Peter Cossins

I was first drawn to bike racing in the late 1970s as a teenager reading the sports pages in my Dad’s copy of the Daily Telegraph, devouring Phil Liggett’s reports about the exploits of Sean Kelly, Paul Sherwen and, later on, Robert Millar and Sean Yates, gradually gaining knowledge about the tactics and history of the sport.

During the early 1990s, while studying for a diploma in magazine journalism, we were given the task of interviewing a famous personality and my first thought was to contact Liggett. I’ll always to grateful to Phil for agreeing to meet and talk to me, but especially for the help he gave in getting me some work experience at Cycling Weekly.

I was lucky enough to arrive at the Weekly as the editorial team there was putting together the first issue of Cycle Sport, and spent the next five years working on both of those titles, reporting on many of the sport’s major events. I subsequently worked for Procycling, becoming editor of that title between 2006 and 2009. Since then I’ve focused increasingly on writing books about the sport, starting as ghost writer on 1987 Triple Crown winner Stephen Roche’s autobiography Born to Ride. In 2019, Full Gas, my book investigating and describing the tactics of professional bike racing won the cycling book of the year prize at the Daily Telegraph Sports Book Awards.

Since 2016, I’ve lived with my family in the French Pyrenees, the view from my office window filled by the Tour de France climb of Prat d’Albis on the other side of the valley.