Patrick Field – Page 7

end of an era

In bicycle road racing favouritism makes it harder to win. To put it another way outsiders have an advantage. Zoetemelk won the World Championship at 38 when the others didn’t take his late attack seriously enough, quickly enough. You can’t chase everyone.
Vino – also in his 39th year – won the the Olympic Road Race with a jump on Putney High Street forcing a gap that he held – with the aid of Rigoberto Uran a non-sprinting Colombian – all the way up the Fulham Road, through South Ken and Knightsbridge, down Constitution Hill and along the Mall.

Churlish commentary followed Vinokourov’s well-judged, opportunist triumph, complaining about his history of blood-spinning. Suppose the race had regrouped on the run-in and Cavendish had won for the Isle of Man who would have carped about Bernhard Eisel working – not for the glory of Austria – but for his regular teamate? At least Rigoberto Uran – another Murdoch mercenary – didn’t wait to see if he could help.

Cycle-sport has no idealised history to draw on. Bike racers had sponsors names on their jerseys, stayed in the best hotels and engaged the best doctors when star soccer players were still travelling to games on the bus, with the crowd. Cycle sport has never been tainted with the Corinthian spirit.

Vinokourov isn’t just a throwback to the glory days of Deutsche Telekom, I strongly suspect he will be the last product of the Soviet Union to win an Olympic gold medal in any discipline that makes you sweat, maybe the last of all? Whatever you think about that, or his conviction for hosting somebody else’s blood, it can’t be denied that anyone still racing at the highest level while looking down the barrel of forty years old must really like riding a bike. The warrior deserves his glorious exit.

who do you think you are?

Someone asked:- “Do you think Wiggins’ victory will make more people cycle?” The best answer I could manage is that it may not increase the quantity but it might have some impact on the quality?
Can any readers confirm that Germans don’t understand the concept of a charity bike ride? It would make sense, they don’t all want to ride bikes for a hundred kilometres but they certainly all know that riding a bike at a comfortable pace, for a few hours, is no big deal.

Anything is easy when you can do it. The hard part isn’t doing it, the difficulty is in becoming a person who knows how to do it. Learning to ride a bike is not a big problem, the more you do it the easier it gets, especially if you get some guidance – or spend time riding with good role-models – to avoid practising doing it wrong. Years of search-and-peck at a keyboard don’t make it easier to become a touch-typist.

Lately a problem for English people – isolated from the heroic role-models of cycle-sport and the practicalities of everyday cycle travel – has been the misapprehension that there’s nothing to learn. Becoming a person who can exploit the potential of a bike is not a big problem but you have to understand that there’s stuff to discover and to practice. Bicycling is young. In historical terms a hundred and twenty years is quite a short time. In evolutionary terms it’s a blink. It’s hard to say much about cycling in this pioneer era but one thing’s for sure… Riding a bike is not natural. Nothing in nature prepared us for floating on compressed air, in a state of perpetual falling where only the forces are balanced.

If you can ride a horse, paddle a kayak or ski, these activities are easy, but it wouldn’t be a surprise if someone without experience, taking them up, sought instruction, or at least the company of expert companions? The idea that everyone knows how to ride a bike, the ‘as-easy-as’ cliche, can be interpreted as another manifestation of mainstream culture’s disdain for bicycle travel. It doesn’t cost anything so it can’t be worth anything. The adjective ‘humble’ sometimes seems compulsory.

The mistaken assumption that everybody can ride a bike – as opposed to the truth that almost everybody has the potential to ride a bike – is encouraged by the fact that, in societies where cycling is an unremarkable part of everyday life, a lot of subtle knowledge is passed on in infancy. One of the best things about riding in the Netherlands is watching tiny children take their mother’s wheel, or the weaker member of a middle-aged couple – dressed for town and riding roadsters – changing their position, as the road zig-zags across the polders, to always hold the spot where they get the best shelter from their companion, crafty as Joop Zoetemelk.

There’s usually been room for one racing champion in British culture. As in…

“Who do you think you are…?”

…Reg Harris? (1955)
…Beryl Burton? (1965)
…Eddy Merckx? (1975)
…Chris Boardman? (1995)

Now that the sports-literate person-in-the-street has to engage with at least two, they also have to consider some of the apparently simple activity’s subtleties. What makes Cavendish different from Wiggins? Wiggins different from Froome? How does Wiggins go so fast and look so smooth?

