I written about bicycles in the military. Turns out, they’ve been very useful in, among other things, reconnaissance missions.
That got me to wondering whether spies have used bikes in their work.
Turns out (I know, I used that phrase already!), the great minds think alike. Or, at least, I think like my people: Apparently, someone in Italy had the same idea!
It was in Tyrol, which some other Italians argue isn’t really Italy: sono tedeschi. So I’ll go with “great minds!”
Have you ever quipped, “I’ll pedal between the raindrops?”
Some of us gave that response when asked whether we’ll ride in the rain. I will, to a point: I won’t set out if it’s cold and raining or if I can’t see more than a couple of bicycle lengths ahead of me because the rain is falling so hard or it’s getting blown sideways.
This week, I haven’t been pedaling between raindrops. Since taking a ride to Point Lookout on Monday I have, however been riding between storms. In four days, we’ve had three incidents of flooding rains. The first, on Tuesday, began with a combination of rain, sleet and snow that didn’t accumulate.
So when I rode Negrosa, my vintage Mercian Olympic, to Coney Island
I wasn’t sure of whether this was the end of a storm—or the calm before a storm or between storms.
Turns out, it was the latter: We had two more inches (5cm) of rain last night.
Once, a driver’s tirade against me included the rant, “I pay road taxes!”
As calmly as I could, I responded, “Well, I do too.” I then pointed out that the only tax he pays, and I don’t, is on gasoline.
Had I been a different sort of person, this might’ve been my response:
Today’s post won’t relate directly to bicycles or cycling. I am, however, confident that many of you will find it relevant and interesting.
I can recall when a yellow fog filled coffee shops, department stores, subway station corridors and other public venues. Of course, almost none of us noticed it until it was gone.
The first step in clearing shared air came exactly sixty years ago today. Dr. Luther Terry made an announcement to a roomful of reporters: A longtime, wide-ranging study led him to conclude that smoking cigarettes causes cancer.
It may well have been the single most important announcement ever made by a U.S. Surgeon General. Smoking cigarettes was considered normal, even healthy, for adults. (Although I have never smoked, I gave cartons of Kools, Camels, Marlboros, Pall Malls and Viceroys as gifts for Christmas, birthdays and other occasions.) The tobacco industry was therefore much bigger than it is now, which is why Dr. Terry—himself a longtime smoker—made the announcement on a Saturday : officials wanted to minimize the report’s effects on the stock market.
(On a related note, tobacco played a significant role in colonialism.)
Of course, Americans didn’t collectively drop their cigarettes once the report became public. But over a period of years, puffing, whether in a public or private, was pushed to the margins. A year after the report came out, warnings were printed on cigarette packs; five years after that, television and radio ads for cigarettes were banned. During that time and afterward, entities from government agencies to real estate offices prohibited smoking on their premises. Countless private citizens did so in their living spaces; cities forbade it in and around apartment buildings.
I’ve already mentioned one result—the disappearance of the yellow haze in public spaces—of the report and ensuing bans. Another occurs to me now: I rarely see an ashtray in anyone’s home, and never see them in public spaces. Also, it’s been a while since anyone asked me,”Mind if I smoke?”
For those of you who prefer empirical data to anecdotes, there’s this: In 1965, the year the Surgeon General’s warning began to appear on cigarette packs, nearly 42 percent of Americans aged 18 and older smoked; by 2018, that proportion had fallen by two-thirds, to just under 14 percent. (It climbed slightly during the pandemic.)
It’s estimated that the report and its effects have saved 8 million lives: nearly the population of my hometown of New York City. Perhaps equally significant, that report precipitated a cultural change in which smoking is not as sociallly acceptable, let alone fashionable, as it once was. And the anti-smoking campaign has spread throughout the industrialized world: Even in France, where the image of a soigné sophisticate included a Gauloise or Gitane clasped with thumb and forefinger, cigarette packets bear the same stark warnings seen in other countries. And, during my most recent visit a year ago, I saw considerably less smoking—and clearer air in cafes and bistros—than I saw during earlier sojourns.
Oh, and I can’t recall the last time I saw a cyclist like an old riding buddy of mine who stopped at the bottom of any hill or ramp and lit up before starting his climb. And I don’t think a scene like this will ever be repeated during a race:
Bicycle enthusiasts—whether we sprint to finish lines, cross cities or continents or simply appreciate technology and fine workmanship—are ripples in the ocean of the bicycle world.
