Gerard McCarten

Gerard McCarten died after a short illness at the age of 87. His death was announced on 20 October 2026 by Cumbria Crack and the News and Star, which described him as one of the great names of Cumbrian cycling. The exact date and place of death and the cause were not made public.

He was the last surviving brother of the McCarten family. He was survived by his son, Stephen, five grandchildren, two of them the sons of his late daughter Lesley, and a great-granddaughter. Funeral details were to be announced later.

Gerard McCarten was born in 1939 in West Cumberland into a well known sporting family. His father, Jim, was a coal miner, and Gerard later told his story in the book The Accidental Coal Miner. His brothers all made their names in sport: Ralph was a leading local sprinter who ran at the famous Powderhall races and played on the wing for Workington Town, John played rugby union for British Steel and rugby league for Seaton, and Ronald won three caps for Ireland at rugby union in the 1961 Five Nations, including a match against England.

His love of cycling began early. Soon after he acquired his first bike he was knocked off by a car and taken to hospital, but it did not put him off, and he began racing as a teenager in the 1950s.

McCarten rode for the Derwent Valley Wheelers as a road and grass track racer. He finished second in the West Star Championship on the west coast before his National Service, which took him to Singapore with the Royal Air Force. There he won the Changi road race and the Far East Air Force best all-rounder championship, was second in the Far East Air Force grass track championships, and rode the Tour of Penang and the Kuala Lumpur to Malacca race.

He had started work at the Moss Bay steelworks in Workington and, after National Service, moved to Sellafield. Living at Seaton, he found it quicker to cycle to work than to take the bus and train, and he built up to around 200 miles a week, riding 10 mile time trials twice midweek and then riding 80 to 100 miles into Lancashire at weekends to race a 60 to 70 mile road race before riding home again. He raced until he was 40, when an attack of shingles ended his competitive career.

He was a founder member of Velo Club Cumbria, formed around 1970 when local clubs combined to save on affiliation fees and organise races. In the 1990s he started Lakeland Sprinters, a youth development project that was still running at the time of his death, and he organised the Cleator Moor Continental road race for three decades. For many years he wrote a regular cycling column for the Whitehaven News and the Times and Star.

In 1962 McCarten met Margaret, a young woman from a nearby village; he later recalled turning back from a ride to a race in Barrow to arrange to meet her at a Saturday dance. They married within two years and were together for 59 years, living in Hensingham, Whitehaven. They had two children, Lesley and Stephen.

McCarten survived prostate cancer, detected around the turn of the century, and in 2016 suffered a heart arrhythmia while out on a ride; passers by in Cleator Moor kept him conscious until paramedics arrived, and afterwards he rode with a defibrillator.

In 2020 Margaret, who had the lung condition bronchiectasis, came home for palliative care. To stay close to her he exercised by riding up and down the 70 metre slope of his cul de sac with his phone in his pocket, and those rides became a series of charity challenges. In 2023 he rode for 100 minutes at 100 beats per minute, sending 10,000 heartbeats as a thank you to her carers and raising around 2,000 pounds. Margaret died on 9 October 2023, aged 80, and he went on with a Four Peaks Challenge for bronchiectasis research and further climbs equal to Everest and Mauna Kea. His daughter, Lesley Sanczuk, died of breast cancer on 22 August 2025.

In their memory he began his Out of this World challenge on 1 October 2025 and finished it on 24 November 2025, completing 3,915 laps of the Balmoral Road circuit, 658 kilometres and 23,000 metres of climbing, equal to the height of Olympus Mons. He rode through Storm Amy on his grandson's mountain bike and recovered from a fall, and near the end visited a local primary school dressed as an astronaut. The ride raised 1,400 pounds, shared between the West Cumbria Society for the Blind and Hospice at Home West Cumbria, and was featured by Cycling Weekly.

McCarten is remembered in West Cumbria as a racer, organiser and writer who helped build the local cycling scene, through Velo Club Cumbria, the Lakeland Sprinters youth project, the Cleator Moor road race and decades of newspaper columns. In his last years his charity rides, carried out on one short street out of love for his wife and daughter, raised money for local hospice, sight loss and lung health causes and inspired readers well beyond Cumbria.