Three-time Olympic champion Ed Clancy joins police close pass operation

British Cycling track legend Ed Clancy — winner of three Olympic team pursuit golds, four Olympic medals in total, twelve medals including six golds at the World Championships, European and Commonwealth titles, MBE and OBE recipient — joined South Yorkshire Police earlier this month as they undertook their latest close pass operation.

Now Active Travel Commissioner for South Yorkshire, Clancy followed in the footsteps of fellow British Cycling star-turned-active travel figure Dame Sarah Storey who also joined one of the force's close pass ops back in 2021.

Clancy shared pictures of the May 3 work on social media, saying it "marks the start of my mission as Active Travel Commissioner to work with terrific teams like this to bring about safer roads in South Yorkshire for everyone".

South Yorkshire Safer Roads Partnership (SYSRP) praised Clancy's involvement saying it is "fantastic work to promote safe road user behaviour! Road safety is everyone's responsibility and we can only prevent serious and fatal collisions if we all play our part".

As the force has explained previously, these operations work by teams of 'undercover' cyclists riding along roads of interest. When they are close passed by a driver, the rider communicates to officers further up the road who then stop the motorist who is educated on the dangers of close passing cyclists or given a fixed penalty notice if a particularly dangerous offence is committed.

While we do not have figures from Clancy's operation, when Storey joined the force 20 drivers who overtook her were stopped out of 110 overtakes.

"Sarah's Garmin radar detected 110 overtakes over the two laps we completed, and of those 110 overtakes, 20 were stopped for advice purposes, which is disappointing," inspector Kevin Smith said back in 2021.

"Our other pair were also close passed a few times, taking the total to 25 vehicles stopped for advice purposes, and another five that we will catch up with through the post. In total 10 prosecutions for a range of offences from careless driving to contravening double white lines."

> Dame Sarah Storey joins South Yorkshire Police on close pass operation – and almost one in five drivers get pulled over

Yesterday, we reported that an FOI request had revealed that of 3,898 allegations of driving offences received by Surrey Police in the last 15 months just 10 resulted in a prosecution.

These included 938 instances of close pass submissions, with only three resulting in a prosecution, four in a penalty notice and four being offered a driver improvement course. In contrast, 742 cases, almost 80 per cent of the total, were resolved with a warning letter.

The news comes a month after we reported that another FOI request had revealed that out of the 286 submissions to West Midlands Police, the force which pioneered 'close pass', resulted in just one prosecution, with 213 reports of careless or dangerous driving around cyclists last year resulting in no further action being taken.