Cyclopedia (31 page)

LIGGETT,
Phil (b. England, 1943)

The hardworking and constantly traveling television commentator and former
Daily Telegraph
correspondent is the biggest media star in English-speaking cycling worldwide. He has a near monopoly on mainstream TV in the UK, Australia, South Africa, and the US, together with his business partner Paul Sherwen, a former professional and one of the cycling FOREIGN LEGION. By 2009 he had covered 38 Tours de France and 13 OLYMPIC GAMES.

Liggett started out as a racing cyclist in the 1960s, competing in Belgium before realizing that he wasn't going to make it. In the 1970s he went to the TOUR DE FRANCE as driver for the journalist David Saunders and took over Saunders's TV and newspaper work when the latter was killed in a car accident in 1978. Between 1972 and 1993 he was technical director of the around-Britain MILK RACE.

Liggett's career expanded in the late 1980s with the start of Channel Four's daily Tour de France coverage and its coverage of the Tour of Britain and UK city center races (see GREAT BRITAIN). His ubiquity stems from his relationship with the television production company that put together the packages for Channel Four using a mix of live images shot by Tour de France television company SFP for the organizers ASO; their material is used by almost all the English-speaking nations. Liggett has his own CYCLOSPORTIVE through the Pennines; a collection of “Liggettisms” was published in 2005.

LITERATURE
A quick freewheel through some “serious” writers for whom cycling is more than a brief reference.

Henry Miller, writer of various sexually explicit 1960s novels such as
Tropic of Cancer
, called a volume of his memoirs
My Bike and Other Friends
and devoted the final chapter to an account
of his love affair with a German-made track bike bought after a SIX-DAY at Madison Square Garden. His veneration of the bike is linked to an unrequited passion for a young woman he met at high school; the bike is both substitute for the woman (he would take it to bed if he could) and a means of escape.

Another cycling fan was Ernest Hemingway, who wrote about the six-days and described the Tour of the Basque Country (see SPAIN) in
The Sun Also Rises.

Cult Irish writer Flann O'Brien, also known as a hilarious columnist in the
Irish Times
and for producing the magical realist novel
At Swim-Two-Birds
, wrote captivatingly about bikes in
The Third Policeman
. This is a surreal murder thriller that features a pair of bike-obsessed policemen. It includes digressions on wooden rims, cycling with your mouth open, saddles, and the celebrated “atomic theory.” According to this, impacts between two objects result in a transfer of atoms from one to the other. As a result, say the policemen, people who spend a lot of time on their bikes become “part-man, part-bike” while the cycles develop personalities, try to get warm, and try to eat food: “The behaviour of a bicycle that has a high content of humanity is very cunning and very remarkable. You never see them moving ... but you meet them in the least accountable places unexpectedly.” Similarly, you can tell “a man with a lot of bicycle in his veins” by his walk.

In Paris at the end of the 19th century, the surrealist writer Alfred Jarry—known for the play
Ubu Roi
—had a state-of-the-art Clément machine customized with wooden rims and caused a sensation when he turned up at the funeral of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé wearing cycling gear. He produced a calendar that includes a month called
Pédale
. Jarry wrote a short story entitled “The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race,” satirizing both the Parisian obsession with all things two-wheeled
and the epic imagery used to describe cycle races by writers like HENRI DESGRANGE. It includes the memorable lines “Barabbas, slated to race, was scratched” and “There are fourteen turns in the testing Golgotha course.” Jarry's sarcasm has not prevented journalists using the term “a Calvary” as a metaphor for extreme suffering in a bike race time and again over the last 110 years.

Jarry also came up with a prescient picture of bike racing in his 1902 novel
The Supermale
, which has a chapter dealing with a Perpetual Motion Race. In this, five cyclists are strapped to a bike that is propelled across Europe and Asia in a race against an express train. The riders are paced by jet cars and flying machines at speeds of up to 300 km per hour and fed on Perpetual Motion Food, a blend of alcohol and strychnine. One of the cyclists dies in the saddle but continues because he has signed a contract with a massive financial penalty if he pulls out. The references to the extreme scenes in six-day racing would have been clear at the time; the satirical take on professional sports—in which the human element has been overtaken by outside interests and the participants are risking their lives to fulfil their contracts—has resonances throughout the history of professional cycling and is probably the inspiration for the race to nowhere in the critically acclaimed animated movie
Les Triplettes de Belleville
(see FILMS).

