Cycling's grand old man makes it to the palace

He tells me that he has never smoked, that he has been a lifelong teetotaller and that his only drug has been cycling. Up until last year, his proud boast was that he'd ridden every day of his life since being given a bike as a 13-year-old. "I've done over a million kilometres," he insists.

Sadly last year, though, he was forced to give up the sport when he fell during a ride in Spain and fractured his hip. He sounds as frustrated as hell that he is having to walk around with a stick and that the NHS are not sorting out his ailments quickly enough. He is limited to cycling on a boring exercise bike but swears he will be back on the real thing soon enough.

You wouldn't put it past Harry when he tells you of an extraordinary life in the saddle. He was a 20-year-old motor mechanic who had already built a reputation as a masterful time triallist when the BOA invited him to join the pursuit team in Berlin. The plan was for him to take the train from Sheffield and join his colleagues in London but Harry couldn't afford it.

"I had no father - he'd died in east Africa from disease during the First World War - and there was just me, my mother and brother," he says. "We didn't have much money, so I decided I'd have to cycle down on the bike I was going to use in Berlin, which was tiring and not the best preparation."

Once in the capital, he teamed up for the first time with the three local cyclists he was going to partner in Berlin. "We had one practice together at Herne Hill and that was it before the Olympics," says Harry. "Only they did give us some better wheels to use on our bikes for the actual event."

Having reached Berlin by cycle, boat and train, Harry reckoned the Nazis' great global propaganda exercise and Jesse Owens's heroics tended to pass the cycling competitors by because the velodrome was situated away from all the hullabaloo at the main stadium.

"Though we heard about him, we didn't see Hitler - but he did put on a show with these Games," ponders Harry. Anyway, then, British cyclists were rather more concerned with the brilliance of their lavishly backed French cycling rivals than with global politics.

For Harry, Berlin was just the springboard for a life of adventures. A year later, a cycling magazine raised sponsorship for him to attack the world one-hour record in Milan and he became the first man to break 25 miles on an outdoor track. Unbelievably, at the age of 80 and given the chance to ride one of those new lightweight superbikes at Manchester Velodrome, he came within a mile and a half of equalling the mark he had set almost 60 years earlier.

In his heyday, Harry was invincible in time trials and he lost his best competitive racing days to the War, during which he built submarines in Barrow. Yet, afterwards, he kept finding new cycling challenges in between running a garage business in Manchester and starting a family. At 60, this dad of five even became a bit of a celebrity across the pond by cycling from coast to coast in North America across four time zones.

"When I look back on my life, I can see the most wonderful things," says Harry. "All the countries I've seen, the people I've met . . . now even the Queen in London. Mind, I won't be cycling down there this time."

The tinge of regret in his voice suggests there really was a time when we might have found this irrepressible figure chaining his bike to the Buck House railings tonight.