When in 2021 vintage bike dealer Richard Hoddinott went in search of a bike that had belonged to Eddy Merckx, he didn’t realise he was scripting a story that would take him to film festivals across Europe. Nor did he expect that the star of the story would turn out to be not the bike, hidden away in an old bike shop just outside of Manchester, but the shop’s owner.
That man was 97-year-old Gerry Shields, who at the time would still turn up to work at the shop that bore his name above the door. Hoddinott said that Shields did much of the heavy lifting in the film. What began as a search for the Merckx bike ended up covering Shields’s whole life. Shields had been into boxing, did club singing, and was widely remembered as an extraordinary character. He passed away in 2023.
