What I learned on Nightrider

Nightrider is exactly what it sounds like: a night-time round trip cycle ride of 100km, either starting at Alexandra Palace or Crystal Palace late on Saturday night and finishing on Sunday morning. I rode it this weekend to raise sponsorship money for the outstanding development charity Practical Action.

Without going into too much detail (which will be meaningless if you don’t know London), from Ally Pally it went to Hampstead Heath, down to central London, wiggled around a bit, headed south through Brixton and Herne Hill to Crystal Palace, then through Sydenham Hill to Lewisham, Blackheath, Greenwich and back to Tower Bridge, a bit more wiggling, then Wapping, Canary Wharf, Mile End and Stratford on the way back to Ally Pally. Or there’s a map here.

And this is what I learnt:

The anticipation is worse than the ride. This is me, milling around at the start at Alexandra Palace, circa 10.40 p.m.  

Reflectolite and flash photography don’t mix. Given that most cyclists’ clothing these days is reflective, it’s not surprising. It’s just a surprise when you forget to turn the flash off then look at the picture. The person in the dazzle on the right is my cycling companion Luke Crawley, of whom more later.

There’s a lot of cars in the middle of London on Saturday night.
And I mean, lots. I didn’t take any pictures because I was navigating the traffic, but Baker Street was full of traffic, Piccadilly was teeming (we were there just before midnight). There also seemed to be a disproportionate number of people crawling through the jams in over-powered sports cars, but maybe I just noticed them because they were driving around saying “Look at me”. Even at 3 a.m. the number of cars heading east was surprising.

It’s hard to take a picture of Big Ben with smartphone. 00:26 a.m. File under: atmospheric.

Tower Bridge looks stunning at night. 03:00 a.m.

Management consultants work late. 03:00 a.m. I’m pretty sure this is the offices of PWC in More London, but it could be one of the expensive City lawyers who’re based there. But anyway, the only reason for all the lights being on must be that they’re still hard at work. On a deal. Or something.

It’s not all glamour. 04:25 a.m. The last refreshment stop outside a leisure centre in Mile End, just after dawn.

There are a lot of cobbles in Wapping High Street. A lot. The super-domestique Sean Yates was once interviewed about the best way to ride on cobbles. I think the interviewer was expecting one of those secrets of the peleton. His advice: “You ride as quickly as possible to get it over with as fast as you can”.

Memory works in mysterious ways. Here’s the thing. You’re following the Nightrider route, looking for the next directional arrow, so you don’t have much of the route in your own head. And then you’ll come across a road or a location which throws up a fragment of something from the past – a wine bar where (you remember a bit later) a boss organised a celebration in Blackheath, the start of a sponsored ride 25 years ago you’d forgottn you’d ever done. And maybe this slightly dreamlike quality is enhanced because it’s the middle of the night.

Eat and drink properly. I cramped briefly at around 70km, and cursed myself. On the training rides I’d been really diligent about eating and hydrating properly (do it on a schedule, because if you wait until you’re thirsty or hungry it’s too late). But on the actual ride I lost track of the schedule and had to drink half my bidon to get the cramp to go away. There’s a bigger point here, about treating the distance with a little bit of respect. As I was coming home (at 6.30 in the morning) I overtook a couple of young women on heavy mountain bikes at Crouch End, with another 35km to go back to their start point at Crystal Palace, and touch and go as to whether they’d make the cut-off. 

Go with a friend. Better still, make sure that the friend is Luke Crawley, seen in the picture at the Crystal Palace stop. Luke used to do Audax rides – 200km in a day, more on a full weekend – and has also (massive respect) completed Paris-Brest-Paris. There were times towards the three-quarter mark, when I was flagging, when I was grateful for Luke’s ability to set a steady pace. And (maybe this is also from his Audax days) he invariably saw the not-so-easy-to-spot direction arrows before I did.

Next time, wear merino. The combination of the sweat from the steep climb to Crystal Palace and the north-easterly wind meant that as we headed back to south-east London I was a bit chilly. It’s all about the wicking, and the base layer cycling shirt I had on wasn’t wicking very well. I’d planned to wear a merino base layer and changed my mind. Won’t make that mistake again.

