The key moment in the elite men’s road race at the World Championships in Rwanda last year came with about 100 km to go, on Mount Kigali. At one end of the leading group Remco Evenepoel kicked off a saga of bike changes that lasted for 35 kilometres. He reminded me of a dithering customer wearing out the patience of a bike shop by trying out one bike after another and finding something wrong with all of them.
In contrast, at the other end of the group Tadej Pogačar was heading for the horizon as if he had gone to the same shop, asked to test ride their most expensive bike, and stolen it.
Best selling author, multiple TT national champion and coach, Dr Hutch is in his element when pros have tech SNAFUs mid race
The team subsequently claimed that all the bikes were the same, and the saddles were all identical and correct. So what was going on? Is Evenepoel a man with a perineum so pernickety that it’s more accurate than an inclinometer? Could you really use him to lay a patio?
I’ve always been impressed with riders who are very sensitive to bike set up. Partly that’s because I’m not one of them. You could put my saddle up, and up again, and the chances are I’d only work it out when the seat post fell out of the frame. Nor am I alone. Chris Froome’s position changed dramatically from one team-bike to the next, but it took him four years to notice.
So what makes a rider sensitive? I’d say it was about having a personality with a deep mechanical sympathy, were it not that my friend Bernard is almost the most set-up sensitive rider I know. He puts his saddle down 2 mm in winter to compensate for thicker tights and he notices instantly if he’s forgotten to do it. And this is a man so subtle that he once reset a wireless router by hitting it with a fire extinguisher.
My theory is that weaker riders notice more. I think that pro riders notice very little, because in the midst of whacking 6 watts-per-kilo through the pedals, they have little capacity for delicacy.
“But Remco’s spirit-level bottom!” I hear you cry. Well, possibly there’s something else going on that might explain all the repeated bike swapping.
The two things that make you most sensitive are nerves and stress. No one finds more quibbles with a bike than someone getting ready for a major event, no one wants to make more tweaks. Once, when a rider I coached was at a championship with a national team, I messaged the team manager to say that under no circumstances was he to be permitted unsupervised access to Allen keys.
And you get the same thing during races. Eddy Merckx was fond of stopping mid-race to move his saddle height, because he was convinced it was never quite right. And like Evenepoel, I’ve ridden over a hole, got a smack in the sensitives from the saddle and developed a total conviction that the saddle had shifted because everything feels a bit weird afterwards. If you’d given me a spare bike set up the same way, it would have felt wrong too.
So it makes me wonder if he’s not that sensitive at all. Maybe he was just unlucky. Whatever, it was a real pity, because the race pivoted on it. And no one deserves to lose a World Championship because of a smack in that particular area.
Great Inventions of Cycling: 1983 – The Courier
The classic 1980s cycle courier (or bike messenger) wore a collection of kit as mismatched as he or she could find, rode an early example of a mountain bike (yes, a road bike would have been a better tool, and no, they didn’t care) and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of about half a dozen streets in London’s Soho district.
Their function was to deliver documents quickly. In this respect they were the halfway house between the Royal Mail and the internet. You could book them at a variety of speeds – standard, rush and double-rush, on an increasing pricing tariff. Standard meant they’d stop for coffee, possibly more than once, and likely as not lose the package. Double rush meant they’d run every red light on Charing Cross Road, take a short cut through a theatre matinee, and probably end up making the delivery by hurling the package from the back of a moving police van.
They became unlikely fashion icons – the bike shorts, the tan, the sunglasses and the urban wild-west vibe really appealed, for some reason. They stayed cool into the 1990s as they evolved to riding re-purposed track bikes with no brakes and the bars cut down so they could dive between converging buses, like Indiana Jones on a chrome Pegoretti.
Email killed the couriers. When it became possible to send large documents, images and even legal documents electronically, their purpose vanished.
Their modern echo is the food delivery rider. They haven’t yet become a high-fashion symbol. But presumably it will happen.
The London courier: A most unlikely fashion symbol
(Image credit: Getty – AzmanJaka)
Dear Doc ….
Dear Doc – I’ve got a clubmate who switched to tubeless in the spring. A few weeks ago, he was struggling to remove a tyre from a rim because the sealant had set. So he popped the wheel in a bench vice, with the tyre in the jaws to pinch it out of the rim. Or at least that was his intention.
He held the wheel a bit too low, closed the jaws of the vice and cracked the rim. He tried to replace the tyre and re-inflate it, but it wouldn’t hold air.
So he reinstalled a tube, blew it up to about two thirds normal pressure, and is still riding around on it. He says it creaks a bit but seems OK. He also cannot for the life of him understand why none of us will go for a ride with him.
