he used running errands for a local grocer — heavy, practical, nothing remotely sporty about it. But something clicked. He started racing in his late teens, and was in contention for the 1940 British Olympic team when, on 3 September 1939, he was at Herne Hill velodrome for the final trials and war was declared. Everything stopped. There were no 1940 Olympic Games.

During the war Godwin worked as an electrician — a reserved occupation that spared him active service but not the loss of his best racing years. When competition resumed in 1945, he went straight back to it. By 1948 he had been selected for the British team at the London Olympics, competing at the same Herne Hill velodrome where, nine years earlier, the war had ended his first Olympic dream.

The story of his kilometre time trial medal is extraordinary. The team pursuit had finished on the Saturday. On the Monday evening, officials came to him and said: Tommy, you're riding the kilometre on Wednesday. Two days' notice. He hadn't trained for it. He hadn't practised the event. Wednesday night came, and it was almost dark — there are photographs that show the velodrome in near-blackness, the only light spilling across the track from the stadium. Godwin was tied for the lead after the penultimate lap. A headwind in the finishing straight dropped him a second and a half off the pace. He won bronze. He already had another bronze from the team pursuit earlier in the week.

In 1950 he opened his cycle shop on Kings Heath High Street, and ran it for the next thirty-six years. Olympic champions worked there as amateurs — Mick Bennett and Graham Webb, both of whom Godwin personally coached to their greatest achievements. He became the first ever paid national cycling coach in Britain, and later managed the British team at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. He served as President of the British Cycling Federation. At the age of eighty-nine, he rode several laps of Herne Hill Velodrome — the track where he had won his medals more than sixty years before.

He was appointed Birmingham's official ambassador for the 2012 London Olympics, and at ninety-one carried the Olympic torch through Solihull. He died three days before his ninety-second birthday, in November 2012, just a few months after the Games he had helped to promote.

For thirty-six years, Kings Heath had an Olympic medallist fixing your punctures. Not many high streets can say that.