A bit of ritual goes a long way. 05:23 a.m. When we finished we were steered towards a tent where we were given a medal and had our photographs taken. Trivial, but it made you feel like you’d achieved something. I tried to get the woman who was handing out medals into the picture but she kept stepping out of the way. I don’t know the cyclist in the photo, who’s just collected his medal: he was just in the wrong place at the right time, or the right place at the wrong time.

And here’s the proof. 07:00 a.m. I ended up cycling 103km on the ride (we missed a sign and ended up going on a bit of detour to get back on the route), and after I’d finished and had breakfast I realised the easiest way to get home was to ride there. 121km? I was quite impressed. But then, you can do anything with photoshop these days.

Thanks to all of my generous sponsors, who have nudged up my total to almost £600 £650. If you haven’t sponsored me, and would like to, I’d love to get my total past that £600 £650 mark. And my Justgiving page will stay open (I think) until the end of July.

And if you’re thinking of doing Nightrider, do it. It’s a very different cycling experience, and a memorable one.

The photographs in this post (but not the Nightrider logo) are by Andrew Curry and are published here under a Creative Commons Licence: some rights reserved.

Lance and the return of the repressed

Lance’s limited but significant confession on the Oprah Winfrey Show sent me back to USADA’s “Reasoned Decision” – their report on the organised doping conspiracy (their words, not mine) that was represented by Armstrong’s various teams, before and after his comeback.
One of the reasons was to check the odds that Armstrong was telling the truth when he claimed not to have used drugs on his comeback, in an age when biological passports make such things easier to check. The answer: at least a million to one against. USADA asked Professor Christopher Gore of the Australian Institute of Sport to examine Armstrong blood samples taken between 2008 and 2011, looking in particular at reticulocytes (the immature red blood cells that are a clue to the possibility of blood doping):

When Prof. Gore compared the suppressed reticulocyte percentage in Armstrong’s 2009 and 2010 Tour de France samples to the reticulocyte percentage in his other samples, Prof. Gore concluded that the approximate likelihood of Armstrong’s seven suppressed reticulocyte values during the 2009 and 2010 Tours de France occurring naturally was less than one in a million. Prof. Gore [p 140]

But there’s also a striking moment in one of the footnotes of the Reasoned Decision. Go back to the moment in 1999, right at the start of the Tour, when Armstrong was informed at he had tested positive for corticosteroids. [pp 31-32] The team doctor was prevailed on to backdate a prescription saying that Armstrong had taken a cortisone cream for a saddle sore. (According to the evidence given to USADA, Armstrong said to the masseur, Emma O’Reilly, who knew the story to be untrue,
“Now, Emma, you know enough to bring me down”.) But the striking part of the story is in the news conference that Armstrong gave, where he told journalists:

”I made a mistake in taking something I didn’t consider to be a drug,” he said, referring to what he called ”a topical cream” for a skin rash. ”When I think of taking something, I think of pills, inhalers, injections,” he said. ”I didn’t consider skin cream ‘taking something.’ ”

Now, one of Sigmund Freud’s more famous concepts is the notion of “the return of the repressed”, in which a forbidden idea surfaces despite our best attempts to police it. The shrinkwrapped blog explains it like this:

He theorized that an unconscious thought/feeling (Id derived) would constantly press for access to the executive fictions of the mind in order to be discharged. The Ego would be on constant alert to prevent the direct expression of the forbidden idea but the idea would find a disguise and surface as a symptom.

And what’s striking about Armstrong’s language, even in this brief quote, is how much he says about the technology of doping (“pills, inhalers, injections”). A clean rider wouldn’t even have mentioned this. With hindsight, the forbidden idea is escaping its repression.
Armstrong told Oprah that he didn’t think it was possible at that time to win the Tour without doping, and he may be right about this. In Matt Rendell’s book A Significant Other, about Armstrong’s team-mate Victor Hugo Pena in the centenary tour in 2003, Pena maybe gives another clue. He tells Rendell (this is from memory) “We all live this life” – meaning the ascetic life of no alcohol, no chocolate, no parties. “Only Lance leads it more than anyone else.”

