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.

Style over sense

I know it's not new news, but I saw the Chanel bike again on a post that linked to an article in the Telegraph. So Chanel bring out a bike for £6900. This is the same money as you could by two eye-wateringly expensive Condor Diamantes with Campag Record and still have some change for an energy drink - or whatever Diamante owners go for. Alternatively you could buy 12 Bromptons and have change for a whole wardrobe of dayglo jackets - or whatever Brompton owners go for.

I notice that like all highly exclusive (read expensive) products, the Chanel bike is a limited edition. Limited presumably because the manufacturers have to stop work every half an hour with giggling fits over the fact nobody noticed the extra zero they added to the end of the retail price. This is essentially a nicely spec'd £500 roadster with a fancy paint job and two girls handbags attached to the rear rack. Most of the population of Copenhagen ride something similar for 10% of the price tag.

I just don't get why when a fashion house conducts a branding exercise, whatever was the lucky recipient becomes fashionable. Fine if it's Timothy Everest smartening up M&S's suits - they both know something about the rag trade. Or Linda Barker desperately attempting to take the chav out of dfs sofa range (has anyone ever paid full price for one of their sofas?) But Chanel and cycling just don't seem good bedfellows.

Hand shadows

I was back on the bike yesterday which felt great. I got home late thanks to SWTrains deciding to stop all the trains running through my station. This meant a taxi ride with the bike (who ever designed London's black cab was a cyclist - just open the door, turn the bars and you can sit with your bike) followed by six miles of cycling through crisp, moonlight woodlands.

When I wasn't being blinded by oncoming motorists, I noticed that the new bike light I'd bought created a great shadow on the tarmac. The brake lever and drop of the bar looked just like a kneeling elephant.

Sport relief

I've never been into telethons. Just the thought of all that goodwill is exhausting and none are ever going to come close to Live Aid. Sport Relief is one of the many events that passed me by so I was surprised to see Alan Shearer and Adrian Chiles beaming out of today's Evening Standard. Apparently they cycled 335 miles from Newcastle to London in two days - a good haul by anyone's standards.

Specialised must be delighted by the fact that they were able to so completely brand these two and pass it all off as "charidy".

The website has a few videos of the pair that will be familiar to any cyclist who has a few miles in thier legs - standing, munching flapjacks on a petrol station forecourt watching the traffic flow past.

My pervious post was inspired by a radio interview with Alan Shearer, perhaps if I'd listened properly I would have heard him mention this ride.

There is some irony in hearing Adrian Chiles describe how "deep he's had to dig" on this ride. Perhaps next time Nicole Cooke's up for Sports Personality of the Year he won't be tempted to ask patronising questions such as "do you fall off much?" If only Nicole been at BBC Television Centre to greet Chiles and ask him if his legs ached.

Pedal it like Beckham

I learnt the other day that professional football players aren’t allowed ride bikes – apparently it’s in their contracts. Nor are they allowed to go skiing. Footballers are valuable resources and like any company asset need to be maintained in good working order to deliver a full return on investment. Skiing is clearly tough on the knees and the risk of injury is high, not only to legs. I read that broken thumbs were a common snowboarding injury.

But cycling?

Is it because they are worried about damaging their precious limbs through pedalling or because they perceive that they may get knocked off and hurt? Given that getting caught speeding whilst over the safe alcohol limit is a rite of passage for most footballer it can’t be the latter.

What can be the harm in cycling to get a paper from the local corner shop …hang on there’s the issue. That one phrase sums up the whole problem: why would a footballer want to ride a bike to the corner shop when he can take a Bentley Continental GT?

1. footballers don’t live in places that have corner shops

2. footballers certainly wouldn’t collect their papers, they’d get them delivered or more likely

3. their agent would tell them all the bits they needed to know.

It’s a shame though as cycling is often prescribed as an entry point to taking up exercise or a part of a programme of recuperation.

The biggest shame is that children, so heavily influenced by celebrity sportsmen, particularly footballers, never see them riding a bike. At some point in a child’s life they will have had the conversation that runs

Child - “but I don’t want to [delete as appropriate] got to bed now/eat broccoli/dry my hair/do my homework”
Parent – “well [delete as appropriate] David Beckham/Frank Lampard/Wayne Rooney does”

The problem is that argument doesn’t work with “I’m not driving you to school everyday, why don’t you ride your bike?” since David Beckham/Frank Lampard/Wayne Rooney don’t ride bikes.

To get children cycling, it’s got to be cool yet accessible, not in a skinny jeans wearing, fixed gear, fakenger, cutting edge Hoxtonite kind of way.