When I was at college, I had a very tall friend. He was about 6ft 7in, or a little over two metres. There were some drawbacks to this for him. First, he banged his head on things with a regularity that was boring to witness, never mind boring to experience. Second, strangers were forever telling him that he was very tall and asking him what the weather was like up there. Third, the university basketball club wouldn’t leave him alone.
From his first day there till his last, members of the basketball team would ask him to come and play. “I don’t know how to play basketball,” he’d say. “You don’t need to, not when you’re your height,” they’d reply. “And also, I don’t want to play basketball,” he’d say. “Well, you should. I mean, I would if I were as tall as you.”
I made a note to mention her to my friend Bernard next time I saw him. I did so mainly because there was a time when the idea of someone with that ability who didn’t go racing would have got under his skin. As a club secretary, he used to coerce riders into racing – I remember him entering people in races without telling them, as a prelude to essentially kidnapping them and taking them to the events.
“You owe it to yourself,” was the phrase he used. He felt they had a duty to make the most of their talent. He took any success they had very personally.
He was not the only person who felt like this. People said similar things to me when I was racing. Mainly, they were offended that I was a time trial specialist. “You ought to be focusing on road racing,” they’d say. I’d point out I was making a good living, winning a lot of races and I was very content. It made no difference. To them, I was wasting what I had; I owed it to myself.
What they really meant, of course, was that if they had my basic abilities, they’d do something else with them. It was like a bald man telling a man with hair what sort of styling products he should use and getting chippy about it. It’s nice that you don’t hear this so much these days. There’s less pressure on riders from outside, at least in this respect.
Once, early retirements among talented riders were resented in the same way. As recently as Pete Kennaugh’s retirement in 2019 at the age of 29, there were many fans who were sincerely pissed off with him for “wasting what he had”. It’s progress that when Caleb Ewan retired this year at almost the same age, the attitude was much more sympathetic to someone who had just lost the necessary fire to be a professional bike rider, or who had other things going on in their life.
When I told Bernard about my new friend, he was disappointingly modern in his take. “I’d love to see her racing,” he said, “but it’s up to her.” I told him that he ought to be pissed off about it. He ought to track her down and enter her in races, then make her do them. After all, that was his great talent. He owes it to himself, and to all of us.
Dear Doc …
Dear Doc-I keep reading about the difficulty of making pro bike racing profitable for the organisers. Perhaps I can help. About 20 years ago when the Tour of Britain came to my area in the Peak District, my dad and my uncle (who had nothing to do with the race) went to one of the spectating hotspots and set up a table in a layby with a sign saying “Tickets-£2.50”. Despite the fact you could walk straight past them and just watch the race, they reckoned that about 20% of the spectators who saw them paid up. I think I’d better remain anonymous – I don’t want the long arm of British Cycling coming after me.
Great inventions…… The battery
Foreseeing that one day the bicycle would be invented, and that riders would eventually become too lazy to change gear with a cable or be able to live without a Strava upload, Italian physicist Alessandro Volta devised an early form of chemical battery in 1800. Of course, he didn’t really realise that at the time and initially thought what he’d invented was an everlasting source of free energy.
This is why the Volta ao Algarve is not named after him.
What he came up with consisted largely of liquids in jars, most of which really just wanted to catch fire. It wasn’t until 1900 that dry-cell batteries became portable, by which point cycling had settled on oil-lamp and pulling-on-levers technology. In any event, it would have taken an awful lot of AA batteries to power the tech on a modern bike. We had to wait for the leap to lithium-ion batteries, which moved the ratio of weight and size to power on to the point where they could save cyclists from the trauma of having to change gear themselves.
Batteries have continued to improve, to the point where e-bike motors are both powerful and easy to disguise in a normal-looking bike. There is no reason to believe that the sport that brought you endless doping scandals is even slightly likely to have used this technology to cheat.
