Gentlemen Riders

The Distinguished Gentleman's Ride documents and celebrates the charitable ride's first decade of spectacular motoring events that raised tens of millions of dollars for men's health initiatives.

The ideal of the amateur competitor, playing the game for love and, unlike the professional, totally untainted by commerce, has become embedded in many accounts of the development of modern sport. It has proved influential not least because it has underpinned a pervasive impression of professionalism - and all that came with it - as a betrayal of innocence, a fall from sporting grace. In the essays collected here, amateurism, both as ideology and practice, is subject to critical and unsentimental scrutiny, effectively challenging the dominant narrative of more conventional histories of British sport. Most modern sports, even those where professionalism developed rapidly, originated in an era when the gentlemanly amateur predominated, both in politics and society, as well as in the realm of sport. Enforcement of rules and conventions that embodied the amateur-elite ethos effectively limited opportunities for working-class competitors to ‘turn the world upside down’. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in History.

Over the past decade, The Distinguished Gentleman's Ride has rapidly established itself as the world's largest and most spectacular motoring event, while also raising an extraordinary amount funds and awareness for prostate cancer and men's mental health on behalf of our charity partner, Movember.Having successfully raised $31.5M USD and counting for charity since its inception, The Distinguished Gentleman's Ride has connected hundreds of thousands of smartly dressed gentlefolk in over 900 cities across over 110 countries united upon their classic and vintage style motorcycles to participate in The Distinguished Gentleman's Ride in support of the cause. Now, 10 years in, the charity motorcycle event is going to celebrate with a book on their 'Decade of Dapper'.