Cyclopedia (35 page)

Racing on the cobbles is a
unique skill, based on pushing a big gear, for as long as your strength lasts, while trying to avoid the potholes and keeping an eye open for crashes. “You can't make any abrupt movements. If it's wet and you make a last-minute movement, you're down,” said Yates. “It's like off-piste skiing through trees: you have to have wide vision, all the time.” A single rider losing control can result in an instant pile-up; if a rider punctures, it can take several minutes to get a wheel change because team cars get left way behind as the race strings out through the cobbled lanes.

And then there is the continual bumping: “Like sitting on a pneumatic drill,” was the verdict of the 1990 runner-up Steve Bauer. The mechanics try various tricks to reduce the pain: at one point in the 1990s, Rockshox MOUNTAIN-BIKE forks became popular, but the usual tweaks are thicker handlebar tape and fatter tires, run at a slightly lower pressure than usual. Winning Paris–Roubaix is the mark of the true cycling great: FAUSTO COPPI and EDDY MERCKX both managed it, but Hinault is the last Tour winner to triumph in cycling's hell. The record winner is ROGER DE VLAEMINCK, with four victories, while FRANCESCO MOSER is the only man to win three times in a row (1978–80). No American has won the race, but George Hincapie placed second in 2005 and was in the top 10 seven times.

Other races have tried to follow Paris–Roubaix's unique format. One of the most successful is the Eroica, which is held on dirt roads—
strade bianche
—in Tuscany. The Tro Bro Léon is a Breton race that includes unsurfaced lanes in the far west of France, while in Britain the East Midlands Cyclassic takes in a raft of mucky farm tracks.

The Paris–Roubaix CYCLOSPORTIVE is held every other June so that amateur cyclists can get the full cobbled experience: the bumps, the velodrome, and the showers. All finishers receive a cobblestone mounted on a base. A mountain-bike event was organized briefly in the 1990s and there are junior and under-23 races on shorter courses.

PATERSON, Banjo
(b. Australia, 1864, d. 1941)

Australian poet who produced the ballad “Mulga Bill's Bicycle” in 1896; probably the best-known cycling poem, it is contemporary with H. G. Wells's novel about early cycling
The Wheels of Chance
(see BOOKS). The poem has been in print since 1973 and is among Paterson's most popular works. It deals with Mulga Bill's purchase of a bike, his pride in his riding skill, and his downfall when—of course—he crashes. The poem is celebrated today in the Mulga Bill Bicycle Trail at Eaglehawk, the Victoria town where it is set. Mulga is a species of shrub that grows in the bush; the implication being that Mulga Bill is a yokel with ideas above his station.

The poem begins:

 

Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that caught the cycling craze;

He turned away the good old horse that served him many days;

He dressed himself in cycling clothes, resplendent to be seen;

He hurried off to town and bought a shining new machine;

And as he wheeled it through the door, with air of lordly pride,

The grinning shop assistant said “Excuse me, can you ride?”

 

The joke is that Bill cannot ride, and after ending up in “Dead Man's Creek,” swears to stick to his horse in future.

 

(SEE
POETRY
FOR OTHER CYCLING POEMS)

PATTERSON, Frank
See ART

PAVÉ
French word for COBBLES.

 

(SEE ALSO
FLANDERS
,
PARIS–ROUBAIX
,
CLASSICS
)

PEDERSEN, Mikael
(b. Denmark, 1855, d. 1929)

Danish inventor who produced an iconic early “safety” type machine launched in 1897: the frame was built using cantilevered tubes set in 21 triangles, giving greater strength and enabling the frame diameter and gauge to be cut to the minimum. One early machine weighed only 13 lb at a time when over 30 was the norm. The Dursley-Pedersen was made by Lister and Company at Dursley in Gloucestershire and also featured a hammock-type saddle made of cord—the first models used 45 yards of woven silk—and “tied” between the top of the seat tube and the head tube. About 8,000 were made between 1900 and 1915; not surprisingly they are now collectors' items.

Pedersen built up a thriving business in Britain but lost the company due to poor business practices. He was reduced to selling matches and was buried in a pauper's grave. His body has since been repatriated to Gloucestershire.

