The Old Man And The Bicycle

Just finished reading Hemingway’s “Fiesta” (a.k.a. “The Sun Also Rises”) and like most of his books I finished it feeling like someone who’d arrived late at the theatre and never really caught up with the plot.

The book is mainly about a week long bull fighting fiesta in Pamplona. In the third and final part of the book, after leaving for San Sebastian, the main character stays in a hotel where a team of professional cyclists also spend a night on the Tour of the Basque Country. This felt like the only part of the book I could really get a handle on. Both sports are all about glory and suffering, they involve brain and brawn and they are popular in Catholic countries.

Hemingway seemed like cycling, saying once “it is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them”. That said, I can’t imagine the photos in his album of Papa cycling next to those of him game fishing, big game hunting, running bulls and all the other stuff he got up to.

Matadors and cyclists have plenty in common beyond their whippet-like figures. Bull fighting, much as I dislike it follows a strict hierarchy, with different skills being brought into play at different stages of the bull’s death. The peleton has its own hierarchy climbers, sprinters, rouleurs, domestiques, super domestiques and team leaders all attempting to complete the course yet in complex plots and sub-plots within the team structure.

There’s also the fact that most professional cyclists live on the edge of death, whether it be through the use of blood thickening, heart slowing EPO, descending alpine cols at 70kph or simply by reducing their body fat down to the point that their rids are visible through their lycra tops. Like Pedro Romero, Hemingway’s matador, professional cyclists live a life that is close to the edge.

Electric bagpipes

The other evening I was driving round Winchester's snaking one-way system when I passed a guy cycling along with a vacuum cleaner poking out of his rucsac. Not something you see everyday but it reminded me of a time I stayed in Edinburgh with a group of students who’d developed a set of electric bagpipes. These were constructed out of a vacuum cleaner (see there’s the link) a large plastic rubbish sack and some pipes. Combined with the noise from the vacuum their bagpipes were louder than their manual equivalent but sounded just as bad. Like Marmite, pipe music is an acquired taste.

So it doesn’t always make sense to “electrify” everything – including gears on bikes. “Spy” photos of the latest Campag and Shimano offerings on the pro team bikes show they have grown ugly battery packs and little numeric indicators on the brake shifters. I’m not some kind of Luddite, wasn’t-it-better-in-the-old-days attitude person. I don’t believe that everything needs to be continuously improved. Like the bagpipes (there’s the next link) I’m left thinking “OK, so it can be done, but why bother?”

I can see that in the world of photo finishes, pros will use every advantage to gain a fraction of a second over the next man. What’s frustrating is that the manufacturers who have a penchant for designed obsolescence will be pushing on the buying public as essential. What’s even more frustrating is that there’ll be suckers out there willing to buy these.

Lance Armstrong once said that most bikes offered a level of technical refinement that wouldn’t benefit the average rider. Just look at the next mug bouncing down a completely smooth tarmac road on a full suspension mountain bike.
So, like the electric bagpipes, electronic shifting should have a limited audience. Unlike electric bagpipes, electronic shifting will probably be the next must-have upgrade.

Dayglo scarecrow

A couple of weeks ago when it was really windy all the high tech bird scarers in one of the fields my train passes got blown over and birds were freely pecking at the seeds. Even though bird scaring technology has moved on from the scarecrow, the new breed still doesn’t seem that effective. These consist of large, highly polished propeller blades that presumably work by reflecting sunlight to catch the bird’s attention.

I spotted an effective and brilliantly simple homemade device that a cyclist had placed on his bike. A small piece of laminated card, about half the area of a business card, green on one side and orange on the other had been attached by string to the rails of the saddle. As he cycled, this flicked in the breeze, drawing attention to him.

I’m a firm believer that with all the visual “noise” in large cities, riding around in dayglo clothing is not that effective. Plus, as soon as you get off the bike you look daft. I heard that people in Scandanavian countries wear small reflectors which dangle from their coats to alert drivers to their presence - which sounds like a great idea, presumably working on a similar principle.