That fact is easy to miss or ignore if you live in a Western/Global North city with bike lanes and well-stocked shops, or if you do all of your bike-related shopping online. It didn’t become real to me until I went for a ride in the Cambodian countryside with a native and both of us rode bikes like the ones people in the area ride.
People who haul their stuff and themselves—I’m not talking about someone in Williamsburg or Portland picking up artisanal bread at the local farmers’ market—don’t ride the latest high-tech carbon fiber wheels and frames with 12- (13?)-speed electronic shifting systems. For one thing, they can’t afford such things. For another, in the Global South—especially in rural areas—there isn’t a shop stocked with the necessary parts, equipped with the required tools and staffed by mechanics trained to use them—or any bike shop at all. And two- or three-day shipping isn’t available in those areas, even if the shop or an individual has internet access and can order.
Moreover, roads tend to be less developed and maintained, if they exist at all. A laden bike might be ridden on a trail or even on parched or sodden earth.
Bikes lead hard lives under such conditions. Therefore, reliability and simplicity are the paramount qualities.
World Bicycle Relief—an organization I’ve mentioned in previous posts—understands as much. In response, they’ve developed the Buffalo Bike, consisting of a rugged steel frame and a coaster brake.
In addition, WBR has trained over 3000 mechanics to keep those bikes rolling, mainly in Africa and South America. Trek has partnered with WBR to ensure distribution and repair of those bikes.
According to WBR, it takes $165 to provide one of those bikes and keep it rolling. That is less than what most department store bikes sell for in North America or Europe, and Buffalo Bikes are sturdier and require less maintenance.
The ride of some bikes has been described as “squirrels.” What riders mean is that the bike seems to wiggle, squirm or furtively jump, usually at high speeds (especially downhill) or when the rider pulls on the handlebars or stands up on the bike.
That got me to wondering: Do squirrels ever describe anything as bike-y?
Once again, Florida leads the nation in bicycle deaths and injuries, overall and per capita. And it's not even close: the next-worst state--Louisiana--has about half of Florida's numbers and rates.
Having cycled in the Sunshine State, I could see why there the body count is so high. Many thoroughfares are "stroads:" multi-lane streets, avenues or boulevards that cut a straight line from Point A to Point B. Such an arrangement seems to bring out the inner Dale Earnhardt in drivers. Also, those "stroads" are not only the most direct routes from one place to another: They're often the only routes. Worse yet, they often don't have "service" or emergency lanes or even sidewalks, let alone bike lanes.
The arrangements I've described can be especially difficult to acclimate to if you come from a place that isn't as auto- and driver-centric as Florida. Just as my teachers and professors didn't teach me about female, queer or Black writers because they weren't taught them themselves, I think many drivers have the idea that the road belongs to them and nothing should be in their way because, well, they were inculcated with such a notion at a young age--and it was reinforced by road an highway engineering that prioritized moving motor vehicles as quickly and efficiently as possible from one point to another.
The conditions I've described had at least something to do with one of the more horrific car-bike crashes I've heard of. Fortunately, it didn't add to Florida's death toll, though at least one of the cyclists involved has "incapacitating" injuries.
Notice that I said "at least." The driver involved in this confrontation was piloting her Kia SUV south in the southbound lane of North Ocean Boulevard Gulf Stream, a Palm Beach County community. A group of eight cyclists was riding northbound, in the northbound lane.
For some as-yet-unexplained reason, the 77-year-old driver crossed the center line dividing the two lanes. The front of her vehicle met--with great force--the front of a 43-year-old cyclist and struck the others who were riding with him.
Perhaps not surprisingly, he's the one with the "incapacitating" injury. Three other cyclsts had "serious" injuries; they, the others and the driver were brought to the hospital's trauma unit.
I hope everyone--yes, including the driver--recovers and she explains, or someone figures out, why she veered across that road. And I hope--though, I realize, this is a very long hope, especially with Ron De Santis in the governor's mansion--that Florida makes itself safer for cyclists, many of whom are tourists or, like me, were visiting family members.
The bicycle has been called the "grandparent of the airplane."
OK, the original phrase is "grandfather of the airplane." But in this day and age, no one--especially I--can be sexist.
