Re:cycling

Bikes.  Lycra.  Olympics.

This has been a spectacular summer for cycling.  Not actually cycling, of course, it’s been bloody miserable weather and unless your cycle came equipped with those pontoon things that they fit to helicopters to allow them to land on water and get attacked by sharks, it’s unlikely you will have enjoyed cycling this summer.  Certainly, I get out on my bike now and again, usually when I want to make a short hop and am both to lazy to walk it and far too tight to bother paying for parking at the other end and certainly again, this year, I began to question being too tight to pay for the optional rear mudguard on my bike, as the spray from the rain thrown up by my rear wheel somehow managed to both hit the nape of my neck and soak my arse.

The spectacular cycling was mainly happening in the velodrome of the Olympic Park and in the streets around Hampton Court, where Team GB showed two things; that if you are one of the greatest cyclists in the world at the peak of your form, you are likely to be looking at the arse of the member of Team GB in front of you and thinking very dark thoughts indeed, and that if you wear lycra, you need to have the body of an Olympian underneath it.

Cycling is, apparently, the new golf.  This, I think, means that middle-aged men have something to get them out of the house at the weekend for a few hours and also something to spend vast sums of money on in order to have a better time doing it.  I have no idea where carbon fibre comes from but I do know that bikes made out of it are very expensive and, presumably, whoever owns a carbon fibre mine spends most of their evenings rolling around in cash, hookers and coke.

The worrying words in the paragraph above are ‘middle-aged’.  In isolation, not a cause for concern.  Let me throw in another word.  Lycra.

I know, I know, we all thought that the practice of wearing lycra as a surface layer finished in the eighties, at the conclusion of which it was tossed in the huge cultural skip along with ra-ra skirts and rolling up the sleeves on your jacket.  Apparently not so.  Middle aged men are wearing lycra to cycle.  The result…have you ever seen sausage meat being squeezed into its skin?  No?  Lucky you.

Because the reality is if you want to be a champion cyclist, you have to be superhuman.  This is why the only people who should appear in public wearing lycra are those with super-powers, or the sort of people who have got up at four in the morning every year since they were eight and spent all day practicing pedalling.  By which I mean Olympians.

Because to be a champion you need an unhealthy degree of obsession.  You may think all you need is enough steroids to make a racehorse break the sound barrier and more blood bags than a vampire banquet, but not so.  You also need a bike so advanced it makes a Formula 1 car look like something that clowns pile out of in the Big Top.

Middle aged men will proudly show you their carbon fibre bikes so light that they can pick up with one finger, after they have unscrewed the GPS system, the water bottles, the on-board defibrillator and so on.  This is a far cry from the bicycles of my youth that gave so much joy, machines that appeared to be made out of scaffold poles welded together and were practically indestructible, or at least child-proof, which is practically the same thing.  These same hearty beasts of burden in grown up form propelled district nurses around and were often to be seen with bags of groceries suspended from both handlebars as stately matrons returned from the shops.

The Olympics came to London to inspire a generation.  They did.  In this case, it’s the generation of blokes over forty who walked past the Harley showroom and straight into Action Bikes for some serious kit and some very tight pants.

Bikes today are so light they have to be tethered to railings to stop them floating away.