Early on in my racing career a more experienced rider told me, “The more worried you are about crashing, the more likely you are to crash.”
Always be suspicious of neat little formulations like this. They always leave a loophole – in this instance he failed to appreciate the magnitude of how much I didn’t want to crash. It turns out that if you spend the whole race cowering ten lengths off the back of the bunch, you’re pretty safe. Of course if you want to get a result, you have to learn to mix it. But you don’t have to learn to like it.
Only one of the reasons I didn’t want to crash was physical cowardice. The other was financial cowardice. I understood completely when my friend Bernard was involved in a sprint pile-up outside Saffron Walden and broke his collarbone. He rang me from A&E to ask how his bike was.
“Bar tape wrecked, saddle scuffed, otherwise it’s OK.”
“That’s a relief. I tried to let my body take the impact first. The NHS doesn’t fix bikes.”
This was in the merry days when stuff was cheap. When a whole pro-level bike cost “just” £2500, unless your crash involved a road roller or a giant vat of acid, your repair and replacement bill was a few hundred pounds at worst. (We still felt hard done by – an equivalent generational leap further back in time took you to the era when you could fix most things with a hammer, some tongs and a good hot fire.)
Michael Hutchinson is a writer, journalist and former professional cyclist. As a rider he won multiple national titles in both Britain and Ireland and competed at the World Championships and the Commonwealth Games. He was a three-time Brompton folding-bike World Champion, and once hit 73 mph riding down a hill in Wales. His Dr Hutch columns appears in every issue of Cycling Weekly magazine
As bikes have grown more expensive and harder to fix, the attitude of most of the riders has, in defiance of all logic, become more aggressive. Where once you were terrified as you tried to edge up the outside of the bunch on your cheap bike by using the last available 25mm of tarmac, now you’d be triply terrified on your expensive bike because there’d be someone trying to move up outside you by bunny hopping the drain covers, and probably a 19-year old kamikaze coming up outside them on the grass.
I think the worst job in all cycling is to be the parent of a young racer. I was chatting to one of them recently who told me that the price of kit combined with the fearlessness of youth meant it was like setting your teenager off to learn to drive by doing laps of central London in a solid gold dodgem encrusted with diamonds. If your family finances exist on a bit of a knife-edge, a pyromaniac would make a more attractive child than a wannabe bike racer.
One suggestion I came across recently was to offer different racing classes based not on ability, but on the cost of the bike. That way you could race a cheaper bike and not be at a disadvantage. But there’s a major problem. If I go racing, I badly want to be surrounded by people as cowardly as me. Ideally more cowardly. I don’t want to spend my day riding at 50 kph among a whole bunch of people who’ve suddenly got one reason fewer to mind crashing. I might want my bike to be cheap, but I want yours to be expensive.
It’s got to the point where I’m honestly amazed that amateur riders and juniors race on bikes that cost as much as they do. If, when I started racing, someone had told me that before I was finished most serious amateurs would feel pressured into buying super-bikes that cost very nearly as much as a new car, I’d have assumed that everyone would ride two meters apart from each other and multi-rider crashes would be something old lags like me would tell anecdotes about.
It says much for our bravery, confidence and above all for our financial irresponsibility that this hasn’t happened.
Great Inventions of Cycling
Before 2008, we all knew where we were with aerodynamics. If it looked aero, it was aero. And looking aero was about being thin, pointy and smooth. This applied as much to you as to your bike.
Then in 2008 the GB Olympic track team debuted race suits that were a bit on the baggy side and covered in huge, ugly, deeply unaerodynamic-looking raised seams, which were designed to “trip” the airflow over the suit and introduce turbulence in a carefully calculated place. Everyone scoffed, right up to the point where the team hoovered up almost all the medals available to them.
As a group, racing cyclists pivoted on the spot, and accepted the idea that things that did not look aerodynamic by the standards of “looking aero” could still be faster. After all, we didn’t want to look stupid.
This turn of events had the huge advantage for manufacturers that they could make things into funny shapes and declare that despite what they looked like, they were faster than any competitor’s product. Because we were all so sophisticated and knowledgeable, we had to believe them.
As long as the weird bump, ridge, scoop or texture had a proprietary name that included “aero” in it somewhere, and came with a nice set of graphs, it was impossible to prove it didn’t work short of actually testing it yourself. At just the moment that all bikes had been beginning to appear more or less identical, it was a valuable opportunity for some product differentiation.
It’s reassuring to know that we’re still falling for it.
Acts of Cycling Stupidity
Word reaches us of a rider who was unlucky enough to crash on some ice over the winter. Among other things, his head hit the ground, fracturing his helmet into two halves.
Being tight-fisted and perhaps a bit stupid, he glued the two halves back together, and explained to a concerned clubmate that, “unless I have exactly the same crash again it’ll be fine, because the helmet will impact a different place and break a different way.”
Two weeks later he crashed again. Since his helmet hit the ground this time too, he was delighted at the cash he’d saved. However, he was a bit disappointed with a mild concussion.
He subsequently remembered that the helmet had come with a crash-replacement guarantee.
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