I rode down a hill a few weeks ago. I live Cambridge (UK), so this is quite a landmark event. However, this wasn’t the motorway flyover where I usually perfect my aero tuck. This was a sweet, flowing series of switchbacks in Alicante (Spain). There are few sensations in cycling more viscerally pleasurable than rounding a perfectly radiused hairpin, with a road that cambers just-so and sightlines clear enough to let you sweep in, clip an apex, and feel the bike accelerate below you onto the next straight. In the sorts of places where they have this sort of hairpin, they often string three or four of them together in a way that makes you feel like a god.
Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week
Then, of course, they chuck in a bend that’s like the wonky trip-step that they used to put in medieval castle staircases to catch out attackers. You think it’s like the others, you fly into it at 60kph, and you exit with white knuckles, a foot scraping on the crash barrier, a gratitude to still be alive and a resolution never to exceed 40kph on a descent ever again.
For the most thrilling descents, the road surface is key. This descent was so smooth. It had no gravel or holes. It had a few of those long black gaffer-tape lookalike repairs, but in the moderate temperatures of autumn, they provided no extra danger to my best Tom Pidcock impression. It was almost perfect.
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I accept that in Southern Europe it’s easier to maintain roads. There’s less frost cracking, less rain and usually less traffic, and Southern Europe seems to have found a place to buy high-quality asphalt, which however much they might Google it, no local authority in the UK has yet tracked down.
The equivalent corner in the UK is a right-angled junction on a country road, with a series of water-filled holes of mystery depth on the inside, a cock eyed drain cover in the middle, some lavishly repainted white lines that you need to bunny-hop over, and lashings of gravel to join it all together. Usually there will be a tall hedge so that on the exit you are unexpectedly eyeball to eyeball with an SUV driver.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the increasingly fine gradations that seem to apply between one category of machine and another in off-road riding. It failed to occur to me then that the difference between a good road and a bad road is at least as great as the difference between a bad road and the easier end of gravel, yet a road bike is pretty much a road bike.
On holiday in Spain, I kept thinking how wonderful an old road bike, with skinny tubular tyres, would be on those roads. The 120psi tyres would thrum as if they were alive. It wouldn’t be as fast as a modern bike, but for someone like me who spent the early years of cycling having his eyeballs rattled on that sort of bike on a UK road, it would feel so good. Spanish roads were what those bikes were invented for.
“I could get an old Colnago, or something,” I said to Mrs Doc, “and keep it in Spain somewhere so I could use it when I’m out there.”
All I got in response was a snort. “You could buy it an apartment and visit it on the side,” she said.
She also pointed out that five-speed means I’d never make it to the top of the hill to begin with. And that on 120psi 20mm tyres on marble-smooth roads, I’d fall off on the first damp morning, probably more than once.
But other than that, it would be amazing.
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