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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This finish on Stage 11 – from the Tour de France on Thursday – will become famous. Mark Cavendish’s lead-out man Mark Renshaw, on the HTC Columbia team, tussles with Julian Dean, performing the same role for Tyler Farrar on the Garmin team, either ‘head-butting’ him, as much of the press coverage preferred, or pushing him back onto his line with his head. The Tour Commissaires (referees) decided that for this, and for going off line in front of Farrar, he should be excluded from the race.
This is quite a rare sanction – the last time it was used was 13 years ago, when the Belgian cyclist Tom Steels hurled a water bottle at another sprinter in a bunch sprint – reckless behaviour, at the least.
And it seems to me both that Renshaw was dealt with harshly – and that sooner or later cycling won’t get away with this sort of arbitrary decision-making.
For the non-enthusiasts, some basics. Cycling is a team sport, in which riders work together using their slipstreams to help their leaders or their sprinters to win. The physics are explained well in Matt Rendell’s book A Significant Other, but essentially a rider close behind another one can gain 30% in terms of speed for a given amount of effort. Hence the so-called ‘trains’ you see as teams close in on the finish of a race and try to set up their sprinter for the win. Each cyclist in the train cranks up their effort to the max for a period, before swinging off and letting the next rider take it on.
Renshaw, probably the best ‘lead-out’ man in the world at the moment, is the final link in the chain, and has the job of taking Mark Cavendish towards the line at speeds of around 70 kph, riding among dozens of others, before leaving Cavendish to accelerate away for the last 200-250 metres. When Cavendish is on form, which is most of the time, the combination is unbeatable, as we saw in the final stage to Paris last year, when Renshaw finished second to Cavendish, lengths ahead of their rivals.
Breaking up the train
Because the Columbia team is so good at this, the other teams have decided that the only way they can win is by breaking up the Columbia train in the last kilometre. And that’s what happened yesterday. On the video – there’s a slow-motion sequence filmed from above at 1.38 – we clearly see Dean move quite sharply across Renshaw’s line from the side, pushing Renshaw to the left, trying to close him in to the barriers so Cavendish can’t come past. Thor Hushovd had tried something similar – but much less contentious – a few days ago. If this were football, it would be the equivalent of holding a striker to stop them attacking a cross.
Renshaw uses his head to push Dean back onto his line – taking even one hand off the handlebars at 70kph is suicidally dangerous, for you and others, as the bike could well start weaving.
Then, as Cavendish goes past, Renshaw moves off his own line a little, to the left, and impedes Dean’s Garmin team-mate, Tyler Farrar. Forcing a rider into the barriers is highly dangerous, and can put cyclists into hospital for weeks, or months. But Renshaw stops quite a long way from the barriers (it may even just be a reaction to the way he’s had to hold Dean off); Farrar, who’s probably beaten anyway, checks slightly and then moves on through the gap. In football terms, whether intentional or not, it is the equivalent of the tap tackle rather than the studs down the calf. And it’s worth adding that Renshaw himself is generally regarded as a ‘fair’ rider (not all of them are), and that he said afterwards that he didn’t see Farrar to his left.
So, although the Commissaires’ decision was said to be unanimous, there is huge room to doubt its appropriateness. There are other penalties they could have imposed, ranging from a fine to relegating Renshaw to the bottom of the day’s standings. (Two riders who started a stand-up fight after crossing the line earlier in the Tour were merely fined, for example.) And why Dean wasn’t penalised is a mystery. They seem to have punished the reaction and not the original foul, as football used to do in the days when the best players didn’t get as much protection from defenders who were trying to kick them out of the game.
It’s also worth making a point about process. The Commissaires made their decision on the basis of the broadcast footage, and without hearing submissions from the team (team officials were called in to be told of the decision). The rules about what is or isn’t allowed in a sprint are unclear, and inconsistently interpreted. There’s no appeal. The Tour organisation, ASO, can get away with this because it is a private organisation, and because teams want to be invited back in the future. But the losses for the team are potentially considerable; Renshaw loses earnings and reputation; Cavendish may win fewer stages (although one wouldn’t bet on it); Columbia may have issues with its sponsors or its Tour earnings. Decisions need to be made quickly on the Tour because every day is another stage, and so every day counts. But we’re no longer in a world where judges can routinely make arbitrary decisions without appropriate process or representation and expect to get away with it. It’s only a matter of time before the ASO finds itself in a legal dispute with a team because a Commissaires’ decision breaches the rules of natural justice.
The Tour de France climbed Mont Ventoux yesterday, and the British riders found their way to pay their respects to Tom Simpson, the British cyclist who died on the climb in 1967, a mile short of the summit, suffering from a mixture of heat exhaustion, dehydration, stomach problems (he’d been ill for several days), amphetamines and alcohol. The best account of that fateful day is in William Fotheringham’s biography Put Me Back On The Bike, which makes it clear there were other causes as well; professional insecurity and Simpson’s burning desire, which quite often pushed him beyond his physical limits.
Simpson was the first British cyclist to make a real impact on professional cycling, and is probably still Britain’s most successful racer, winning among quite a lot of others the World Championships, Paris-Nice, and classic one-day races such as the Milan-San Remo (not won by another UK rider until Cavendish’s win earlier this year). The first, too, to wear the leader’s yellow jersey in the Tour, with a best finish in sixth place.
Yesterday David Millar threw an inscribed Garmin team cap to the foot of the memorial, while Charly Wegelius added a water bottle. Mark Cavendish removed his helmet. Bradley Wiggins, who had gone past at the business end of the stage about half an hour before, Twittered afterwards that he’d had a photo of Simpson taped to his bike.
Shed a tear today for Tom. I had a little extra strength today from somewhere. Had a photo of the man on my top tube.