Anyway, the saying most likely came about because some of the bicycle's technological innovations--including pneumatic tires--made aircraft possible. Also, many of aviation's early pioneers--including the Wright Brothers themselves--started out as bicycle mechanics, designers, racers or manufacturers.
Perhaps that was the reason why, I believe, the subconscious of the cycling world, as it were, has always harbored the dream of a flying bicycle--which has been done--and of riding a bicycle through the air.
About the latter: If you go to Arizona Science Center, you can do just that. But you won't be suspended in the ether. Rather, if you dare, you can ride a bicycle on a wire suspended across a 15-foot span.
Since it's in the Science Center, you don't run any risk of landing on cactus if you fall. Still, even if you are a novice, falling could be a blow to your psyche, if not your body. I imagine, however, that even an experienced cyclist (like yours truly) would feel a sense of pride over completing such a ride, however brief it may be.
After that, the only thing better might be cycling in a pink cloud.
People in Miami are as unaccustomed to snow as Harpo Marx was to public speaking.
Likewise, most New Yorkers aren’t used to earthquakes. In a way, ground-shakes are even stranger for us: When white flakes fluttered down to the sands and palm trees of the Sunshine State, folks knew what they were looking at. On the other hand, most people here in the Big Apple thought the rumbles came from a truck or subway train. Or, like me, they slept through it—even though the epicenter was just a few blocks from my apartment.
I am sure that countless Californians have slept through much stronger shocks. Still, it’s hard not to wonder whether an earthquake—in a city that experiences them about as often as the Jets or the Knicks win championships—on the second morning of the new year is a harbinger of what awaits us.
What finally woke me up? The helicopters that circled over the neighborhood. Marlee ducked behind the couch. I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep. So I got dressed, hopped on Tosca—my Mercian fixie—and pedaled into this:
I hope that’s more of a foretelling of the year to come.
After pedaling out to Flushing Meadow-Corona Park, I stopped at Lots ‘O’ Bagels for two whole wheat bagels. In my apartment, I enjoyed them with some English Blue Stilton cheese. Some might say that no true New Yorker would eat a bagel that way but I like the way EBC’s creamy texture complements both the cheese’s pungency and the bagel’s chewiness. I can, however, still claim to be a true New Yorker because I’m not accustomed to earthquakes but got through one, however minor it was. And I started my day with a bike ride.
The other day—New Year’s Eve—I took yet another ride to Point Lookout. I don’t know whether I was burning residual calories from Christmas week or waging a pre-emotive strike against the evening’s indulgences.
Whatever it was, I got what might have been the best treat of all, at least to my eyes.
That softly glowing band between the sea and sky made the ship—and the few people I saw on the boardwalks of the Rockaways and Long Beach—seem solitary but not isolated, alone but not lonely. That, of course, is how I felt while riding Dee-Lilah, my Mercian Vincitore Special, under a sky that was muted gray but not gloomy .
Some of us need that light, and to move in or occupy it like that ship, because this season encourages, and sometimes forces, extroversion, camaraderie and bright lights. Some of need times of solitude, and solo bike rides, to navigate, let alone enjoy, holiday gatherings of any size.
I couldn’t resist posting this image from Cicloposse because, well, I like it.
The image was used to herald 2021 which, nearly everyone hoped, would be much better than 2020. Or at least people hoped—or even assumed—that it couldn’t be worse.
I hold onto similar hope for 2024. Some have said that it might include this nation’s last democratic (with a small “d”) election, especially if you-know-who is elected. But many people who took up cycling during the pandemic have kept with it and there does seem to be some awareness, at least among some officials, that urban and transportation planning can’t begin and end with moving as many motor vehicles as possible from point A to point B, as it has since at least the building of the Interstate highway system.
I hope that the increased consciousness and good work I’ve described isn’t undone by energy and economic policies that include only fossil fuel-powered vehicles and deems nuclear power and natural gas to be the only “green” alternatives. I mean, if President Ronald Reagan could declare, with a straight face, that “trees cause pollution,” what could a Trump administration say about any kind of alternative transportation?
Even as I think about such possibilities, I still hold on to hope. A new year has begun, after all, and it looks like a good day for a ride.
What wishes do you have, dear readers, for the New Year?
When I was a child, I had a fever.
