Prior to the time trial stage of the UAE Tour earlier this year, Ineos’s Josh Tarling admitted that, on the whole, he’d have quite liked it if Remco Evenepoel had been somewhere else for the day. He said it somewhat tongue in cheek, but still, I liked the honesty.
There are unwritten rules of bike racing. Among them is the idea that you, as an athlete, always want to measure yourself against the best. Every day of your racing career, you want that opportunity to stand with the biggest stars, race mano-a-mano, and see your place in the firmament.
But I think I speak on behalf of athletes everywhere when I say that there are only so many times you need to measure yourself against the very best before you’ve learned everything about taking a thrashing that you are ever going to.
Eventually your thoughts turn to more parochial matters – like the chance to go home waving a medal and give yourself a fighting chance of convincing your nearest and dearest that you’re not wasting your time at this “cycling” thing.
I was privileged to spend quite a lot of my career with Sir Bradley Wiggins as my perspective-provider. And it was always an honour to have him crush me under his wheels. But there were also days when I would definitely have preferred it if he’d stayed in Tenerife and enjoyed the sunshine and the altitude training. I would not have admitted to this thought, obviously.
Occasionally you get your wish. I once won the British Individual Pursuit championships. This unexpected turn of events came about because it was a Commonwealth Games year, which prompted most of the UK’s best pursuit riders to skip the championships.
And let me tell you, it’s a lot more fun being self-deprecating about the championship jersey you won because all the country’s best pursuiters from Bradley Wiggins to Steve Cummings (inclusive) weren’t there, than it is telling people for the fourth year running that fifth place was pretty good considering.
I was always a little flattered that my friend Bernard never wanted to race against me. It acknowledged what he wouldn’t want to admit directly, which is that in any race that ran without incident, I would beat him.
But it was curious to me that any time I went to race at a major event, Bernard was keen that I get beaten by as much as possible. On the one occasion I raced Tony Martin, Bernard had a viewing party, bought popcorn, and had a sweep on how much the reigning World Champion would beat me by. He optimistically picked eight minutes. (It was a 50 km time trial, since you ask.)
It wasn’t quite that much – it was about five. Bernard was still happy-ish. He didn’t like that I’d won the sweep, but said he could still see the bigger picture.
“But Bernie,” I pointed out, “The bigger picture is that by the transitive property of people beating each other, him beating me by five minutes means he’d beat you by about ten.”
“That’s all right. I mind the idea of the World Champion beating me by ten minutes a lot less than I mind the idea of being beaten by five by some bloke from the next village who borrowed my hedge clippers and cut through the cable.”
I suppose the truth of the matter is that even at second hand, what Bernard was doing was the same as any of us do when racing star riders in person – getting a simple thrill from a direct handle on how good some of the big riders are.
The difference for him being that the novelty of measuring-against-the-best would never have worn off:
“It’s just a shame that Tony Martin is too busy to do that to you every week,” he said wistfully.
Acts of Cycling Stupidity
I was at a book festival recently, and signed a book for someone who said, “My son is a professional cyclist.”
I asked who it was. He said, “Oh, you won’t have heard of him. He was watching the Tour when he was ten and just thought he’d like to be a pro cyclist, and asked me if I’d pay him to ride his bike. So I agreed to pay him £2 a week.”
“That’s cute,” I said. “Maybe he’ll be a real pro one day.”
“I doubt it,” he said. “He’s 22 now, and I’m still paying him £2 a week.”
Great Inventions of Cycling: Shorts (1886. Then again in 1919 and again in 1946.)
In the beginning, bicyclists wore breeches and knee-high leather boots. This was to provide protection from the front wheel of a bone-shaker or penny-farthing, which would pass between their legs like a giant meat slicer.
Shorts only appeared after the safety bicycle. Even then, they were only worn by racers – gentleman leisure cyclists wore breeches or plus-fours and stockings, lady cyclist wore skirts or (if they tended toward the scandalous) some variety of baggy trousers.
This continued until after the First World War, when women (and only women) started to wear shorts. Men stuck to their plus-fours, unless they were racing, in which case they wore black woollen tights that could absorb several times their own weight in water and rubbed most of the skin off a rider’s knees on any ride longer than a couple of hours.
Shorts were in fact prohibited by the racing rules in Britain – when the hour was first beaten for a 25-mile time trial, it was in Ireland, a liberal paradise where shorts were permitted. Every time triallist in Great Britain scoffed that anyone could go that fast if they were allowed to wear shorts.
After the next war, everyone was finally allowed to wear shorts for racing. These shorts were still made of wool, like cut-off versions of the tights, and were generally very short because if they weren’t they rucked up around a rider’s inner thighs and abraded the skin off those instead.
Finally, in the 1970s, stretchy synthetic shorts arrived, and everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief and put away their E45 cream. They’ve remained more or less unchanged since.
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