(FOR A SELECTION OF WRITING SPECIFICALLY ABOUT CYCLING, SEE
BOOKS
—SUBDIVIDED INTO FICTION, NONFICTION, MEMOIRS/AUTOBIOGRAPHY, AND TRAVEL)

LONGEVITY
Cycling is not just a young man's sport, although the accepted view is that a male cyclist matures at between 27 and 29, after which his power declines with every passing year. Some examples of unusually long cycling careers:

Born:
Annecy, France, October 31, 1958

 

Major wins:
Gold, Olympic road race 1996; world road champion 1985, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1995; world time trial champion, 1995, 1996, 1997, 2001; world pursuit champion 1986, 1988–9; world points race champion, 1989; women's Tour de France 1987, 1988, 1989; 15 French national road titles (between 1979 and 2009); world hour records 1986, 1997, 2000

 

Nicknames:
Ma Dalton, La Cannibale

 

Soft-spoken, almost shy, “the grandmother of womens' cycling” does not have the abrasive attitude that might be expected of one of the most competitive cyclists to grace the sport. She certainly does not seem like a woman who is famed for falling out with teammates, officials, and suppliers, and who was described as being “the best [athlete] with the worst of personalities” (
Le Nouvel Observateur
).

In Beijing, aged 50, Longo became one of a handful of athletes to compete in seven successive OLYMPIC GAMES, and in London she can expect to move another step toward the absolute record of nine games held by the Austrian sailor Hubert Raudaschl. Initially Longo seemed cursed by the Olympics: she crashed in the road race in 1984, broke a hip a month before the Seoul Games, and made a tactical error in 1992, believing she had won, but being unaware that Kathy Watt of Australia had already crossed the line. Since then her record speaks for itself: four medals including gold in a rain-hit women's road race in Atlanta in 1996.

A superb climber and a fine time triallist but lacking a sprint, she also won 13 world titles between 1985 and 2001 on road and track, took the women's Tour de France three times (1987—9) and claimed the women's HOUR RECORD. In 2008, she took her 55th French national title since 1979, a record for longevity to compare with British great BERYL BURTON. Longo began her sporting life as a skier—she was three-time French university champion and her husband, Patrice Ciprelli, was also a French champion—and initially combined the two sports like her great rival Maria Canins. What motivates her
to keep on her bike, she says, is that “cycling is her favorite means of getting around and finding new places.”

She also has a degree in mathematics and is celebrated for her green lifestyle. She says she cannot stand the chemical disinfectants and cleaners used across the Western world and lives high on a mountain above Grenoble in the Alps with her flock of goats, and—although she travels to the US to prepare for major events—she rarely goes to another country without taking her own organic carrots, water filter, and deionizer.

 

(SEE
WOMEN
FOR A HISTORY OF WOMEN'S CYCLE RACING AND OTHER TOP WOMEN TO GRACE CYCLING)

(b. Scotland, 1812, d. 1878)

 

Claimed to be the inventor of the rear-wheel-driven pedal cycle. Macmillan was a Dumfriesshire blacksmith who decided to make himself a hobby horse (see BICYCLE for the importance of this early bike). The breakthrough from earlier machines came when he realized that it would be improved if it could be propelled without one of his feet being on the ground.

His design had suspended pedals at the front with long connecting rods linking them to cranks on the rear wheel. It was heavy, but he managed a speed of about 14 mph, and in 1842 he rode it from southwest Scotland to Glasgow, a distance of 68 miles, in two days. During the trip he had an accident involving a child and was taken to court and fined five shillings the following day.

Macmillan's machine does not survive, and he never patented the design. A copy made by a cooper from Lanarkshire, Gavin Dalzell, appeared in 1847 and is in the Museum of Transport in Glasgow. Further copies were made some 20 years later by a wheelwright in Kilmarnock, Thomas McCall, inspired by the Macmillan velocipede.

MANGEAS,
Daniel (b. France, 1949)

The voice of cycling in France. As the speaker of the TOUR DE FRANCE and up to 200 other races a year, the former baker introduces the riders as they sign on at the start and keeps the crowds entertained at the finish. His knowledge of even the most obscure members of the professional peloton is encyclopedic. Mangeas first worked on the Tour in 1974, and the 2010 Tour is set to be his 37th. In 2002 the race organizers gave him the ultimate accolade: his own stage start in his home village of Saint-Martin-de-Landelles on the Norman-Breton border, where he organizes the annual after-Tour criterium.