The picture at the top of this post is from oprah.com and is used with thanks.

Nosing out the Armstrong scandal

Perhaps it’s coincidence that the two journalists who have pursued Lance Armstrong most assiduously – David Walsh and the former professional cyclist Paul Kimmage – are both Irish. Kimmage has been a vocal anti-drugs campaigner since his landmark book A Rough Ride was published in 1990. The Sunday Times settled a libel case with Armstrong out of court (in the libel-friendly English courts) after the paper published extracts from Walsh’s French-language book, LA Confidentiel. M’learned friends are revisiting that case as I write; and I imagine that publication of USADA’s ‘Reasoned Decision‘ will open the way for an English-language edition, or an update of his book From Lance to Landis.

Despite all the leaks, the USADA report, which runs to 200 pages with another 800 pages of affidavits by way of an appendix, is eye-watering. There’s a line in Matt Rendell’s book, Significant Other, written about and with the US Postal domestique Victor Hugo Peña, where Peña says of Armstrong, in effect, that while all professional cyclists live the abstemious life, Armstrong does it more than anyone else. The same turns out to be true of drug abuse.

A profile of David Walsh in the current edition of the UK Press Gazette, explains why Walsh became curious about Armstrong:

What first piqued Walsh’s suspicion was Armstrong’s reaction to an article by a young cyclist named Christophe Bassons, in which the Frenchman claimed the top riders were still doping.

“Armstrong bullied him and hounded him out of the race,” says Walsh. “My feeling at that moment was that a clean rider wouldn’t have done that. It was pretty obvious to me that Armstrong was doping – not from any evidence I had but from the way he behaved.

“I think if anybody had been applying cold logic at the time, they would have come to the same conclusion.”

That was in 1999, and Bassons (along with the former US Postal soigneur Emma O’Reilly who talked to Walsh for LA Confidentiel) is one of the unsung heroes of the Armstrong affair. When Armstrong did something similar to Filippo Simeoni, another critic from inside the peleton, five years later, more suspicions were aroused. (As an aside, Armstrong’s line as an enforcer of the omerta within the peleton on drugs use is an interesting application of game theory: the correct strategy is the maximum level of personal threat to the edge of the law).

Anyway, I worked as a journalist myself at the start of my career, and I thought that Walsh’s observation was a fine example of what’s sometimes called journalistic ‘nose’ – niggling away at something that doesn’t quite fit until the underlying story reveals itself.

It’s clear, now, that one of the reasons that cycling’s governing body, the UCI, has been so irritable about the USADA investigation is that now the evidence against Armstrong is public, their own complicity is visible. The former President Hein Verbruggen was on the offensive this week with a fine line of bluster. But of course, like Armstrong, the UCI suits do their own line in bullying, pursuing a ‘shoot the messenger’ strategy in the Swiss courts. Floyd Landis has just lost a libel case brought by the UCI and its current and immediate past Presidents Pat McQuaid and Hein Verbruggen, and Paul Kimmage is being sued by the same trio for comments in an interview with Floyd Landis published in the Sunday Times, because, says the UCI, “Mr Kimmage had made false accusations that defamed the UCI and its Presidents, and which tarnished their integrity and reputation.” (The full transcript of Kimmage’s interview with Landis can be read at NYVeloCity).

Kimmage, unlike Landis, is contesting the case. Vigorously. (The UCI hasn’t sued the newspaper, which speaks volumes for their approach: and some of the legal affidavits about the UCI in the documents released by USADA with the Reasoned Decision seem pretty tarnishing, which may give the court at least a pause for thought).

You can show your support for Kimmage by contributing to his defence fund, started on the cycling site NYVeloCity, which is at $60,000 as I write. There is, inevitably, an expletive laden Downfall parody online, of the moment the UCI learns of the defence fund. But increasingly, in the wake of the USADA documents, the UCI and the two Presidents look like the losers here, no matter what the outcome in the courts. Given the extent of the evidence that USADA has pieced together, they’ll have to choose if they want to be taken for fools or for knaves.