Can Nicole…

and Elizabeth…

really get along, really combine successfully?

The quality goes up, the satisfaction goes up and then the quantity goes up.

It might work?

time to buy the yellow paint

When modern cycling – safety bikes with air tyres and chain-drives – began, Britain was the workshop of the World, unique in having a large urban working class. In agricultural societies bicycles made the workforce more mobile, more productive, a bicycle was something for a landless labourer to aim at. Bicycles promoted social cohesion. In a nation of industrial cities bikes were more likely to be considered a threat to social order, because they allowed working people easy access to the countryside.
In 1894 bicycle-road racing was banned in Britain following an incident on the Great North Road in which a carriage-horse bolted. Semi-clandestine time-trials were tolerated, but mass-start road-racing wasn’t re-established for half a century. One interpretation of Wiggins’ triumph, is that the outspoken Londoner with Irish-Australian roots is finally healing a wound that has delayed the development of bicycling in this country.

Wiggins is a ‘Mod’. The Mod(ernist) cult began in the post-war boom. The Beatles went to Hamburg in 1960, as Rockers….

…- Rockers like leather jackets, long hair, big motor-cycles and American music – and came back as Mods.

Modism persisted through related flavours – skinheads, soul-boys, casuals – and enjoyed a revival around 1978. Wiggins is too young to have participated in either of these booms. He’s not a Mod by accident. It’s a choice.

Mods like tailoring, haircuts, American music, motor-scooters, coffee bars, anything Italian. Modism’s affinity for Italian style overlaps nicely with just-like-Eddy…

…retro coureur-chic; woollen jerseys, leather-mitts, cotton caps. It makes sense that – Fred Perry, a sportswear brand that became a classic ‘soul-boy’ label – would want to team up with Wiggins. They must have noticed the rapid growth of Rapha-ism. Here’s Bradley looking moody in the doorway of a new shop, selling old bikes to young people in Mountgrove Road N5.

The great fixed-gear boom of the early Twenty-first Century is probably over, but if – and it seems only lightning-strike can stop it – the Maida-Vale track-star, hipster wins the Tour de France the idea that studying to ride a bike is an aspirational activity for dandies will get another mighty hand-sling down the grand boulevard of human progress.

During the Beijing Olympics I had to ride out into the Outer Eastern Suburbs to make an important delivery. Floating through the afternoon snarl of Leyton and Wanstead I felt love coming from the disappointed wage slaves in the white vans:- ‘There’s one of those people we’re proud of.’

Hurrying to appointments during the last fortnight, taking pace off the motor-traffic on the Kingsland Road like I was pushing back through the convoy with a jersey full of bidons, I’ve felt the same delusion.

the politeness of champions

So the answer to last week’s question… “Will Cav be willing to carry bottles and close gaps for Wiggo?” …is ‘yes’. Heartwarming and humbling to see the Manx phenomenon back in the convoy stuffing his arc-en-ciel World Champion’s jersey with bottles. Presumably he’ll get his reward in Surrey and the South Western suburbs on July 28th?

So the answer to last week‘s question…

“Will Cav be willing to carry bottles and close gaps for Wiggo?”

…is ‘yes‘. Heartwarming and humbling to see the Manx phenomenon back in the convoy stuffing his arc-en-ciel World Champion’s jersey with bottles. Presumably he’ll get his reward in Surrey and the South Western suburbs on July 28th?

Anonymous suggestions that Wiggins and his dominant team are beginning to look like Lance Armstrong and US Postal, against whom evidence of – to use the traditional euphemism – scientific preparation has been building for years, led to a sweary outburst from the lanky lad from the Edgware Road.

“I say they’re just fucking wankers. I cannot be doing with people like that.

“It justifies their own bone-idleness because they can’t ever imagine applying themselves to do anything in their lives.

“It’s easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of shit, rather than get off their arses in their own lives and apply themselves and work hard at something and achieve something. And that’s ultimately it. Cunts.”

