Graeme Gilmore contested 127 six-day races, with 68 different partners, and won 13.
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He won the European, Danish and Canadian omnium championships and was the first Australian to win a professional road race in cycling-mad Belgium.
A generation before fellow Tasmanians Matt Goss and Richie Porte would win races like Milan-San Remo and Paris-Nice, Gilmore was blazing the trail in both.
But for all his achievements, the modest Launceston grandfather still speaks most fondly of the two domestic achievements that earned him the 1967 Australian cyclist of the year award.
“I’d rank the Warrnambool and Tasmanian Thousands – when I broke the world record for one mile and beat Syd Patterson into second – as the two most important races I won in Australia,” Gilmore said.
“I’m sure the Warrnambool was a seven-hour run and a really strong headwind which was one reason we caught the fronties.
“I was first and fastest and won the Victorian 150-mile road champs and am still the only rider to win all three in one race. My word I’m proud of that.”
Gilmore’s memory is as reliable now as his legs were half a century ago.
Seven hours, 14 minutes and seven seconds was the winning time in the 52nd Melbourne to Warrnambool, run on Saturday, October 7, 1967.
Gilmore was 22 years old when he became just the sixth rider to win off scratch and complete the second of the three goals he had set himself before taking on Europe.
He had already claimed the first, the national road championship, in Lithgow, and was only denied the third, the Sun Tour, by a bad crash, despite winning four stages.
He remains one of only three Tasmanian winners of the famed 265-kilometre one-day Melbourne to Warrnambool race, joining 19-year-old Cressy farmer Trevor Brooks (1937) and Paul Rugari, who also clocked first and fastest in 1987.
Gilmore’s fascinating tale is told in intricate detail in The Warrnambool, a definitive history of one of the world’s oldest bike races.
Written by journalist and promoter John Craven, whose lengthy and varied career includes a stint reporting at The Examiner, the chapter “The Gummy Gilmore roller-coaster ride” details the full extent of the family’s cycling dynasty.
Before Graeme’s son Matthew became an Olympic silver medallist and madison world champion and grandson Zack embarked on his own track career, four previous generations of Gilmore cycling heritage had already been laid out.
“There’s six generations in all,” Gilmore said. “My father Jack, his father Albert Ernest, and his father James who started the ball rolling.”
Craven reports that James raced in the early 1900s before his progress was halted by the First World War while Jack was a handy amateur until called upon to fight the Japanese in Borneo and New Guinea during the Second World War.
Graeme Gilmore was also destined to have his career shaped by military intervention albeit during peacetime.
Craven recants the story how, on a March evening in 1965, the Gilmore clan sat around their black-and-white television to see whether Graeme’s birth date of June 29, 1945, would be drawn from a barrel and see him selected for two years national service under Robert Menzies’ hugely-contentious compulsory conscription policy.
It was, curtailing a cycling career that had been sparked by a combination of that esteemed heritage and Tasmania’s passion for the sport.
“So popular were Tasmania’s summer sports carnivals in the 1950s that a special passenger train ran from Launceston to rural Latrobe on Christmas Day for the town’s extraordinarily well-patronised annual athletics-cycling-woodchopping festival,” Craven writes.
“The Gilmore family was on the 1955 train and 10-year-old Graeme bubbled with excitement: ‘I was mesmerised, especially when Tasmania’s own Mac Sloane beat the great Sid Patterson in the wheelrace final,’ he recalls. ‘I got Mac’s autograph, and also Don ‘Mopsy’ Fraser’s, the wild man who played footy for East Launceston. I couldn’t believe how fast Sid, Mac, Russell Mockridge and some of the other champions were riding. I thought to myself: This is what I want to do’.”
Eight years later, Gilmore defeated Sheffield dairy farmer Frank Atkins to win the Latrobe Wheel before adding the Burnie Wheel a week later and subsequently three Devonport Wheels from scratch.
In hindsight, he said the national service actually helped his career.
“The Army gave me discipline and commitment. It served me well. The training was tough. All the blokes in the infantry were exceptionally fit. It helped prepare me physically and mentally for some of the rough stuff that lay ahead.”
That included his victorious Warrnambool, which almost ended before it began. Completing his warm-up, Gilmore broke the centre bracket axle on his bike and did not have a replacement.
“It was only 10 minutes before take-off time and the atmosphere was frantic,” Craven reports.
“A young amateur cyclist, John McCulloch, had pedalled across the city from his South Oakleigh home to watch the start. Miraculously, his bike contained the required part and a deal was reached.”
Craven’s extensive and absorbing account runs to an impressive 56 chapters and paints a vivid picture of the race and its illustrious honour role that span the history of Australian cycling from Hubert Opperman to Simon Gerrans.