Born:
Paris, France, January 22, 1889

 

Died:
Dampierre, France, March 1, 1935

 

Major wins:
Tour de France 1923, 10 stage wins; Milan–San Remo 1912; Paris–Roubaix 1919, 1921; Giro di Lombardia 1911, 1913, 1920; Bordeaux–Paris 1919; Paris-Brussels 1920; Paris–Tours 1922

 

Nickname:
the Iron Wire (
La Ficelle de Fer
)

 

One of the stars of the HEROIC ERA, Jean “Henri” Pélissier was capable of winning on any terrain. His disputes with HENRI DESGRANGE highlight the demands race organizers imposed at the time. In 1919 the TOUR DE FRANCE boss forbade him from getting help from other riders and Pélissier walked out, and he did so again in 1920 after he was docked two minutes for throwing away a punctured tire.
In 1923, Pélissier won the Tour, prompting Desgrange to compare his victory to “a work by Racine, a perfect statue, a faultless painting or a piece of music you never forget.” Late in his career, Pélissier and his brother Francis founded an early riders' trade union.

During the 1924 Tour, Pélissier put on two jerseys for a stage that started in Le Havre in the middle of the night: one issued by the Tour organizers, one of his own. He threw the latter away when the sun came up, which was against the rules; Desgranges got wind of it and the pair had a row in public. Pélissier abandoned the next day after a judge counted his jerseys at the start and in a fine example of early media management made sure that the leading journalist of the day, Albert Londres, knew about it. Londres found Henri, his brother Francis, and another rider in the Café de la Gare in Coutances in Normandy; the ensuing interview was originally entitled “Les Martyrs de la Route” but later was known as “Les Forcats de la Route”—“the Convicts of the Road,” a term that became synonymous with the outrageous demands made on the cyclists of the time.

Pélissier told Londres that he and his brother used DRUGS, opening his pillbox and showing the journalist “cocaine for the eyes, chloroform for the gums ... and do you want to see the pills? We ride on dynamite. When the mud is washed off us, we are as white as sheets. We are drained by diarrhoea. We dance jigs in our bedroom instead of sleeping. Our calves are leather, and sometimes they break.” Francis added: “And as for my toenails, I've lost six out of ten.”

“One day,” concluded his brother, “they will put lead in our jerseys because God didn't make us heavy enough.”

Pélissier had a tragic end: his wife Leonie committed suicide in 1933, and two years later his girlfriend Camille shot him with five bullets from the same pistol during a violent argument.

PEUGEOT
Celebrated French cycle company that had the longest unbroken sponsorship in cycling until its demise in 1987. Its motif, the Lion, goes back to the company's days as a steelmaker in the mid-19th century; it was founded in the 18th century to make watermills. Peugeot began sponsorship in 1896, won their first TOUR DE FRANCE in 1905 with Louis Trousselier, and went on to win La Grande Boucle 10 times.

Peugeot was a family affair that began manufacturing in 1882 with a high-wheeler known as the Grand Bi and was making 20,000 bikes a year by 1900; by 1892 it had expanded into car making, and this is now the main activity. In the First World War, the company made plane engines and shells as well as cars, trucks, and bikes. The cycle company's peak came in 1955, when its factory at Beaulieu turned out 220,000 machines, employing some 3,500 workers. In the 1970s it produced the definitive Peugeot, the PX-10 racer, with componentry from French producers such as Mafac (brakes), Simplex (gears), and Stronglight (chainsets).

While car output continued to be strong, the bike-making side declined in the 1980s and 1990s, with the name eventually sold to licence-holder CycleEurope. The Peugeot car company still sells bikes, but none of them are racing machines.

Peugeot was the last cycling squad to survive as a purely factory team without a main extra-sportif sponsor—although it had backing from petrol companies such as Shell and BP—and thanks to its massive sponsorship of club teams as well, its checkerboard design jerseys were ubiquitous in French amateur racing in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1960s its riders included a young EDDY MERCKX and TOM SIMPSON, while in the 1970s the team featured the 1975 and 1977 Tour winner Bernard Thévenet.

From its amateur “feeder” club ACBB in Paris, Peugeot took on members of the FOREIGN LEGION such as STEPHEN ROCHE, PHIL
ANDERSON, and ROBERT MILLAR in the 1980s. Its last great Tour was 1983, when Pascal Simon looked a likely winner until he broke his shoulderblade in a crash while wearing the yellow jersey. In 1987, the factory team was discontinued due to rising costs, although it continued as Z-Peugeot, and the bikes were later ridden by the Festina team.