Reaction to Wiggins’ tirade – which provided a refreshing contrast to the customary platitudes of elite sport-stars – illustrates the particular status of the top rank of road-racers.
When a soccer player mouths off or throws a punch it’s a scandal leading to disgrace and suspension. Uncouth behaviour is not encouraged among bike racers, it may even attract nominal fines, but there’s a general climate of tolerance. These are not normal people and it’s unfair to apply normal standards to them.
Take, for example, Oscar Freire, who fell in the massive high-speed chute 25 kilometres from the end of Stage Six. He got up and rode to the finish and thus retained the right to start stage Seven. Once over the line it turned out Freire had raced fifteen miles with a punctured lung.
If you or I fell off our bikes and put a rib through a lung we’d be glad to take the ambulance and morphine option and probably not ride for a month. Oscar’s first thought was avoiding elimination.
The rash of crashes in the first week clarified the Wiggins/Cavendish situation by removing any realistic possibility of Mark contesting the Green Jersey. Wiggins succeeded in – not only battering the opposition in Monday’s time trial – but also put a little time into his strongest team-mate Froome, thus winning continued, loyal support from the whole squad.

The question “Are Bradley Wiggins and Team Sky too much like Lance Armstrong and US Postal?” is foolish. It’s certain that any team-mate who out-shone Armstrong – in the way that Froome bested Wiggins in last years Tour of Spain, would have been out. And the idea of Armstrong allowing a World Champion sprint specialist in his team is unimaginable. Wiggins is a bike-racer not an old school Patron like Hinnault or Merckx.

when the excrement impacts the enthusiast

The early Bee Gees were – to my child self – comical, with their goofy looks and emotional ballad style.

The early Bee Gees were – to my child self – comical, with their goofy looks and emotional ballad style. I recall a briefly popular playground parody which turned ‘Massachusetts‘ into ‘massive chew sets’.

In December 2009 Mark Cavendish had some new teeth fitted, then resumed training earlier than his medical advisors wanted. His gums became infected, he fell ill and his early season schedule was delayed. The episode led to harsh speculation that he was more interested in stardom than winning bike races.

The publicity following Robin Gibb’s death made me wonder about Celtic teeth, and whether Cavendish – in trying to look more ‘Monaco’ – had succeeded in looking less Manx.

Usually the more you find out about people the more interesting they become, celebrations of his life reminded us Robin was a co-writer of this great song.

Great songs from unlikely sources include this from…

…West End boy Yusuf Islam, and all those great standards by Chris Kristofferson who isn’t much of a singer and couldn’t act his way out of a paper-bag.

One of the unwritten rules of bike racing is there must be blood.

Yesterday’s unfortunate abandonment – broken tibia – by Kanstantsin Siutsou from Belarus will tell us something new about the Manx lad with little legs and explosive acceleration. In the aftermath of the stage David Brailsford described TeamSky rider Siutsou as “versatile” by which we may understand he does what he’s told.

Bicycle road racing is – like life – a team endeavour with individual winners. Any worthwhile achievement is the result of collective action but very often one person gets all the credit. Road racing produces recurring narratives of loyalty, honour, trust and betrayal.

As a team with a strong G.C. favourite – in Bradley Wiggins from Maida Vale – was it rash to include in their squad for the Tour de France both Cavendish – a super-star with his own agenda – and Austrian Bernhard Eisel who came with Cavendish from his previous team as personal domestique-deluxe?

Will Wiggins find himself short of team-mates when the shit hits the fan? Is Cavendish willing to allow his place-man Eisel to ride for Wiggins? Will Cav be willing to carry bottles and close gaps for Wiggo, fine-tuning for Box Hill in the big mountains?

Cavendish’s enthusiastic contention of interim sprints suggests he has ambitions to lead, maybe win, the points competition this year. His spectacular crash – in which Eisel also took a taste of tarmac – today in Rouen, shows the added risk of contesting bunch sprints early in the race without a full team to maintain some control at the front end.

Cavendish is also targeting the Olympic road race. An event prestigious enough to bump the Dunwich Dynamo up the calendar. Cavendish and Wiggins have history, winning the Madison World Championship as the perfect sprinter/stayer combination then flopping at the same event when heavily marked at the Beijing Olympics.

In last year’s World Championship Road Race Wiggins dominated the elite field in the closing stages to set up Cavendish’s biggest win so far. Wiggins’ awesome display of sustained power and control in that event might easily end up being the greatest performance of his life. It would be interesting to know what agreement has been struck between the two for the next month’s busy programme.

The compelling uncertainty of sport means nobody knows whether Team Sky/GB are spreading their resources too thin, whether the experiment will end with domination, Yellow Jersey, Green Jersey and Gold Medals all round, or in embarrassing fiasco?