This cartoon of Pat McQuaid and Hein Verbruggen is from the cycling commentary and satire site cyclismas, well worth visiting for its coverage of the Armstrong affair and other things cycling, and it is used with thanks.

A life well lived

I meant to pay tribute during the Tour de France to the cycling coach Brian Wright, who died suddenly in April. He would have been thrilled that Bradley Wiggins had realised his potential and won the Tour de France, since he knew him as a youngster, but that’s not the reason for writing about him here.

Simply put, not many coaches can have played leading roles in setting up three cycling clubs that survive them, or facilities that enable participation or spread word of the sport so effectively. The Hillingdon Slipstreamers, and their track and clubhouse in Minet Country Park, a children’s cycling club where my son is a member, the Minet Ladies Cycling Club, which he founded, and a primary school club and track at Field End school are all legacies of Brian’s years as a coach, together with Prime Coaching, which he also helped to found. He thought that cycling built health and confidence, and he cherished the successes of all of his cyclists, not just the stars. It’s not surprising that he became Participation Coach of the Year (not just for cycling) in 2010.

I know the Slipstreamers best, and the origins of the club – which has close to 300 six-to-sixteen year old members, and up to 150 attending on any Saturday morning – say quite a lot about the man. As I understand the history, it started when a section of the Hayes Bypass was uncompleted and detached from the road network, and Brian was one of a group who started to run coaching sessions for kids on the tarmacked section. By the time they gor round to finishing the road, upwards of a hundred kids were turning up, and the council was persuaded to lay a cycling circuit in Minet Country Park, also created by the new road. The circuit is used constantly now.

Brian died during a cycling training camp in Malaga, another of his many coaching activities. When so many people die uncomfortably a quick death when you’re doing something you love (as with the cyclist Beryl Burton) is also something to be envied.

He was due to have carried the Olympic torch a fortnight before the Games started, an honour he would have cherished. His grandaughter, who is a member of the Slipstreamers, took his place, which seemed an appropriate legacy.

Brian’s voice is in my head as I write this, reminding me (through my son) of one of my bad uncoached habits, of riding on the tops not the hoods as I pull away from lights, which is bad for both balance and control. But his memory is much more tangible: at Minet Country Park, at Field End primary school, as with Christopher Wren, “if you seek his monument, look around you”.

The picture of Brian Wright at the Hillingdon Circuit is from the Minet Ladies Cycling Club, and it is used with thanks.

Going Dutch

I went on the ‘Go Dutch’ Big Ride demonstration organised by the London Cycling Campaign a couple of weeks ago, which, despite the rain, was billed as the largest cycling demonstration ever to take place in London. The ride went from Park Lane to the Victoria Embankment, all on roads specially closed for the duration, taking in Piccadilly, Trafalgar Square and Whitehall as it went.
The theme – you might have guessed this by now – was that if conditions for London’s cyclists were a bit more like those in the Netherlands, more people would cycle and the government and the Mayor might hit their cycling targets.
So I was amused to read a few days later, in Bella Bathurst’s eclectic but entertaining Bicycle Book that when Holland plays Germany Dutch football fans chant at the German supporters ‘Give us back our bicycles’. Beating the Germans is something of a special occasion for the Dutch, especially at football, as Simon Kuper relates in his book Football Against The Enemy.
And sure enough, this chant dates from the war years, by Bathhurst’s account. In 1942, during the German occupation, the Nazi authorities confiscated Dutch bicycles both to stop the Resistance from using them to get around, and because they were running out of transport.
“No other German enactment has called up such bitterness in all ranks of society”, wrote a German officer. “The Dutchman, who is practically born on a bicycle, views the seizing of that bicycle as practically the worst thing that can happen to him.”
Of course, the London Cycling Campaign is right. Dutch-style cycle facilities in London would improve the city’s cycling numbers. But culturally, we have a little way to go just yet.