All right, I won’t sing the best-known Pink Floyd song. For that matter, I won’t sing: I don’t want to risk arrest for disturbing the peace!
So…when I was a child, there was a very popular toy. It was also popular in my parents’ time. So, playing with it might have been the last time I could enjoy such a thing without thinking, “I’ve become my mother/father*”
Mr. Potato Head, I’ve recently learned, was the first toy advertised on television. It’s still in production today and, perhaps not surprisingly, featured in Toy Story.
As I remember, there were all kinds of accessories available—including a little bicycle for him to ride. I don’t recall him, however, looking so stylish
unless, perhaps, there was a fin-de-siécle edition of Monsieur Pomme de Terre for the Burgundy countryside.
*—Early in my gender affirmation process, my mother had just heard a “great new singer:” Lady Gaga.
“She is great,” I affirmed. “She’s one of my new favorites.”
A pause.
“Omigod! I’ve become my mother.” We laughed.
Rain, interrupted by showers, fell pretty constantly from Wednesday until early yesterday morning. I ventured out for “quickies” along the waterfronts of Long Island City and Greenpoint. Late yesterday afternoon, I took a slightly longer, and definitely familiar, to Fort Totten.
I don’t mind riding in the rain as long as it isn’t cold. (I also don’t mind the cold as long as it’s not wet.) Since Christmas, the high temperatures have clustered around 10c (50F), which is mild for this time of year.
But the best meteorological feature of yesterday afternoon, at least to my eyes, was the clouds. I love seeing such a heavy, thick and even dark mounds when I know they’re not going to drop any more rain. I especially like the way they move, but don’t move away, enough for the sun to poke through, and how those rays are refracted through clouds and onto rippling waves.
Two of my favorite songs are the Beatles’ “Here Comes The Sun” and Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now.” Who couldn’t feel good about hearing the best Fab Four song (aside, possibly, from “Something”) not written by John or Paul? The point of that song isn’t the sun itself; rather, it’s that hope and clarity are on the way. And the most popular reggae tune that nobody thinks of as a reggae tune is about, I believe, the moment after.
Somehow I felt I could see more clearly in yesterday’s late-afternoon winter light by the water, than I could under a cloudless summer sky. That might be the best reason to ride at this time of year, at that time of year, after two days of rain punctuated by showers.
Golfes d’ombre: E, candeur des vapeurs et des tentes,
Lance des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frisson d’ombelles
So what did my Christmas Day ride have to do with Arthur Rimbaud’s poem about vowels—specifically, the lines about “E?”
Well, he likened the most-used vowel to the color white and used images of royalty and glaciers to convey the feeling of the sound and its character.
Of course, I was nowhere near the southern continent: I was on the South Shore of Long Island, and it wasn’t cold enough for even a white Christmas, let alone a glacier.
So I did another Point Lookout ride before spending Christmas evening with friends. Then on the holiday we don’t celebrate in the US—Boxing Day—I took a late-afternoon ride to Fort Totten. It’s just past the Throgs* Neck Bridge, which spans the meeting-point of the East River and Long Island Sound.
The convergence of those bodies of water, and the way Queens, Westchester and Nassau counties, curve around it, probably made it a strategic point and the reason the Fort was built. (The Army Reserve still uses a small part of it; the rest was decommissioned and became the park it is today.) The differences between the currents of those two bodies of water and the terrain that surrounds them may account for the interesting light that illuminates —and fogs that shroud—the area.
So, my Christmas rides treated me to different kinds of lights, including the ones people strung along their trees and homes.
*-The Throgs Neck Bridge connects Fort Totten, in the Queens neighborhood of Bayside, with tbe Bronx enclave of Throggs Neck (the locale of the New York Maritime Academy) I don’t know why the name of the bridge is spelled with one “g” while the Bronx neighborhood gets two.
Today is the second full day of winter—and the day before Christmas Eve. The temperature reached about 5C (40F) under clouds holding rain that could drop late tonight but will definitely fall tomorrow, according to the weather forecasts.
It seemed like the perfect day for a ride—to the ocean. The wind blew out of the southeast, so I was pedaling into it down the Beach Channel isthmus to Rockaway Beach and past sand and tides to Point Lookout.