When Bjarne Riis toppled Miguel Indurain in 1996 they say the factories, shops and offices of Denmark were deserted in the afternoons as everyone stayed glued to live TV images of the bald Eagle becoming the first Dane to win Le Grand Boucle.

If Wiggins wins the Tour the achievement will raise the profile of cycle-sport in Britain to new heights. If Cavendish emulates the World’s greatest living Welsh person and takes Gold on the first weekend of the Olympic Games his global profile will get even bigger.

Super-champions don’t just win they are also noble. Win or lose, how these two handle the pressure, and conduct their relationship will tell us something more about their characters and begin to define their enduring reputations.

Bring it on.

handbags and gladrags

Now we have an investment-quality, made-in-England musette, with both. You could even use the map to get to Harwich.

“Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.”

Victor Hugo

So far this season has seen the launch of…

…a range of German bicycle tyres carrying a graphic of the London Skyline.

…German bicycle bags featuring maps

Now we have an investment-quality, made-in-England musette, with both. You could even use the map to get to Harwich, for Hoek van Holland, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Köln or Berlin.

The straps are attached at an angle so the bag rests stable on your back until you need an inner-tube or a banana.French vocabulary is so poetic. The peloton, more glamorous than the bunch, a musette more refined than a bonk- or butty-bag. For best effect these last two are delivered in a gritty (pronounced ‘gritteh’) Northern accent, ideally in a moorland hailstorm.

A musette is a small folkloric bag-pipe, that gave it’s name to a style of French accordion music, and also – because of a supposed resemblance – to a road-racer’s feed bag, passed up by a soigneur, at a zone de ravitaillement.

The real things are disposable promotional items. Once the contents have been transferred to jersey pockets and bottle cages the musette is slung away to be retrieved as a trophy-relic by some devout witness.

“This scrap of cotton? It once held Laurent Jalabert’s fourth breakfast.”

The DD bonk-bag is made to much more exacting standards – an item nobody would want to throw into a hedge. It’s screen-printed, with a timeless design, it will still work well and look great moon-bleached and faded, on DDXL in 2032.

Available on London Fields, on Saturday night, maybe on Dunwich Beach on Sunday morning, if somebody can be a bothered to haul stock over Essex and Suffolk.

Strictly limited edition.

You know you want one.

See you on London Fields, on the road or on the beach.

gone with the lamp-lighters and cinema projectionists

It’s entirely appropriate that a frivolous event – a night ride and beach party – has origins shrouded in mystery.

Barry Mason had flair. It was he who invented the Dunwich Dynamo’s creation myth; that a bunch of cycle messengers set-off after an evening drinking session and didn’t stop until they reached the North Sea. Barry always prefaced this confection with ‘legend has it…’ but despite the caveat his sticky tale passed into history.
It’s entirely appropriate that a frivolous event – a night ride and beach party – has origins shrouded in mystery. The problem with Barry’s story is that it may – over time – lead those without much adult memory of the Twentieth Century to misunderstand what those times were really like.

In the years when the DD was a pay-to-enter event, selling enough tickets to cover fixed costs was the difference between profit and loss. Down at Critical Mass sometime in the mid-Nineties, diligently passing out DD flyers with a coupon on the bottom, a scruffy young man took one, read it carefully and asked:- “Do any couriers do this?” Then answered his own question. “No courier would ever do that.”

His declaration was over-statement. There were some bike messengers who rode for fun, but in those days – when delivering letters and packages on a bicycle was a real job, not a lifestyle – many more of them hung up their bikes at the weekends, just as toilet cleaners put down their brushes and carpenters their chisels. On Saturday nights some of the most adept messengers travelled by taxi.

For the benefit of teenage readers; a coupon is a form cut from a newspaper, magazine, leaflet or flyer (a flyer is a promotional piece of paper like the ones promoting industrial pizza that still get shoved through letter boxes)

In olden days people cut coupons out, filled them in and sent them – in paper envelopes with cheques or postal-orders – something like Paypal only slower and more concrete.

Email, electronic artwork, email attachments, automated bank transfers, Wi-Fi; it’s easy to forget how fresh this stuff is. Every kilobyte, one less cardboard envelope or – for pedants – one cardboard envelope fewer.

