It's All About the Bike (21 page)

With every spoke uniformly threaded, Gravy put a drop of oil on each nipple — ‘to lube the threads, so they won't get damaged when tightening'. Then he stood again to squeeze each pair of spokes in his hands, correcting the spoke line, or ‘setting them in' as he called it, ‘and looking for flappers'.

For wheels made by machines in a factory, this part of the process is done with a big metal bar, Gravy explained. The potential to over-stress parts of the wheels is huge. It's why factory wheels don't have a long warranty. Gravy's wheels, on
the other hand, are guaranteed for life — ‘your life, my life or the life of the rim,' he said.

With a tool he's had for twenty-five years, Gravy checked the ‘dish', to ensure the rim was centred in the hub, as the front wheel should be. It wasn't. With a few adroit turns of the wrench, he adjusted it. Too much. He adjusted it back, fractionally. The wheel was now ready to be fine-tuned and tensioned.

Gravy started again, at the blue nipple, and tightened every spoke a half turn. As the wheel spun slowly, the trueing stand indicated where the wheel was laterally untrue — the wobbles in the rim walls made a brief scraping noise, like the distant sound of a spade dragging on concrete, as they passed the guides on the apparatus. When Gravy had located the blemish, he worked the relevant spokes: a wobble on the right rim wall, he tightened spokes on the left, and loosened on the right, and vice versa, to make it laterally true. Then he moved on to the next scraping noise, working his way round.

I've trued hundreds of my own wheels, but standing over Gravy's shoulder and seeing the rim change shape and hearing the scrapes fade away with the turn of the spoke key, I had a sense of the wheel being a dynamic and integral structure. A mechanical marvel, yes; simple and beautiful, yes; but somehow alive too. Gravy spun the wheel and stepped back. Light bounced off the stainless steel spokes in a mesmerizing display. For a moment, I was surprised at the dazzling richness of such a practical object. I thought of Marcel Duchamp: he mounted a bicycle wheel upside down on a stool in 1913, spinning it occasionally, and redefined Minimalism. ‘I enjoyed looking at it,' Duchamp said. ‘Just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in the fireplace.'

Gravy went round again — one-quarter turns — and again — one-eighth turns — and again — ‘a tiny nudge' — and again — ‘to relieve the stress in the spokes.' What could easily be the title of
a Fairfax therapy class is actually another important part of the custom wheel-building process. Pairs of parallel spokes are squeezed at midspan on both sides of the wheel, all the way round. It corrects the spoke line at a microscopic level, to make sure they're pulling dead straight, and sets the spoke elbows into the flange. Care must be taken not to overdo it. In a factory, a machine does it. Gravy does it by hand with an aged tool made for him out of an axle, by Tom Ritchey.

With a spoke tension meter in hand, Gravy began the final finessing. James Starley would have given his eye-teeth for one of these tools. It measures the bend in millimetres between three points on a spoke and gives a figure in Newtons for the tension of that spoke. It's a way of ensuring, with remarkable accuracy, that each spoke is at the optimum tension. It's a long way from the coarse lever Starley used to tension the wheels on the first Ariel bicycles.

‘The more you ride your bike, the more you want nice wheels,' Gravy said softly. ‘Taken care of properly, overhauled from time to time and not left out to rust, a wheel can last you decades . . . and give you all sorts of fun rides.'

Gravy raised his wrench to the wheel less and less, and then not at all. It spun in silence. He stood up, stepped back and put his arm around my shoulder.

‘Well, my friend. It's true.'

The Saddle

Truth hurts. Maybe not as much as jumping on a bicycle with
a seat missing, but it hurts.

(Leslie Nielsen,
Naked Gun 2½)

There are three contact points between rider and bicycle: hands/ handlebar, feet/pedals and backside/saddle. Their order of importance depends largely on how dedicated a cyclist you are. Ride 100 miles with an avid cyclist and he may complain a little about pain in his wrists or ankles; ride 10 miles with a novice and he will bellyache about his backside until he's had three pints and a bag of pork rinds. Nothing kills the joy of a bicycle ride like saddle-sore. It's the most common complaint in cycling and there's a good case for the inclusion in the English language of an intransitive verb that describes the precise condition: to buttache —
v.i.
(slang) to complain whiningly about saddle-sore from riding a bicycle.

A universal truth of bicycling is this — pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Pro cyclists hurt badly too. They just don't buttache about it. In
The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway — a keen cyclist who rode round Europe with F. Scott Fitzgerald — the protagonist Jake Barnes encounters a group of professional racing cyclists at dinner in a Spanish hotel during a stage-race:

The bicycle-riders drank much wine, and were burned and browned by the sun . . . The man who had a matter of two-minutes lead in the race had an attack of boils, which were very painful. He sat on the small of his back . . . The other riders joked with him about his boils. He tapped on the table with his fork. ‘Listen,' he said, ‘tomorrow my nose is so tight on the handlebars that the only thing touches those boils is a lovely breeze.'

The damage a saddle can do to the human body is extraordinary. I've never had boils on my backside, but friction with a piece of leather has, in the past, caused cuts, lacerations, lesions, abrasions and contusions. I've rubbed my thighs raw like sashimi. The term ‘saddle-sore' doesn't come close to expressing the pain. ‘Saddle trauma' is nearer the mark.

