Cyclopedia (7 page)

The spate of drug scandals since 1998 has given rise to a small and highly profitable genre: confessional memoirs by a drug taker or provider. First came
Secret High
by the almost unknown Erwann Mentheour, followed by
Massacre à la Chain
(translated as
Breaking the Chain
, Yellow Jersey, 2000) by the soigneur Willy Voet of Festina, which sold over 300,000 copies. Others to tell their stories in print included Jerome Chiotti, a mountain-bike world champion who returned his gold medal after confessing to drug use, the Cofidis professional Philippe Gaumont, the Festina manager Bruno Roussel and the team's leader Richard Virenque. The latter's book,
My Truth
, explained how he had not taken drugs, and was published before he changed his mind and confessed. Christophe Bassons, an anti-drugs campaigner and former Festina professional, wrote the ironically titled
Positif
.

French Revolutions
, Tim Moore

A cycling novice takes on a bonkers task: riding around France, loosely based on the 2000 Tour route. Moore has no inhibitions about his own failings and, unlike others who use the “I” word to destruction, he gets away with it because his sense of humor never flags. Probably the best constructed ending among all the fine tomes listed here.

 

Round Ireland in Low Gear
, Eric Newby Pretty eccentric tale, as the travel-writing great sets off in the depths of winter with wife Wanda to contend with Irish weather, Irish signposts, and their shared lack of cycling experience.

 

Round the World on a Wheel
, John Foster-Fraser

Kipling or Baden Powell should have written this account of one of the first around-the-world trips. If you want to get an idea
of the mindset that made the British Empire what it was—in the best and worst senses—it's all there in this book, reissued in 1982. An excellent
Boys' Own
-style caper at the time, now a period piece.

 

Into the Remote Places
, Ian Hibell

One of the original and best “ridden there” books. Hibell cannot match Moore for humor, or Newby for observation, but no holds are barred, from bust-ups with his (male) companions, to his love affair with a (female) companion, not to mention the extreme experience of crossing the Darien Gap, slashing the jungle, bike on his back, with a septic leg oozing pus. You won't complain about riding your bike to the store again.

 

Full Tilt: Dunkirk to Delhi by Bicycle
, Dervla Murphy

Setting off in the depths of Britain's hardest winter of the 20th century, 1963, Murphy made it all the way to India with her bike, producing an epic account of cycling through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kashmir that offers much food for thought given the current political situation.

 

(SEE
LITERATURE
FOR HOW CYCLING FITS INTO THE LITERARY WORLD OF HENRY MILLER, FLANN O'BRIEN, AND ALFRED JARRY)

BORYSEWICZ, Eddie
(b. Poland, 1939)

Groundbreaking US national coach who masterminded the medal-winning performances at the Los Angeles Olympics, furthered the careers of GREG LEMOND and LANCE ARMSTRONG, and initially managed the team that eventually became US Postal Service. Borysewicz was born in Poland, where he was a national junior champion before moving to coaching after a tuberculosis infection. He was on the Polish team staff at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal and joined the US Cycling Federation
as head coach the following year, thanks to a chance meeting in a bike shop with the USCF's competition head Mike Fraysse.

Borysewicz spoke no English and initially relied on the 12-year-old son of Polish friends for translation. The riders nicknamed him Eddie B because they could not pronounce his surname. He bought his own desk at the Olympic Training Center in Squaw Valley and booted out most of the established national team, telling many of the riders they were too fat. Compared to established practices in EASTERN EUROPE, however, this was standard procedure. His first season in command was marked by silver medals on track and road for Sue Novara and CONNIE CARPENTER, but another big breakthrough came with LeMond's junior world road title in 1979. Four years later, Borysewicz guided the US team to a clean sweep of all the medals at the Panamerican Games, and in 1984 to its first Olympic medals since 1912, with the squad taking five golds in L.A. That triumph was, however, marred by the subsequent revelation that some of the team had used blood doping, a practice that was not illegal at the time but was later banned. Borysewicz denied involvement.

He left the US team in 1987 and founded an amateur team backed by Montgomery Securities that included Lance Armstrong among its members. Subaru-Montgomery raced the European circuit in 1993 without great success, but the Montgomery head Thomas Weisl stuck with the squad and it acquired backing from the US Postal Service in 1996. After quitting professional cycling, Eddie B coached the Polish national team in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Borysewicz was inducted into the US Bicycling Hall of Fame in 1996.