My reward was exactly what I’d hoped for: early winter light, gray yet intimate like one of those old friends with whom you don’t have to pretend—and couldn’t, even if you wanted to. Or, perhaps, it is a reflection the few people I saw walking—themselves, their dogs, their lovers or spouses. Maybe they—and I—are reflections of that light, which doesn’t force extroversion.
Perhaps the strangest and most wonderful thing about that light, and the winter seascape, is that it allows a glimpse of the sunset hundreds of kilometers away, in the middle of the afternoon—and renders that sunset as a brushstroke that accents ripples of gray mirroring each other in the sea and sky.
Oh, and on my way home, the wind blew at my back—after I munched on the slice of Kossar’s babka I’d brought with me. I made good time in every sense of the word!
Last night, I took my Winter Solstice ride. Although I didn’t plan anything about it—except for one thing, which I’ll mention—I more or less knew I wouldn’t ride a lot of miles or climb. So I rode Tosca, my Mercian fixed gear bike.
The one planned part of my ride took me to a house about a kilometer from my apartment:
The residents of that house, on 23rd Street near the RFK Bridge, turn their porch into a kind of miniature Christmas village every year. The electric trains actually run on their tracks; the Ferris wheel turns and some of the figures walk, dance and even sing.
A few minutes later, I came upon another display that, while not as dynamic, filled the street with its lights and colors.
I continued to ride. I’m not sure of which motivated me more: those lights and colors, the crisp cold air or the complete absence of traffic.
About the latter: It was a proverbial “calm before the storm.” Not surprisingly, the holiday rush began this morning: A seemingly endless stream of cars crawled and honked down my street and, it seemed, everywhere: When I took a ride out to the Malcolm X Promenade today, it seemed like everyone in the world was entering or exiting LaGuardia Airport, the Grand Central Parkway or any street leading to them.
As I rode today, I couldn’t help but to think about last night’s ride—and a man who sold fruits and vegetables from a stand in Jackson Heights. I stopped and bought a bunch of red Swiss chard, a string of tomatoes and a small bag of cherries because they looked good—and out of respect to that man who, like me, was outside on the longest night of the year.
This year’s Winter Solstice will come in two hours.
I’m going for a ride to celebrate it—and the end of the semester.
There are organized rides—some in places where the weather’s even colder than it is here. (1C or 33F) Last year, the organizers of such a ride had, I believe, a really good idea.
Nearly two weeks ago, an alien clad in green, white and red landed in the middle of Paris, bearing artifacts eagerly anticipated by a line of people 1.5 kilometers (almost 1 mile) long who came to greet it.
No, the alien wasn’t Italian and the artifacts weren’t vital links to a distant galaxy. They are, however, prized in the place from which the aliens came. And the people who so anxiously awaited an encounter with them had seen them, until that moment, only on large, glowing screens in darkened halls.
The alien’s colors were not of a flag or spectrum. Rather, they represented the emblem of the alien’s homeland—something known in the galaxy as a “chain “ or “corporation.”
Those folks in the queue were waiting to try something they’d seen in images from a faraway land—one where Ford F-150s roam.
By now, you might have surmised that the customers in Les Halles were waiting to try something that doesn’t exist in the galaxy of Parisian pâtisseries—a Kree-spee Kréme beignet.
I guess I shouldn’t have been have been surprised. Owing largely to movies, television and music videos, American popular culture is, especially for the young, a kind of yang to the yin of haute culture, couture and cuisine. Les jeunes have grown up watching Americans dig into iconic Krispy Kreme boxes.
The company says it plans to open 500 “access points”—which will include vending machines and kiosks as well as actual stores—all over France in the next year.
I mention this development because I hope that Krispy Kreme isn’t a sign of more, and worse, trends crossing the pond, just as seeing the Shake Shack font is a harbinger of the worst things about gentrification coming to your neighborhood.
Guardian Europe columnist Alexander Hurst describes America as a “hellscape” in which folks go for their fix of glazed donuts—in their SUVs and amped-up pickup trucks.
To be sure, I have seen such vehicles in Europe. They are, however, smaller than their US counterparts. Also, when I took bike tours in the countrysides of France and other European countries, such vehicles were used by farmers, carpenters and others engaged in work that requires hauling a lot of equipment and cargo. Even the SUV-like vehicles I saw on recent trips in Paris, Athens and Rome were usually emblazoned with the name of a store or some other business.