MEMORIALS
Cycle races have crisscrossed Europe for over 130 years so not surprisingly the roads of the continent are dotted with memorials to great cyclists and also race organizers and journal ists, while there are also plaques to recall major events, particularly on the great mountain passes. These in turn serve as objectives for cycle-tourists, who lay flowers and souvenirs just as medieval pilgrims would have done at the shrine of a saint.

Among the most celebrated are the bleak bas-relief at the spot where TOM SIMPSON died on Mont Ventoux and the modernistic sculpture just downhill from the bend on the Col du Portet d'Aspet where the 1992 Olympic champion Fabio Casartelli had a fatal crash in the 1995 Tour de France. In other places, plaques denote notable episodes from the past: one is to be found outside the building in Sainte-Marie de Campan, France, where the Tour cyclist Eugène Christophe had to repair his forks in the 1913 race (See HEROIC ERA for more stories about “The Old Gaul”).

Also in the Pyrenées, on one bend of the Col de Menté, a plaque marks the spot where an epic duel between EDDY MERCKX and the Spaniard Luis Ocana in the 1971 Tour ended when Ocana crashed in a rainstorm. Another plaque, on the Col d'Aubisque, recalls the day in 1951 when the Dutchman Wim Van Est fell 200 meters into a ravine and was rescued with a rope improvised from tires tied together. The first man to cross a mountain in the Tour in the lead, Rene Pottier, is remembered by a small memorial at the summit of the first pass covered by the race, the Ballon d'Alsace.

The graves of the greats are also frequently visited by cycling fans who leave mementoes such as racing hats and bottles. So many are left at the Simpson memorial that every now and then it has to be cleaned up.

It's not just famous racers and legendary racing episodes that are remembered, however. In Britain, a memorial at Meriden, Warwickshire, celebrates cyclists who fell in both World Wars: an annual religious service is held there. Close to the top of l'Alpe d'Huez is a small plaque that denotes the spot where the climber LUIS HERRERA put two pieces of lava from his home country in thanks to the people of France after they sent humanitarian relief to the victims of the volcanic eruption at Armero in 1985. A plaque at the Réveil-Matin restaurant in Montgeron, near Paris, celebrates the start point of the first TOUR DE FRANCE in 1903.

On a main road outside Malaga in southern Spain, a plaque and flowers denote the spot where the Spanish professional Ricardo Oxtoa and his brother Xavier were mown down by a car in 2002. Other cyclists who have been killed in traffic accidents are now recalled worldwide by GHOST BIKES.

FAUSTO COPPI and MARCO PANTANI have between them inspired more memorials than any other cyclists—those are listed in their individual entries—but other notable names are remembered as well.

Born:
Meensel, Belgium, June 17, 1945

 

Major wins:
World pro road champion 1967, 1971, 1974; Tour de France 1969–72, 1974, 34 stage wins; Giro d'Italia 1968, 1970, 1972–4, 34 stage wins; Vuelta a España 1973, six stage wins; Milan–San Remo 1966–7, 1969, 1971–2, 1975–6; Tour of Flanders 1969, 1975; Paris–Roubaix 1968, 1970, 1973; Liège–Bastogne–Liège 1969, 1971–3, 1975; Giro di Lombardia 1971–2; Het Volk 1971–3; Ghent–Wevelgem 1967, 1969, 1972; Flèche Wallonne 1967, 1970, 1972; Amstel Gold Race, 1973, 1975; Paris–Brussels, 1973; GP Nations 1973; world hour record 1972

 

Nicknames:
Big Ted, the Cannibal

 

Every sport has its nonpareil and Eddy Merckx is to cycling what Pele is to soccer or Muhammad Ali to boxing. While Merckx's records in individual events may be beaten—LANCE ARMSTRONG has outstripped his five Tour wins—his record of domination over half a dozen years between 1969 and 1975 can never be equaled. Indeed, across any sport it's hard to find a parallel for Merckx's unique strike rate: 54 wins in 120 starts in 1971; 250 wins in 650 starts from 1969—73. No cyclist as “winning” is likely to be seen again. Merckx had looks as well: a mop of dark hair, finely sculpted cheekbones, sideburns worthy of the '70s, and an expression of total self-absorption.