Is it a coincidence that just as the last Scottish Highlanders were cleared off their lands and embarked for Nova Scotia, New Zealand or Birmingham, the British aristocracy went wild for tartan, Queen Victoria had a bag-piper under her bedroom window and – in Edinburgh – North-Brit male toffs started waltzing around in pleated skirts with little daggers stuck in their socks?

When the last un-contacted forest aboriginals get their first taste of Coca-cola, and first experience of steel tools, rich kids start wearing Campagnolo seat-pin bolts through their nasal septa and sporting warrior tattoos.

When I explained the theory – that a global infatuation with ‘bike courier chic’ is(was?) a clear symptom that the riders with big bags and radios are running out of road – to Bill ‘Buffalo Bill’ Chidley, the King of the Couriers, he disagreed. As counter-argument the legendary self-advertiser cited a recent case of a messenger who had to ride from Soho to Clapham to deliver a hard-drive.

Later – on reflection – I tried to imagine how many old-school couriers it would have taken to carry two terabytes of paper correspondence?

One of the rules of mass-participation cycle-touring is…

Never assume anyone else knows the way.

If you ride the Dunwich Dynamo next week and follow a handful of red lights for half an hour you may find they’re not going to Dunwich at all, just heading up to the all-night garage in Bury St. Edmunds for a packet of cigarettes.

Keep the route-sheet handy – even if you know the way, it sets a good example to greener pilgrims – and this five-bob data display system will add old school Twentieth Century messenger-cool to almost any bike.

batteries not included

“If string will do the job use string.”

Mike Burrows

You will need…

1 Zip-tie
1 Bulldog clip

Zip-ties – AKA cable-ties – can be purchased in bulk from electrical wholesalers in various lengths and weights. If you’re too tight to pay cash-money for a supply you can find a pirate sign – for example “FILM UNIT” – cable-tied to a lamp-post and cut it down carefully. Cut the tie where it’s tail enters the head to leave the longest remnant possible.

Alternatively a fine blade can be inserted into the head to lever the ratchet spring open and unlock the tie in one piece. String also works and can be transferred easily between a fleet of machines.

Bulldogs come in all sizes. They are available at stationers. Choose one that suits your application.

Tie the bulldog clip to your handlebar stem, or any exposed cables where its contents will be easily visible on-the-fly.

That’s it.

If the clip tends to rattle on the bars while empty you can make an acoustic damping system using a small section of rubber sheet – cut from failed inner-tube – secured with more zip-ties or double-sided cellulose-based, pressure sensitive adhesive tape (Sellotape).

Use your data display to carry…

route-summary information – road numbers, places en-route etc.
shopping lists
destination addresses
flyers
maps

Works well with…

a plastic bag for rain-proofing
a head torch to read data in the dark

Also works with Twenty-first Century bikes.

*five bob = five shillings = 25p

as easy as riding a bike

While people who used bicycles for travel were a vanishing tribe – stubbornly refusing to vanish – practical cycling was an unusual subject for mainstream media.

While people who used bicycles for travel were a vanishing tribe – stubbornly refusing to vanish – practical cycling was an unusual subject for mainstream media. On the rare occasions that it featured on a TV magazine show, a common convention was to give a naive reporter a bike and ask them to use it for commuting. When they ran into threshold problems the conclusion drawn was not, that the poor neophyte was in need of help, but rather that travelling by bike is impossibly difficult.

The exercise was analogous to putting a person who’s never skied on a lift up a mountainside, giving them a pair of Herman Munster boots clipped to a pair of two metre laminated planks, asking them to slide back to the valley and concluding from the embarrassing results that alpine skiing is not a bracing recreation but really, really difficult and somewhat perilous.

My own contribution to this clichéd sub-genre was in 1995 when hired to appear in an item about urban cycling by the production company of ‘Ride-On’ – a motoring show for Channel 4. The film crew had me riding round the Elephant and Castle, a busy double roundabout that forms the hub of South London’s road network. They shot me from various locations on the kerb, from the roof of a shopping centre, they clamped a clockwork camera the size of a brick – miniature for those times – on the handlebars and framed my face from below, they clamped it on the forks and shot forward into the moving traffic.

Keen to set a good example to the viewers and taking professional care of my temporary employer’s equipment I rode purposefully but with deliberate care, using the lane markings on the roadway, the patterns made by the files of motor-traffic and a bike rider’s ability to demand the attention of others, to hold an empty zone around my machine.