BOYER, Jonathan
(b. Moab, Utah, 1955)

First American to finish the Tour de France and one of the first to forge a career in Continental Europe. Boyer was born in Utah, raised in Monterey, and moved to France in 1973 to join the ACBB cycling club in Paris, an outfit that had hosted Irish pioneer Shay Elliott in the 1950s and would subsequently become celebrated for producing many of the FOREIGN LEGION of British, Irish, and Australian pros. Boyer turned pro for the Lejeune-BP squad in 1977 but was subsequently hired by the Renault-Elf squad to assist Greg LeMond on his entry to European racing. He completed his first Tour in 1981, wearing a jersey with a stars and stripes design that suggested he was US national champion, but was actually a marketing ploy by the race organizers. In 1982 he was in contention for a medal at the world road race championships in Goodwood, England, but LeMond rode past en route to the silver medal. In 1983 he rode to his best Tour placing, 12th overall; his only major win in Europe was a stage of the Tour of Switzerland in 1984. Later, Boyer was a member of the 7-Eleven team managed by JIM OCHOWICZ in its early years racing the European circuit.

In November 2002 he was convicted of lewd behavior with a minor and served a year in jail and five years probation. Since his release, Boyer has completed the Race Across America—which he won in 1990—and has been active with mountain bike guru Tom Ritchey in promoting cycling in Rwanda.

BRAKES
Early bicycles had crude braking devices consisting of rod-operated spoons or rollers that pushed onto their solid tires, sometimes with a lever pushed by the foot. Pneumatic tires, invented in the 1890s, were more fragile, so rim brakes
were developed, still powered by levers and rods; at the same time, the development of early free wheels resulted in the invention of the coaster brake, which meant the cyclist could brake by backpedalling. On a fixed-wheel bike, the rider can use inertia to slow down—the passive resistance of the legs as the pedals push them around—or for more rapid braking can try to slow down the pedals by pushing against the motion.

Rim brakes operated by various designs of calliper have been in use since 1879, when JAMES STARLEY patented the Grip with brass brake shoes; the stirrup brake, using levers and rods to pull the stirrup mounting for the shoes, came in early in the 20th century. Cantilever brakes—in which small callipers and brake shoes are attached to braze-on bosses on either side of the rim—have been used since the 1890s, and have always been popular on CYCLO-CROSS machines because of their great stopping power and the clearance they offer; they wereused on early mountain bikes.

Until the end of the 1970s, road racers chose between side-pull callipers, as made by CAMPAGNOLO from 1968, and center-pulls, in which the callipers crossed in a shallow X, of which the best were made by British company GB and French firm Mafac. In the end, side-pulls became universal, mainly because of their greater simplicity, although Campagnolo's elegant, if heavy, Delta brake of the 1990s was in essence a center-pull with a parallelogram-shaped linkage.

The MOUNTAIN BIKE brought innovation in this area as well as others. First came powerful hydraulic brakes—the best made by French firm Magura—where the cables were replaced with fluid-filled control lines; these sat on the same bosses that would have taken cantilever brakes and produced such power that seat-stays could be seen bending under the strain. To counter this, they were sometimes backed up with metal bridging plates.

Drum brakes had been used on the very first mountain bikes, but their weight was a handicap; the best design has proved to be lightweight hydraulic disc brakes refined from motorbike models, offering one great advantage over rim brakes: they do not lose any efficiency in the wet, when it is estimated that water flowing over the rim can cause the loss of up to 60 percent of braking power.

BRIGHTON
Finish point for one of the world's largest mass bike rides, the London to Brighton, one of the first events of its kind. The ride was founded in 1975 as a demonstration of pedal power; 34 cyclists covered the 54-mile route. From 1980 it was run officially in aid of the British Heart Foundation. Now about 27,000 cyclists, of all ages and on all kinds of bikes, struggle up the final climb over the South Down's Ditchling Beacon just before the final swoop to the finish on Madeira Drive. Since 1980 almost 40 million dollars has been raised for the BHF, while an estimated 650,000 cyclists have taken part.

It's not clear who was the first cyclist to ride to the South Coast resort, but one of the first was John Mayal, who set out in
February 1869 on an old ordinary to get there in a day. It took him approximately 20 hours. London to Brighton and back remains one of the British RECORDS officially listed by the Road Records Association; the current record for a bike dates back to 1977 (Phil Griffiths, 4 hours 15 minutes 8 seconds).

Brighton was the venue for a British stage finish in the 1994 Tour de France, when the peloton rode over Ditchling, and the resort hosted a World Cup Classic for several years (see HEIN VERBRUGGEN'S entry for the history of the World Cup).