The scale and volume of Merckx's dominance was unprecedented. For example, in just nine weeks in 1973 he won four major CLASSICS—Ghent—Wevelgem, Amstel Gold Race, PARIS–ROUBAIX, and LIÈGE–BASTOGNE–LIÈGE—followed that with overall victory in the three-week VUELTA A ESPAÑA, with six stage wins en route, and, after a brief break, added the GIRO D'ITALIA, taking another half-dozen stages. In winning, Merckx would leave the opposition minutes behind. “He always does more than is necessary to win. He is not content with mere glory,” wrote the Tour organizer Jacques Goddet. He was christened “the Cannibal” by the daughter of a French rival, Christian Raymond, because of his voracious appetite for victory, after a stage in France where the bunch trailed in half an hour behind him
(see NICKNAMES for other interesting cycling monickers).

But Merckx is not a domineering personality in the style of Lance Armstrong or BERNARD HINAULT. “I'm not a cannibal, I'm the sensitive kind,” he said. He explained that his need to crush the opposition so absolutely stemmed from a lack of confidence. “When you are alone in a one-day race, you're certain to win. In a stage race, it's never certain, you can always have a bad day. The bigger your lead, the more you have [in hand] if that happens.”

Two devastating events early in his career made Merckx obsessively insecure in spite of his obvious physical strength: a positive drugs test in the 1968 Giro, which he was adamant came from a spiked bottle, and a horrific crash in a motorpaced race in 1969 in which the driver was killed. The accident left Merckx with constant back pain that in turn made him worry about his position on the bike, which he would check before every race and sometimes change while riding, carrying a wrench along just in case. He would wake up in the night before major races and go to his garage to check his bikes were adjusted just right. His basement held 200 tubular tires that he would season for two years to reduce the risk of punctures. At one Giro, he travelled with 18 bikes and personally drilled out the componentry on each to save a few grams.

While Hinault played up his “grumpy badger” image and JACQUES ANQUETIL played mindgames with the opposition and press, Merckx was famed for hiding his feelings. “Merckx, a super winner, walks away without a trace of fatigue, with nothing to say, just a hint of boredom,” wrote a French journalist in 1970. “He has robotised himself ... transformed himself into a machine with the utmost meticulousness. He is half-man, half-bike.” “Most of the time, there was nothing anyone could do against him,” said the British pro Derek Harrison. “His legs were like pistons. The way he sat on the bike was just beautiful.”

Many of Merckx's achievements have entered cycling legend. In 1972 he broke the HOUR RECORD in Mexico City in a ride that now
seems poorly scheduled: he started off far too quickly, “died” for 50 minutes, and had to be lifted off his bike at the finish. During his first TOUR DE FRANCE win, in 1969, he was already in the yellow jersey and well ahead when he found himself in front on the final Pyrenean stage. He led for 85 miles and finished eight and a half minutes ahead of the next rider, on a stage when he really only needed to race defensively. In 1968, at a Giro stage finish at the Tre Cime di Lavaredo mountaintop he fought his way through a snowstorm to mop up a break that had started the climb nine minutes ahead.

Merckx had no rivals, only occasional challengers. In the Classics ROGER DE VLAEMINCK and Freddy Maertens fought him gallantly, while in the Tour de France the Spaniard Luis Ocaña threw down the gauntlet in 1971, finishing almost nine minutes ahead at the Orcières-Merlette ski resort in the ALPS. On the next stage, out of the Alps to Marseille, Merckx attacked from the start and rode so fast that the race was half an hour ahead of schedule at the finish.

Ocana summed up his rival: “It's not enough for him to win one day, he wants to win the next day and the day after that. Ayrton Senna has the same mentality, he's eaten away by the same thirst for victory. Only the very great have it. Winning for them is second nature. When they don't win any more, they come face to face with a void.”

The Cannibal's career began to wane in 1975 when the Frenchman Bernard Thevenet overcame him in the Tour—Merckx crashed along the way and broke a cheekbone but still finished second—and he retired from racing in spring 1978. Until retirement in 2009 he ran a bike factory in Belgium, which was set up with the help of his former bike maker Ugo de Rosa; he also works on ASO's Tour of Qatar. His son Axel raced during the 1990s for teams such as Motorola and Telekom. Merckx grew close to Lance Armstrong when the Texan raced on his bikes while at the Motorola team, and the pair remain friends.