The picture at the top is from the ibikelondon blog, and is used with thanks. There are also images of the day at Ben Brown’s photostream on flickr.

Mano a mano

There are times – rare times – when professional cycling resembles nothing so much as boxing, but without the physical contact: two riders, usually at the end of a mountain stage, well beyond their physical limits, slugging it out with each other. Indeed, some of the most famous moments in cycling are about this: Anquetil and Poulidor duelling on the Puy de Dome, of which fragments remain, Hinault and Lemond (on the same team!) battling their way up Alpe d’Huez before eventually acknowledging each other in a gesture of mutual respect and crossing the line together.

Cycling fans were treated to a similar duel yesterday between two relatively unheralded riders, Christopher Froome of Sky and Juan Jose Cobo of Geox, who started the stage second and first respectively, separated by just 22 seconds. The stage was the last mountain finish of the race, so represented the last opportunity for a decisive attack.

I’m not going to spoil the ending, in case you don’t know the result, but Froome attacks with about 1500 metres to go, on a climb that varies between one-in-seven and one-in-five (eight minutes into this Procycling video); he looks as if he’s created a winning advantage; Cobo, the race leader, staring at losing the whole race, digs deep into his reserves and slowly cranks himself up the hill, before launching his own counter-attack.

I was breathless watching it; I can’t imagine how deep into oxygen debt the two cyclists were when they finished, but Froome later said it was the hardest day he’d had on a bike. For the rest of us, only gratitude; days like this are the reason cycling is such a special sport.

(The result is here if you can’t be bothered watching the video).

The picture of Cobo leading Froome just before Froome’s attack was taken by the incomparable cycling photographer Graham Watson, and I hope he’ll forgive me using it. Please go and look at look at his other Vuelta pictures on pictures on Velo News.

All about the bike

The first weekend of the Tour de France is a good moment to review It’s All About The Bike, and from what I’d heard about it before I read it I’d expected it to be more about components. This isn’t a complaint. Robert Penn’s book is about his journey to build his perfect bike – frame, wheels, groupset, handlebars, even to the saddle – and along the way he meets a lot of people who are among the best at making such things.

But as he goes he tells us a lot about the history of the bicycle, its explosion as a social phenomenon in the late 19th century, and the way it has developed since. And it’s also – intriguingly – a history of innovation, as Penn traces the way in which the problems of the early designs are overcome to produce the modern bicycle, which remains the most efficient way we have discovered to turn energy into movement.

One of the biggest early problems was the design – before gears were invented, the pedals were attached directly to the front wheel, so the only way to get more distance for each turn of the pedals was to increase the size of the wheel. Hence the ‘ordinary’ or the ‘penny-farthing’, described by Penn as “a technological cul-de-sac”. He quotes Mark Twain’s account of his cycling lesson on the ordinary (“you don’t get down as you would from a horse, you get down as you would from a house afire”). Accidents were so common on dreadful roads that it gave us a hatful of new expressions, including “to come a cropper”. One of the unsung heroes of cycling’s history, James Starley (of whom more shortly) nonetheless managed to ride the hundred miles from London to Coventry on an ordinary in a single day.

Once the ordinary gave way to the ‘safety bicycle’, with its familiar diamond shaped frame, records began to tumble. By the 1890s, a good racing bike weighed in at 10kg, even if decent gears took another thirty years to arrive. Some of the feats of the riders were breathtaking:  in 1899 Charles Murphy, paced by a train, rode a mile in under a minute on planks laid between the tracks.

As for Starley, he was a self-taught mechanic who had a gift for invention. He was the son of an agricultural labourer who left home for London at 15, then moved to Coventry where he set up a sewing machine company before turning his attention to bicycles in the late 1860s. He invented both the tensile spoked wheel and the differential gear as he wrestled with the limitations of early bicycle design.