Comfort is the only requirement of a bicycle saddle. The basic ergonomic principles behind it are simple. The front end or nose of a saddle is narrow, to prevent (or at least limit) chafing of the inner thigh. The rear is wide enough to support the rider's pelvic girdle: or, to be anatomically exact, to support the ‘ischial tuberosities' or ‘sit bones'. This is the part of your backside that bears your weight when you sit. Women have sit bones half an inch or so farther apart than men (it's to do with giving birth), and so benefit from saddles a little wider at the rear.

The shape of a saddle becomes critical when cycling over long distances, where the rider applies great force and pedals fast, as pros do. In the days of leather saddles, which shape to fit through use, pro cyclists took comfy saddles with them when they changed teams. Tommy Simpson, the flawed British cycling hero who was more famous in death than life, used to make his own saddles. Horst Schütz, a German pro in the 1980s, had saddles specially made for him: hollows and bumps were
carved into the compressed foam to replicate the anomalies of his bony behind.

Simpson and Schütz were both noted track racers who took part in many modern ‘six-day races' — a form of competitive cycle racing that perhaps provides the ultimate test of the backside/saddle interface. In the early days, races literally went on for six days and nights, non-stop. Individuals cycled as many laps of an indoor cycle track as they could in the time. The first competitive six-day race was held in the Islington Agricultural Hall, London, in 1878. Riders, on high-wheeler bicycles, rode round and round until they dropped, slept briefly, rose, and rode round and round again — for six days straight. There was no racing on the Sabbath. Phew! As sport, it would not meet with the customs of our times.

Victorian society, however, took delight in observing the blind animal endurance of poorly paid athletes. Thousands filled the Hall each day to watch the riders pile on the laps. The winner, the
Islington Gazette
reported, was Bill Cann of Sheffield. He rode 1,756 km (1,060 miles) on a bicycle with a wooden saddle. What the
Gazette
did not report was that his buttaching could be heard in Lincolnshire.

The following year, the same event was dubbed the ‘Long Distance Championship of the World'. As a purely commercial enterprise, it was outside the remit of the newly founded, self-styled governing bodies of cycling — the Bicycle Union and the British Touring Club (later the Cyclists' Touring Club). Typical of the priggishness that dominated this new age of athleticism in Britain, the two organizations barred from membership anyone who had ever won prize money or been paid to compete. Cycling was at the forefront of the rationalization of sport then emanating from the universities and public schools, and central to one of the period's big social questions: the ‘Gentlemen vs. Players'
debate — should people be paid for playing sport? Football, cricket and rugby were, roughly simultaneously, going through the same growing pains.

Few ‘Gentlemen' fancied the indignity of a six-day race, of course. George Waller, a professional cyclist and general Newcastle brick, won the 1879 event, and 100 guineas. He averaged well over 322 km (200 miles) a day and had to be carried from his saddle at the finish. After a brief business excursion with a travelling cyclists' circus, he retired as a pro and went back to work as a builder.

Waller's main rival in 1879 was Frenchman, Charles Terront. Also working class, he prospered, unlike Waller, which says much about social mobility in the two countries. Terront became France's first sports star (there's a street named after him in Nantes), with riches, a memoir published during his lifetime, many female admirers and a reserved seat at the Opéra in Paris. His success made him an icon for successive generations of working-class Frenchmen who sought the mansion on the hill through cycle racing. Terront advanced from six-day racing to other track disciplines and then, most famously, to road racing. In 1891, after 71 hours and 22 minutes of continuous, sleepless racing, Terront rode down the Champs-Elysées alone. He'd won the first Paris—Brest—Paris race, the oldest extant ‘Classic' cycle race and inspiration for the
Tour de France (which began in 1903, as a six-day race on the
road
instead of the track). At 745 miles, Paris-Brest-Paris was another mean test of a bicycle saddle. At least they were by then made not of wood but of leather.

Six-day races or ‘Sixes' reached New York in the early 1890s, signalling the beginning of the cycling frenzy that swept across America. From the mid-1890s to the end of the 1920s, every major US city had a velodrome. Along with baseball, track racing was the most popular spectator sport. The annual races at Madison Square Garden were the largest and most spectacular sporting events of the era, dubbed the ‘Super Bowl of Sixes'. (Still a popular type of track race today, ‘the Madison' is named after the venue.) The carnival-like atmosphere and the opportunity to socialize and bet attracted an extraordinary cross-section of Manhattan society. Captains of industry and politicians mixed with movie stars and gangsters, all watched over by bookies and eagle-eyed promoters in white suits and blue spats.

The 300 or so US manufacturers of bicycles vied to sponsor the leanest, fastest, most handsome cyclists. Their fortunes rose and fell with them. Cyclists were the highest earners in sport: in fact, modern professional sports marketing effectively began with them. For a brief period, before motorcycles and automobiles, men on bicycles whirling round banked cycling tracks made of Siberian pine were the fastest things on the planet. And speed was the currency of the moment. Professional cyclists found themselves the gods of sport. At the Garden, they were all-powerful.

Add to the sponsorship battles America's favourite pastime, gambling, and the scene was set to push the riders to their limits. There were numerous accidents, as riders fell unconscious and lurched across the track. Drugs were taken, merely to keep the riders awake. Occasionally they rode themselves to death. The
crowds revelled ‘in a kind of agony and suffering that perhaps was available only on the battlefield,' Todd Balf wrote in his biography of Major Taylor. Taylor launched his racing career at a six-day race at Madison Square Garden in 1896, the year the first six-day race for women was held. During the event Taylor collapsed and feared he might die. However, he went on to become a great track sprinter, a sporting icon and America's first black celebrity, at a time when such a thing was deemed improper.