A cycling body has been widely mocked after censoring the name of a historic Welsh village called Three Cocks. British Cycling replaced the small hamlet’s name with five asterisks in a listed schedule for a junior road race in South Wales, seemingly in a bid to avoid offending participants.
However, social media commentators have accused the body of “taking wokeness too far” and disrespecting a rural settlement that was named after male chickens 500 years ago. One said: “I’d be offended if my village name had been altered like that. Who on earth is going to offended by Three Cocks?” Another added: “It is a perfectly acceptable old English word which has been around for centuries. You must have a pretty smutty sort of mind to think anyone would be offended by it.”
“Far too offensive to have cockerels crowing over the Welsh countryside, let alone three,” a third X user wrote.
Local newspaper the Abergavenny Chronicle also took umbrage to the censorship, writing: “The historic heritage of places such as Three Cocks deserves better than to be castrated by a censoring hand.”
British Cycling has apologised for the blunder, which it blamed on “overly sensitive” website filters.
“Clearly the system decided, inappropriatly, to spare our blushes and auto-censored the historic Three Cocks village from the Junior Race of South Wales,” a spokesperson said.
“Whilst it’s great to see this fantastic event getting such national attention, we’ll be having a serious look at the new systems we’re implementing to ensure that technology doesn’t override common sense in the future.”
Three Cocks was named after the coat of arms of former landowners, the Williams family of Old Gwernyfed, whose crest was also emblazoned onto the centuries-old Three Cocks Inn.
