British Cycling has offered a good-humoured apology after the Welsh village of Three Cocks was “accidentally censored” by the governing body’s website.

We highlighted the bizarre situation on our live blog yesterday, the event listing for the Ras Ieuenctid De Cymru – Junior Race of South Wales stating the opening two stages would be based out of Three C**** in Powys.

British Cycling British Cycling “censors” Three Cocks (credit: Google Maps/British Cycling)

Speaking with road.cc this lunchtime, a British Cycling spokesperson rather amusingly suggested the cock-related censorship had not been deliberate and was the doing of some “overly sensitive filters” on their website.

“Clearly the system decided, inappropriately, to spare our blushes and auto censored the historic Three Cocks village from the Junior Race of South Wales,” the spokesperson told us.
 
“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 future!”

Once the internet was done cracking jokes about cockblocking, balls-ups, gonadgate and more, the Daily Mail stepped in to give us all an even bigger laugh, publishing a story claiming: Woke cycle chiefs ridiculed after censoring the name of historic Three Cocks village from racing event plan.

No word yet if British Cycling is still “woke” given it’s now all been blamed on their website system. The “censorship” also made headlines in the local press, regional Welsh newspapers up in arms about the asterisks in their proud village of Three Cocks. 

> Local paper accuses British Cycling of “censoring” village named Three Cocks

Not to worry, Three Cocks has rightly been reinstated to the official British Cycling event page and those pesky “over sensitive filters” shouldn’t be causing more problems in the future. We hope not anyway, but should find out soon enough. As road.cc reader stonojnr pointed out yesterday, the Tour of Britain heads through Cockfield on Wednesday, enough to give British Cycling’s website system sleepless nights…