And I hadn’t realised until yesterday that Simpson’s daughter, Joanne, had shared the same house as Bradley Wiggins’ dad, Gary, when Gary Wiggins was competing professionally in Belgium.
The most exact epitaph for Simpson came earlier this year from David Millar, who’s had his own problems with drugs. In his introduction to Simpson’s recently re-published autobiography, Cycling is my Life, he described the memorial as a poignant reminder of “how close he got and how far he fell – Tommy Simpson, cycling’s very own Icarus.”
I’m never sure about posts which are basically lists, but I have been mulling this one over for a few months now, and there will never be a better moment than this year’s Tour de France ‘Grand Depart’ in Monaco to share them. So here it is:
Best introduction to the Tour de France: Inside the Peloton by Graeme Fife. Fife – a prolific cycling writer – manages to combine both the sense of the sport and how it works, as well as the history of the race and most of the ‘grands’, the riders who have dominated it.
Best inside account by a professional: Paul Kimmage’s book A Rough Ride. Kimmage, now a sports journalist, was a successful amateur who never won a race as a professional. His book, published in 1990, was the first to break ranks on the sport’s drugs culture in the ’80s, and he was ostracised for most of the ’90s. But the book does more than this; it gives a feel for the life of the journeyman pro (in the same way, say as Eamonn Dunphy’s Only A Game did for football in the ’70s).
Best Insight Into being a team domestique: Domestiques are the team riders who can’t win for themselves, but ride for their leaders, preventing breakaways, chasing them down, keeping the pace high in the mountains, and so on. A Significant Other by Matt Rendell (based on Victor de la Pena’s diaries of the 2003 Tour) catches this better than any other. There’s a splendidly geeky section on the physics of the peloton, and a fine chapter in which de la Pena explains his team role in detail on one particular stage.
Best fictional account: Tim Krabbe’s The Rider – a novella about an amateur race, seen from the perspective of one of the riders. Almost existential.
Best book written by an insider about a pro team: A tie here, and both are about professional British cycling teams, about fifteen years apart. In Wide Eyed and Legless, Jeff Connor (a former fell-running champion-turned-journalist) is sent to ride the Tour stages ahead of the race and also report on the ill-fated ANC-Halfords team, under-prepared and under-financed, as it falls apart during the race. Team on the Runis written by John Deering, the press guy of the Linda McCartney team, funded by the vegetarian food company, and by Paul, who comes out of the story well. There are some highs – an unexpected win in the Giro d’Italia, for example – before the money goes astray.
Best book about racing as an amateur- or maybe just the best book about racing: The Escape Artistby Matt Seaton, a wonderful account of the slightly obsessive nature of the amateur rider. It sets the tone with a well-judged description of a tricky but exhilarating part of a favourite training run, and also of his first experience of riding fixed wheel at the Herne Hill velodrome (which ends calamitously). This is about cycling as a way of life – which comes up hard, later, against his wife’s illness and early death. I’d say it’s the best of all of these books.
Although I love professional cycling, despite its flaws, I have delayed reading Matt Rendell’s biography of the Italian climber Marco Pantani, who won the Tour de France and the Giro in 1998, and died of a massive cocaine overdose in a hotel room six years later, dogged by (well-founded) drugs scandals. The book got fine reviews, and Rendell knows the sport well (he is (co) author of one of the best books about being a team domestique). The reason I put off reading it was that I knew it would depress me.
The best way to summarise this is through a couple of lines in the final chapter:
Looking back, Marco’s successes, like any number of world records, gold medals, and winning sequences in recent sporting history have a phantom quality. … They weren’t events at all, but phantasmagorical experiences with no clearly definable reality that existed chiefly in the emotions they caused in millions of indivdual minds. The emotion most associated with Marco is euphoria, yet we know now that it was triggered by the poisons that flowed through his veins and made his flamboyant style possible.
It’s worth exploring this further. One of the most exciting sights in cycling is a climber attacking the field and gaining the minutes he needs to win – and Pantani’s stage win at Les Deux Alpes in 1998, when he attacked on a climb in atrocious conditions, descended recklessly, then climbed again, to make enough time on Ullrich to seal his Tour victory – was one of the most exciting days of racing in my lifetime.
But in a (literally) forensic analysis, Rendell demonstrates that Pantani had been blood doping through the use of EPO almost from the start of his professional career. At the same time, he kicks away one of the cycling fans’ supports. Almost all of the successful cyclists in the 1990s used EPO (Bjarne Riis, tour winner in 1996, has admitted it; Ullrich hasn’t but the evidence is against him, there are still questions over Armstrong’s win in 1999). So the fan’s defence is that EPO use must have levelled the playing field – while quietly disregarding the talented but non-using Charly Mottet, who never finished the Tour higher than fourth. Rendell suggests that athletes respond differently to EPO, and that Pantani’s success might just suggest that his body was better attuned to the drug.
So far, this ia familiar story about 90s cycling – or even modern professional sport. But there are two other stories in Rendell’s narrative as well. The first is about the nature of cycling in Pantani’s native region of Emilia-Romagna, with its strong Communist traditions. The first chapter of the book places cycling, and Pantani, deep in their social milieu.
The second is perhaps more revealing. Rendell suggests that Pantani’s sporting success disguised a pattern of mental illness that might have otherwise been recognised more clearly – and which seemed to be inherent in his growing cocaine abuse after 1999. More: this might have been part of his make-up as a sportsman which enabled him to take the risks on descents which contributed to some of his victories, and also to some of his crashes. The other half of this, of course, is that some of the experts who tried to help Pantani identified this problem – but the cyclist’s fame and wealth, and some of his advisors who lived inside this bubble and benefited from both, meant that it was always impossible to address it.
The initial newspaper article, which led to the book, can be found here.
