Its stated objects were "the holding of meets and races, the arrangement of tours, and generally to facilitate and encourage bicycling in the University".

[1] Those local aims were soon to have national application as the club became centrally involved in forming and shaping the bodies that would organize competitive and recreational cycling in England and Wales in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

included the three who would represent Oxford in the first cycling Varsity match, which was held in 1874: Edgar Wing (Worcester Coll.

[4] Rivalry between the two university clubs soon extended to the Hour Record, being first set and then bettered by their riders three times between 1876 and 1879, the two latter by Dark Blues, Weir and Christie.

[citation needed] In early 1939, several British regional newspapers announced, via a syndicated article, that: “After an interval of 37 years organised cycling has been revived at Oxford University.

It did not, though, prove possible to organize a challenge race prior to the outbreak of World War II, mobilization for which stripped Oxford (and Cambridge) of most of its students and led to the disappearance of the so-recently reconstituted club.

[citation needed] During the 1950/51 academic year a small club was once again active, though mainly for the purposes of recreational cycling.

In the following year it acquired a handful of keen racing members, among them the ebullient Malcolm Prince (Jesus Coll.)

championship and later in the same year it competed against the Cambridge University Cycle Racing Club (now CUCC) in a "3-up" team time trial on a "neutral" course near Whipsnade.

[citation needed] After another brief hiatus, the club was restarted in Michaelmas Term 1957 by Peter Hopkins (Exeter Coll.

Carritt took the Bucks-Oxon-Berks road race title twice, as well as the British Universities road race, while in time trials he was among the best British 12-hour riders of his day, and, at the 25-mile distance, was the first OUCC rider to break the hour, recording a time of 58 minutes and 4 seconds in the 1968 Varsity Match.

[citation needed] In the early-to-mid 1970s, the club developed an interest in very long-distance rides, which included far-ranging vacation tours.

It was through their membership of OUCC that the highly successful tandem tricycle pairing of Stuart Jackson and Edwin Hargraves came together, which took multiple United Kingdom place-to-place records.

By the end of the 1970s, the racing membership of the club had dwindled to six including the Senior Member, Rolls-Royce Junior Research Fellow Lawrence Daniels (Keble Coll.).

This came from Competition Cycles of Cricklewood, London, whose proprietor, Colin Freud (Christ Church Coll.

The racing section embraced science-informed training methods, introduced in the early 1980s by research neurologist and club coach, Dr Eugene "Gene" Merrill.

A fortuitous kerbside meeting in 2007 led to the club benefiting from the coaching services of former Giro d'Italia rider Flavio Zappi.

Writers have observed that the spirit of the Scholar Gypsy affects cycling at Oxford generally, attributing this partly to the nature of Oxfordshire's country lanes and the county's characteristic topography and scenery.

[12][13] The local woods now provide trails for one of the club's relatively recent accretions, the mountain biking section.

Mountain biking, by virtue of ts popularity, has earned its own Varsity Match, held annually as a cross-country (XC) race, in which, like the traditional road time-trial event, the winning team is deemed to be that which finishes with the lowest aggregate time.