Part of that has to do with the higher cost of gasoline in Europe. Another factor might be the narrower streets and roads. But Hurst believes that France and other European countries must do more to prevent this:
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| Ford F-150 through the years, 1970s-2020s.Graphic by Will Chase for Axios |
The bloat in American vehicle sizes, he observes, is not only an “environmental disaster.” It’s also a hazard for pedestrians and anyone operating a smaller, less powerful vehicles—including bicycles.
As I have pointed out in earlier posts, SUVs and the pickup-trucks-on-steroids (driven by guys who could use Viagra) give us little or no room to maneuver if the driver turns, swerves or veers. Moreover, their increased height makes cyclists and pedestrians (especially small children) less visible and their higher grilles are more likely to strike someone in the upper body or even head, which is more likely to result in paralysis or death than a blow to the lower extremities.
Mayor Anne Hidalgo has proposed tripling the parking fees for SUVs in central Paris and doubling them in the rest of the city. If her proposal passes, it will be a good start. But more needs to be done—in her city and country, and the rest of Europe—in order to prevent an invasion of alien vehicles grown and fueled by Krispy Kreme’s.
In the US, you don’t have to be on the West Coast to ride into a sunset on the ocean.
Here in New York City, you can go to the south shore of Brooklyn, Queens or Long Island, or certain parts of Staten Island, for such a ride. Actually, a ride to Battery Park in Manhattan also counts, as New York Bay—where the Hudson River ends—is technically part of the Atlantic Ocean.
A narrow passage of the Bay separates the tip of Manhattan from Red Hook, Brooklyn, where I took a late-day ride to celebrate the end of a torrent that inundated this city for nearly 36 hours—and to take a break from reading papers and other end-of-semester duties.
Some of the most comic failures of my life have involved my efforts to be a vegetarian. Now, I don’t believe that no meal is complete without beef, chicken, fish or some other animal flesh. But my intentions of going to an entirely plant-based diet always seem to be derailed by some unforeseen event—like the andouille that found its way into the cornbread stuffing for the turkey I was, uh, cooking for other people.
Or a barbecue that presented itself along my ride. Because you know that I never, ever would intentionally ride to a feast of wings, drumsticks, sausages and patties singed on a hot grill.
And when I am riding to such a massive repast—unintentionally, of course—I am never tasting, in my mind, those succulent accompaniments to succotash. (Gotta eat a balanced diet, ya know?)
Sometimes I am visualizing those tasty morsels so vividly that I am, in my mind, grilling them as I ride.
Following in his footsteps or tire tracks, it seems, is Sir Bradley Wiggins, who won the 2012 Tour. He says he no longer rides a bicycle, although his reason is different and he coaches his son in his racing career.
That last fact is very interesting when you consider the first British TdF winner’s reasons for hanging up his bike. “A lot of my cycling career was about running from my past,” he explains. “It was a distraction.”
That past included a father—who just happened to be a six-day race champion in Australia—who was absent until Bradley, at 19, was beginning his career. The elder Wiggins showed up in Belgium, where the young rider was racing.
Bradley described it as “probably the hardest day of his life” even though spectators at the track in Ghent were cheering him. His father, broke and broken, regaled him with stories of how he “beat everybody in Europe.” Then, while, squeezing his newly-found son’s arm, he delivered a verbal coup de grâce: “Just don’t forget, you’ll never be as good as your old man.”
(Is that the start of an Oedipal conflict, or what?)
Reading that reminded me of someone I knew who ran for the track teams of her high school and college. She told me that one day, she was out for her daily training run—a ritual she continued after she graduated and no longer was competing—when she stopped in her tracks and wondered aloud, “Why am I doing this?” She realized that she, like Sir Bradley, was running from a traumatic past—which, in her case, included sexual abuse from her brothers.
Speaking of which: before the “reunion” with his father, he had been sexually abused—at age 12, by a youth cycling coach.
In a strange, terrible way, Sir Bradley Wiggins has—besides his Tour de France victories and World Championships—something in common with Anquetil and other cyclists who rode little or not at all after retiring from competition. Jacques and other riders—almost none of whom attained anything near his level of success—grew up poor or working-class. For them, the bicycle was a vehicle of escape from the farm or factory. Once they could afford a nice house and car, the bicycle became a symbol of a past from which they were trying to ride away—just as it was for Sir Bradley Wiggins.