After each run the director and senior colleagues retired to their mobile home to view the latest sequence and confer in hushed voices. They did their best to seem optimistic – making moving pictures is a bit like going to war, morale is very important – but clearly weren’t happy with what had been recorded.

They were running out of options. It began to seem that darkness might fall without them capturing the pictures they wanted. Finally the director took me aside and in a conspiratorial tone asked:- “Can’t you make it look more difficult?”

In the end the segment – which mostly showed cycling to be a sensible way to get around London – went out with a staged coda in which the show’s presenter – an aristocratic ex-r ace driver – decided to try cycling; rode away and was knocked to the floor by a carelessly swung car door. It was meant to be funny.

In those days the seemingly contradictory notions…

Cycling is an infantile accomplishment unworthy of study.
Cycling is so difficult, dangerous and demanding that no sane person can contemplate it.

…reinforced each other by taking cycle-travel out of the realm of possible adult behaviour. Cycling was for children or for super-heroes, not for normal folk.

There’s a segment in the latest ‘Sunday Politics’ a show on BBC 1, on the feasibility of London ‘Going Dutch’. Featuring a discussion between the urbane and articulate Mustafa Arif – a Director of the London Cycling Campaign – a couple of politicians and – bizarrely – Sir Stirling Moss – the Lewis Hamilton of the 1950’s – who retired while I was still in the infants*.

Sir Stirling doesn’t have much to contribute beyond his legendary presence and a lame plea for helmet compulsion, which Mustafa flicks to the boundary with a finely judged mix of deference and contempt.

The interesting part for me is the film which introduces the discussion , and contrasts traffic conditions in Groningen, in the Netherlands, with those in London. It doesn’t dwell on the problems of cycling in our motor-centric capital. Now that most young and thrusting media-types travel by bike this line is no longer really tenable.

Here the metaphorical non-skier up the mountain is boy reporter Andrew Cryan trying to drive a car around central Groningen and finding it more than somewhat problematic.

The message is still that cycling can’t happen but the sensational premise is no longer…

‘Cycling to work? Are you mad?’

…but rather…

‘Where streets are cycle-friendly motoring is close to impossible.’

The young fellow does his best to make it look dangerous, talking to camera, with both hands off the wheel, while the vehicle is moving, but his flustered attempts tell us nothing about the practicality of moving a car in and out of the filtered permeability of Groningen’s centre, just that little Andrew was only there for six hours.

Even then his hyperbolic…

“Unless you were making a delivery or you’re a taxi[sic] you’d be absolutely mad to try and drive here.”

…has to be balanced with the observation that…

“In the suburbs [motor-]traffic flows incredibly well.”

Making car journeys more awkward also makes travelling by car easier. Who’d have thought it eh?

As we get into the discussion it’s hard to imagine that Sir Stirling – who once jousted with Juan Manuel Fangio and Mike Hawthorn – was first choice as token apologist for motor-dependence?

They might have preferred Jeremy Clarkson who recently opined that…

“…in Britain, where cars and bikes share the road space. This cannot and does not work. It’s like putting a dog and a cat in a cage and expecting them to get along.”

This simile can’t really bear much analysis.

Q: What kind of dog wakes up in the morning and wonders: – ‘Shall I be a dog or a cat today?’

Q; If a dog and a cat have sexual congress will they produce…

…an obsolete audio format?
…a simple component for a chain-driven transmission?
…nothing but noise?

Of course Jeremy Clarkson is a semi-fictional comic character – more Alan Partridge than Alain Prost – and the last thing he would want is to engage in reasoned debate about the baffling, reflexive fluidity of real-life.

Q: * Who comes out of the skirting board at 220 miles per hour?
A: Stirling Mouse.

problems of giantism (part 2)

Cycle sport is fascinating and glamourous. Most people don’t have the fortitude and humility for cycle sport with it’s grueling diet of pain, disappointment and humiliation. A road race – even at the bottom of the pyramid – may have fifty starters, only one will win. In cycle-sport second place is also known as ‘first loser’.

Cycle sport is fascinating and glamourous.

Most people don’t have the fortitude and humility for cycle sport with it’s grueling diet of pain, disappointment and humiliation. A road race – even at the bottom of the pyramid – may have fifty starters, only one will win. In cycle-sport second place is also known as ‘first loser’.