His nephew John Kemp Starley continued the family tradition. His Rover Safety bicycle, first manufactured in 1885, is now recognised as the first modern bicycle. Starley had set out “to design the lightest, strongest, cheapest, most rigid, most compact and ergonomically most efficient shape the bicycle frame could be”. In doing so, he transformed the bicycle market. He floated the business and built the largest cycle works in Coventry, then the centre of the world’s cycle industry. It later became the Rover car company, though he didn’t live to see it. He died suddenly at the age of 46; 20,000 people attended his funeral and every cycle firm in the city closed for the day as a mark of respect.

The sections of the book about assembling the dream bicycle have some fine moments as well, whether it’s listening to the frame-builder Brian Rourke talking about setting up the frame, or being given some industrial gloves at Continental in Germany to take his set of tyres out of the oven. The passage in which Penn describes the California wheel builder ‘Gravy’ Gravenites build his wheels has a quiet poetry to it.

All of this is given credibility by Penn’s own history as a round-the-world cyclist. He knows what he’s writing about, and has had the scares, some mentioned here, to prove it. And like all good cycling books, the minute I finished it I wanted to go out on my bike. So I did.

Guards of honour

Alberto Contador won the Giro d’Italia at the weekend by an impressive – or suspicious – 6 minutes 10 seconds. But what I want to write about here is an episode which shows another side to the sport. On Stage 3, the young sprinter, Wouter Weylandt, crashed and died on a descent. Travelling at between 50-60 mph, his bike apparently clipped a wall as he looked back at a group behind him  and he was thrown off, being killed instantly as hit a wall on the other side of the road.

Cycling is a dangerous sport, and crashes are common. But deaths on the road are rare, largely because of the extreme handling skills of those who make it to the professional ranks. There are about a thousand professionals in Europe – less than the number of footballers in the top two divisions in the English leagues alone.

When someone dies, cycling has its ways of honouring them. In the Giro, this was done by riding the next day’s stage, not racing it. Each of the teams in the race rode at the front of the peloton for 10 kilometres, and at the end of the stage Weylandt’s team, Leopard Trek, together with his training partner Tyler Farrar, were allowed to go to the front and cross the line together (see the picture at the top of this post). The prize money for the stage was donated to his family – his girlfriend is five months pregnant.

You might think that the spectators would be irritated about being deprived of a day’s racing. Not a bit of it: they stood by the road and applauded, paying their respects to the cortege.

Leopard Trek has set up a memorial fund to help Weylandt’s family. The picture is via the blog Endurance Racing, and is used with thanks.

The thrill of the track

I had the good fortune last weekend to go track riding at Calshot in Hampshire – a 142m banked track in the former Sunderland Flying Boat hangar on Calshot Spit. For those who haven’t done it, track riding provides a unique thrill: you ride on a fixed wheel bike (without a freewheel) so if the wheels are going round, so are your legs; and the ends of the oval track are banked (45º at Calshot), which is intimidating until you get the hang of it. “Speed is your friend”, as the coach reminded us at the start. The results, once you get the hang of it, are an exhilarating aerobic ‘buzz’ from the continuous pedalling, and a real feeling of achievement as you get used to holding your line high up the side of the track.

One of the best descriptions of track riding is by Matt Seaton in The Escape Artist, on riding the outdoor track at Herne Hill in south London, although it ends with a dramatic crash. I’ve ridden at Herne Hill – it’s where I first tried track riding – and it is, sadly, in a poor state. The track is still in use but most of the buildings onsite are now shuttered up for safety reasons. It was used for the ‘Austerity Olympics’ in 1948 – the ‘make do’ Games which probably saved the Olympic movement from collapse after the Second World War – and has a long tradition of track riding. (The sports writer Richard Williams caught this well in a recent column).

The velodrome remains, until the 2012 Olympics, the only cycling track in London. The story of its decay is complex, but let me try to untangle it. The site is owned by the Dulwich Estate, a charity which owns 1,500 acres of Dulwich, and which bequeaths money to various schools and others in the area. Week-to-week events at the track have been managed by the cycle club VC Londres for some years, and it is still well-used, while Southwark Council has held the lease. Dulwich Estate has declined to renew the lease, although they say they are keen to see the track refurbished; it’s listed and the site is protected urban greenspace. (But the fact that their charitable objectives are all about disbursing income to their largely well-heeled beneficiaries can make people suspicious of their motives, as does the fact that they padlocked the site in a similar lease dispute in 2005.). Locals have launched a campaign to save the velodrome; it attracted 700 people to a meeting in Dulwich College earlier this month..