MILAN–SAN REMO
The longest of the one-day CLASSICS and the only one to retain a course that is virtually identical to the one first used in 1907. First come the flat plains south of Milan, then the Apennines via the Turchino pass, then it's around Genova and along the old Roman Mediterranean coast road through Imperia and Alassio to San Remo, the last substantial town before the French border.

The race was founded to publicize what was then a fading seaside resort known only for gambling; today it is the first truly major event on the cycling calendar, nicknamed “
La Primavera
” by the Italians, for whom it symbolizes the arrival of spring with the passage from fog and cold in Milan to sunshine on the Riviera. Victory here has been a rite of passage for every Italian
campione
from ALFREDO BINDA to FRANCESCO MOSER.

In its early years, Milan–San Remo was occasionally hit by hellish weather. The snowy 1910 edition remains legendary: the winner Eugène Christophe (see MEMORIALS to find out where his broken forks are remembered) might well have died of hypothermia had he not been rescued by a farmer. He warmed up in the farmhouse for half an hour, then set off to complete the 12-hour trek. Only two other riders finished; Christophe then spent a month in the hospital recovering and did not race properly for another two years. Such feats were typical of the HEROIC ERA.

Today, the largely flat course means that in spite of its 190-mile length, Milan–San Remo is essentially a tactical battle that frequently ends in a mass sprint between the men strong enough to survive the series of short climbs that test their legs in the final 60 kilometers. First comes the Cipressa, a series of steep hairpins through olive groves with a dangerous descent back to the coast, next up are the Capi—little ascents to headlands, Mele, Cervo, Berta—before the final test: the sinuous Poggio.

While FAUSTO COPPI scored several notable solo wins, including a legendary 160-kilometer escape in 1946 that began before the Turchino was crossed, the record holder in San Remo is EDDY MERCKX who won seven times in 11 years. Between 1997 and 2001 the German Erik Zabel achieved a dominance unique in any one-day event in recent years, with four wins out of five. MARK CAVENDISH gave Britain its second win in the event (after TOM SIMPSON in 1964) with his narrow sprint victory in 2009.

MILK RACE
One of the longest-lasting race sponsorsh i ps in cycling. This amateur Tour of Britain was first held in 1958 with its roots in a variety of around Britain events run during the 1940s and 1950s, such as Brighton–Glasgow and the Circuit of Britain, backed by companies such as Quaker Oats and the
Daily Express
.

The Milk Race was sponsored by the Milk Marketing Board, a government body responsible for
selling milk produced by Welsh and English farmers until the agency was abolished in 1993. It always had a down-home feel to it. The first event was flagged away by the comedian Norman Wisdom and run by the West London official Chas Messenger, who produced famously tough courses. He managed a trans-Pennine stage lasting seven hours in 1962. The Milk Race also has a place in antidoping history: soon after drugs were banned in 1965, tests carried out on the racers resulted in the first three positives in cycling.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Milk Race became one of the biggest amateur stage races in the world, behind the Peace Race (see EASTERN EUROPE to find out more about this one) and the Tour de l'Avenir, run by the Tour de France organizers. It welcomed competitors from Russia and Poland in spite of the fact that these state-sponsored professional amateurs were usually victorious over the home cyclists who worked full-time and only raced part-time. The Russians won every year from 1977 to 1984, apart from 1978, when a Pole won, and 1983, when the American Matt Eaton won. The era is captured in the documentary
Manpower
. The race tended to visit all areas of England and Wales—but never Scotland.

Malcolm Elliott, winner in 1987, went on to finish the Tour de France that year and briefly became a prolific winner in Europe, while the last winner, in 1993, was Chris Lillywhite riding for the Banana-Falcon pro team. There have been other Tours of Britain. The Butlin Tour was a seven-day event between Butlin's holiday camps in 1951. The Sealink Tour ran through the 1970s, usually including a transfer on the nationalized ferry company, while the Kellogg's Tour was an all-professional event that lasted from 1987 to 1994, and the PruTour, backed by the Prudential financial services company, took place in 1998 and 1999. Since 2004 the Milk Race has had a successor in the Tour of Britain, run by the Sweetspot promotions company and taking place over nine days in September.