 

(SEE
GIANT
AND
RALEIGH
FOR OTHER ICONIC CYCLE MAKERS;
TEAMS
FOR OTHER NOTABLE CYCLING SQUADS)

POETRY
The only anthology on the market is
The Art of Bicycling
(Breakaway Books, 2005, ed. Justin Daniel Belmont). This includes poems by major names such as Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas (who rhymes penny farthing with Camarthen), Seamus Heaney, Pablo Neruda, and Yevgeni Yevtushenko. The only professional cyclist represented is the late MARCO PANTANI. Also included is the work of the British poet Jeff Cloves, who has kindly allowed me to reproduce two of his poems here. The first was written after the death of TOM SIMPSON, the second 20 years after the death of FAUSTO COPPI.

(FOR THE DEFINITIVE AUSTRALIAN CYCLING POEM, “MULGA BILL'S BIKE” SEE
BANJO PATERSON
; SEE ALSO CYCLING IN
ART
AND
LITERATURE
, AND
BOOKS
.)

POLITICS
Cycling and cycle racing have always been closely linked to political developments in the wider world. For example, the newspaper circulation war that led to the Tour de France's foundation was born of the political controversy involving Alfred Dreyfus, while the invention of the bike was important in women's rights. In Ireland, the national tour caused political controversy in its early years (see RÁS).

Both the GIRO D'ITALIA and TOUR DE FRANCE have had political undertones, the Giro more so than its French counterpart. In 1911 the race celebrated 50 years of Italian unification, while the 1946 event was seen as an expression of the nation rising from the ashes of war. That race visited disputed territories such as the city of Trieste and the newly integrated Alto Adige, where the freshly elected president of the reborn republic, Alcide de Gasperi, made a point of visiting the race.

Politicians have always loved to get involved with cycling. It was a similar story in Nazi Germany, where cycle rallies were run, bike accessories bore swastikas, and tires were marketed with swastika imprints. In fascist Italy, Benito Mussolini was not a massive cycling fan—he preferred motor racing because of its modernity—but he still made overtures to the young GINO BARTALI. The 1938 Tour de France winner was unwilling to be used for propaganda purposes but still succumbed to pressure from the sport's minister to ride the 1937 Tour as well as the Giro; unfortunately he crashed. After the war, Bartali was close to Italy's new prime minister Alcide de Gasperi, who represented the pro-Catholic Christian Democrats; he campaigned on their behalf and responded to De Gasperi's call to win the 1948 Tour as Italy came close to a communist revolution. (See Bartali's entry for whether or not he actually saved the nation.)

The first VUELTA A ESPAÑA was explicitly political. It was an incarnation of the country's
sense of patriotism, according to an editorial in the promoting paper: as Spain's Civil War loomed, such words were a call to arms for the fascists. Before the start of the 1941 Vuelta, the peloton lined up at Madrid's Puerta del Sol, considered the spiritual center of the Spanish state, put out their right arms, and sang “Cara al Sol,” the Falange anthem. Later, the race was sponsored partly by the Spanish Ministry of Education, and politically aware stage winners often saluted the military from the podium.

After FEDERICO BAHAMONTES won his Tour de France on July 18, 1959—the anniversary of the military uprising that spawned the 40-year dictatorship of General Franco—he was greeted by el caudillo upon his return as 14 military brass bands played in his honor. When the pair met, Bahamontes recalled that Franco wanted to discuss soccer, but the dictator was a Real Madrid fan, while the cyclist supported Barcelona. “I couldn't really help him,” recalled the “Eagle of Toledo.”

The Franco legacy lingers on in the fact that even today, the Vuelta never visits the heart of the Basque Country. During the dictatorship, the race often started and finished there, to make the point that the fiercely independent nation was part of the mother country. This tradition was poorly received as Basque nationalism gained pace. In 1968 a bomb was exploded on the race route, while 10 years later the separatists scattered tin tacks and timber beams on the road before the two final stages, both of which were thus canceled.

The nationalists bombed that year's Tour de France as well and were in action again when the Tour started in San Sebastian, setting fire to two cars, one of which contained a month's worth of clothes belonging to the TV commentator PHIL LIGGETT. Whenever the Tour visits the Pyrenees, the Basques are prominent, brandishing banners calling for the release of political prisoners;
when the race enters the Basque country, the signs are in Basque as well as French to appease the locals.