Breaking the logjam

The problem – in a local microcosm – goes to the heart of the inherent flaw in the idea of the ‘big society’. Cycling clubs, generally, are model ‘big society’ organisations. They’re usually well-run and durable. VC Londres, for example, was founded in 1964. But the stated reason why Dulwich Estates won’t offer a long lease to Southwark Council on the Herne Hill site, which includes other cycling and leisure activities as well, is because they want the site run professionally. Without a long lease, it’s impossible to justify the investment needed to resurface the track (badly needed) and repairing the buildings. There’s some commitment from Lambeth and Southwark Councils, and Southwark has put up some cash.

But to make the Herne Hill track sustainable, it needs to be usable in all weathers (the banking is dangerous to ride on when wet), which means finding enough capital funding for one of the imaginative schemes to protect the track from the elements. And that is likely to be beyond the scope of the best-run civil society organisations, without help from public or philanthropic funding. Perhaps it’s time for the Dulwich Estate to break the logjam it’s created by adding the site to its list of beneficiaries? It currently spends around £8m a year, and a small fraction of this could create a secure basis for a charitable Trust to take over the site, After all, the schools which currently take most of its money aren’t in the need they were (all are now fee-paying public schools) when Edward Alleyn’s money set it up. At least the Herne Hill velodrome site is open to all.

The pictures in this post were taken by Peter Curry at the 2009 Herne Hill Good Friday Meeting. They are posted here under a Creative Commons licence. The Save The Velodrome campaign is building support; there is also a Facebook page.

Au revoir, Laurent Fignon

The death of the racing cyclist Laurent Fignon, from cancer, at 50, wasn’t unexpected, but it is a sad day nonetheless. Cycling fans, at least those of a certain age, can remember where they were when they watched him lose the 1989 Tour de France by 8 seconds on the last day to the American Greg Lemond. (I saw it in a hotel lounge in St Jean de Luz, waiting for a taxi; a friend who was lucky – or unlucky – enough to be yards from the finish on the Champs Elysee says he saw Fignon’s face change as the cyclist realised he was about to lose).

In his own account of that Tour, Fignon puts its this way:

“Ah, I remember you: you’re the guy who lost the Tour de France by eight seconds!”

“No, monsieur, I’m the guy who won the Tour twice.”

And a Giro d’Italia and – twice in succession – one of the hardest of the one-day Classics, Milan-San Remo.

My own memory of that Tour is not of the final stage, but of Stage 18, four days before, in the Alps. Lemond did no work that Tour, following Fignon’s wheel and relying on his better time-trialling to give him the advantage. The previous day, on the climb to Alpe d’Huez, Fignon had shaken Lemond off and regained the yellow jersey. But he reckoned that his lead wasn’t enough to withstand Lemond’s likely gains on the final stage’s time trial. So on the road to Villard de Lans he took off again, riding away from the front of an elite group which included the strongest riders in that year’s Tour. It was one of the most exhilarating attacks I have seen.

It should have been enough. Fignon later blamed his defeat on crippling saddle sores. But it’s also said that had he copied Lemond and worn an aerodynamic helmet for the time trial, or even just cut off his ponytail before the start, he’d have gained the few seconds he needed to win the race. But you know that had you suggested either, he’d have ignored you.

We don’t choose our sporting heroes because they win. As Jorge Valdano memorably observed, we prefer Arrig0 Sacchi’s Inter Milan to the more successful team assembled by Capello. We can admire Mourinho’s teams, but it’s hard to enjoy watching them play. It takes something more. One of the tributes to Fignon said that he combined audacity with the talent to back it up. Fignon himself wrote in his autobiography, “Isn’t it better to gamble on victory than settle for comfortable defeat?” Audacity and talent: as mere fans, it is the stuff we dream on.