Eddy Merckx once said that:- “In racing, there are always more bad days than good.”

And he was Eddy Merckx.

There’s a category of person – almost all men – who love the frisson, the glamour, of cycle-sport but lack the courage, fortitude and humility required to participate. Some of these people enter events that are NOT races, then try to win them.

“Re: Dunwich Dynamo 4th / 5th July 2009

by *********** » Thu Jun 25, 2009 1:39 pm

Yes – it’ll be my fifth year (I DNF’d in 2007 due to the weather).

We’ll be leaving at 8pm and going like a bat out of hell. This may not be in the spirit of things, but it avoids having to pass hundreds of slower cyclists on dangerous roads, and the queues for food can be appallingly long if you get there late.”

Plenty to worry about in this exemplary gem pruned from the archive of an internet forum. The writer’s identity has been redacted.

No shame in not finishing, if you tried your best, better luck next year. Not finishing due to the weather – in 2007 there was a brisk tailwind, it rained during the night, which was warm, and the morning was fine and steamy – is the sign of an ill-equipped, ill prepared and callow rider. Not finishing a planned journey because of the weather, in England, in July, is pathetic.

I’m guessing the writer’s never held a racing license or pinned on a number to ride against the watch, that their idea of “like a bat out of hell” equates to a brisk but comfortable pace, and is a long way South of 40 kph?

These criticisms are matters of taste. The real embarrassment is the idea that they don’t want to overtake hundreds of slower cyclists on dangerous roads. Usually there are 364 and a half – this year one more – days when you can ride from Hackney to Dunwich without passing more than a dozen bike riders.

If you don’t want to meet other pilgrims why are you riding a social event? None of the roads on the DD‘s recommended route are subject to avalanche, landslip or flash floods. If you find them more dangerous than you want them to be then you’re doing something very wrong.

An unwritten rule of cycle racing is ‘there must be blood”. In a race you’re expecting to take risks. As Sean Kelly sagely observed…

“You don’t think about hospital. You think about winning.”

Cycle-touring is different. Nobody is standing by to scrape you off the road and put you in an ambulance if you miscalculate. If the difference between success and failure is the width of a tyre you overslept or misread the ferry time-table. The point is to be reliable and efficient, to travel and to have fun.

The formal stop on the Dunwich Dynamo – this year at the delightfully secluded Sible Heddingham Village Hall – is to allow the luxury of running water and flush toilets. Hot drinks and a short menu are offered for sale to help cover the costs of opening and staffing this amenity. If you find the idea of queues ‘appalling’ fill your bottles, eat the food that you’re carrying and leave the rest for those who are less well prepared or more tolerant of waiting. If the food’s run out or the line is too long DON’T KVETCH. It will only draw attention to the fact that you’re lacking in the prime virtue of cycle travel SELF RELIANCE. Keep the place tidy.

The Dunwich Dynamo is a free event. It’s idiotic to float a free event and then complain if others use it to act out their harmless fantasies. If folk want to treat the Dunwich Dynamo as a road-race – and can somehow overlook the fact that it has no entry fee, no start time, no finish line, no prize list and no UCI ranking – and they manage not to endanger or inconvenience anyone but their own sorry selves where’s the harm?

In most jurisdictions bike racers are fined or disqualified for dropping litter. At the highest level, where a discarded bidon or empty musette will be fought over as if it were the blackened toe-nail of a medieval Christian saint, nobody minds. Debris is part of the show.

Some people who’ve only seen bike racing on TV think it’s OK to drop litter so long as your bike has no mudguards, your riding as fast as you think you can go and your wearing a replica pro-team jersey. The truth is that affecting the reckless habits of a big time bike-racer on a free-to-enter touring ride makes you look like a DOOFUS.

If your cruising speed is North of 30 kph why not leave late and breeze through the field offering words of encouragement to the halt and the lame? A push on the uphills(ASK FIRST)? You might meet some nice people? If you find someone in trouble you may be able to offer help? There’s a surprisingly large number of people who think fitting a tyre is difficult, that a puncture is an emergency. Set a good example, remind people – softly – to be quiet in villages.

If you prefer to ride early and go as fast as possible remember your sweetie wrappers and dead tubes aren’t holy relics. If you drop them you put the future of the event in jeopardy. You carried them out, You take them home.

And make sure you’ve enough clothes to be warm on the beach in the small hours.