Pedal and be damned

From The Oldie

Cycling, if we are to believe our political masters, is as close as we’ll get to Godliness.

A country stroll is punctuated by a fluorescent fleet of velocipedes bearing the legends GIANT, KONA, TREK, RIDGEBACK, CANNONDALE on their Day-Glo frames, ridden by excited wholesome young professionals taking in the country air and politely but insistently pushing you to the side of the footpath.

No city or even most modest of towns is complete without a maze of lurid green paths – although as close to nature as Apollo 13 is to an elm – to denote its environmentally correct credentials. Special traffic lights, blue circular signs and dedicated cycle lanes have become part of the firmament of civic life.

Frankly, though, these huge injections of public money into cycling paths and the ever-increasing popularity of off-roading has turned cycling from being the pursuit of left-field eco warriors into something rather more establishment. As practised by the leader of the Conservative Party.

Enter, then, the fixed-wheel bicycle.

It has no truck with panniers and bells and a gentle pedal to the office. The fixed-wheel bicycle is so-called because it has no gears and in many cases no freewheel, either. Based on lightweight track bikes, if you want to slow it down, you pedal more slowly. If you want to stop you stop pedalling and hope you don’t go flying over the handlebars. A piddly front brake is grudgingly added only to make it street legal.

The cult of the fixed-wheel bicycle was started by couriers. For them mudguards, a set of brakes and some gears was as near as dammit driving a luxury saloon – strictly for squares. Far better to careen around town on a stripped-down piece of carbon fibre that looks like an oversized insect on wheels. Not only that, having your feet in motion all the time made them as hard to ride as an unbroken horse. A junction for the fixed-wheel cyclist is merely an inconvenience at which he pedals impatiently backwards and forwards like a unicyclist, his machine balanced beneath him, ready to spring as soon as the heel of the last pedestrian has gone past his front wheel. The fixed-wheel machine is the Johnny Rotten of bicycles, and has no truck with niceties of civic life.

It was inevitable that this couldn’t give a toss I-do-this-for-a-living elitism of its rider would transfer over to the mainstream commuter.

For a certain type of cosseted middle-class man, with only a spread sheet and a presentation to get the blood coursing, the bicycle already allows him a certain dweebish machismo. But with the purchase of the fixed-wheel Bianchi Pista Steel road bike he can satisfy his lust for machines (Aprebic AC-3033 butted CroMo forks; Wellgo LU-895 pedals, anyone?) and at the same time live out his Wild One fantasies, minus the nasty cigarettes and, God-forbid smelly, petrol burning engines.

Because fixed-wheel bicycles are extremely light and extremely fast, so it is, with a Brando-esque sneer, their riders have a better chance of overtaking cabs, white vans, bendy buses, articulated lorries etc while negotiating the Elephant and Castle.

“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets,” wrote the American essayist Christopher Morley in the early part of the last century.

Pah! Not any more, mate. The bicycle certainly is no longer the dignified conveyance favoured by Oxbridge undergraduates, artisan factory workers or Derek Guyler’s Corky the policeman in Eric Sykes. As we have become more dependent on our cars and at the same time more health-obsessed, the bicycle has become a political statement.

And this is where again the fixed-wheel cycle scores double eco Brownie points. Because you have to pedal all the time, you have to be very fit. So for your fixed-wheel cyclist the calm free-wheeling past the Radcliffe Camera to the verdant college quad, clicking down a trusty Sturmey-Archer gear to ease the pain of pedalling uphill is pleasure never-to-be-found.

This kind of commitment means that fixed-wheel riders also have to be young. Which is just as well. Because they’re so difficult to ride, especially in London traffic, you have to be young enough to have as much fear (and reckless bravado) as Eddie the Eagle. You will also be far too callow to have come across Mark Twain, who wrote,
“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live.” You can’t help thinking that for the fixed-wheel cyclist, this aphorism is still terrifyingly apt.