Is This What Cycling Needs?

About twenty years ago, some cycling buddies and I were enjoying a post-ride pizza.  (Actually, it was more like pizzas, plural:  If I recall correctly, we did a long ride at a brisk pace.) Miguel Indurain, possibly the least effervescent personality ever to dominate a sport, had just won the Tour de France.  While we all admired his talent and skill as a rider, a couple of us lamented the fact that he was all but unknown outside of a few European countries.  That was one of the reasons why so few Americans, at that time, were paying attention to the Tour or racing in general. 

A few years earlier, Greg LeMond won the Tour for the third time in five years.  There was some “buzz” in this country about him and cycling, but it died out pretty quickly after he hung up his bike.  Of course, some of the waning of American interest in the Tour, Giro and Vuelta could be blamed on the fact that no American rider of LeMond’s stature followed him, at least for nearly a decade.  

Although people who met him said he was likeable enough, he wasn’t particularly compelling in an interview.  Moreover, the same people who professed to liking him also said, in the immortal words of a journalist I knew, that he “wasn’t the brightest thing in the Crayola box”.  A couple of interviews I saw mostly confirmed that impression.  

At least he was more interesting than Indurain.  Some reporters said the Basque rider was a jerk; others said that spending time with him was more narcotic than aphrodisiac.  Even he himself admitted, in a post-race interview, “My hobby is sleeping”.

As we gobbled our slices of tomato, cheese and dough, one of our “crew” came up with this insight:  “What cycling needs is a Michael Jordan.”

If my sense of history of accurate, Jordan had retired from basketball for the first time.  I don’t recall whether it was during his failed attempt at a career in baseball, which he said was always his first love in sports.  But even in his absence, Chicago Bulls #23 was, by far, the best-selling sports jersey in the world.  Kids were wearing it in France when I rode there later that summer, and a newspaper reported that he was the most popular athlete in that country.

I thought about my old cycling buddy’s insight  yesterday when I was listening to the radio news station and the sports reporter said that in a few days, the Yankees will start their first training camp in two decades without Derek Jeter.  Some would argue that he was the greatest baseball player of this generation.  (Even though I’m not a Yankee fan, I wouldn’t argue against that claim.)  He, like Jordan, “Magic” Johnson, MuhammadAli and Martina Navratilova, was one of those athletes known to people who aren’t even fans of his or her sport, or sports generally.  And, although neither basketball nor baseball is starving for fans in the US, I’m sure that the executives of the leagues in which they played—not to mention legions of marketers and advertisers—were glad that Jordan, Johnson, Ali, Navritalova and Jeter came along.

From Triangle Offense

As I thought about that, I thought about Lance Armstrong and realized I hadn’t heard much about him lately.  After his last Tour de France victory in 2005, he seemed poised to become, possibly, the first cyclist to transcend his sport, even if he didn’t dominate it in the way Eddy Mercx, Jacques Anquetil, Bernard Hinault  and Indurain did during their careers.  

(Even when they were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, most European cycling fans agreed with such an assessment of Lance.  Although he won the Tour more often than the other riders I mentioned, he didn’t win, or even enter, many of the other races, including the “classics”, on which those other riders built their careers.)

Of course, part of the reason why he would have been a transcendent phenomenon was his “Lazarus” story.  Even before he confessed to doping, there were whispers that he faked his cancer (having known people who lived with and died from it, I don’t know how it’s possible to do such a thing) in order to lull his competition and create a media sensation.  But, even if he hadn’t gone from wondering whether he’d lived another day to leaving peloton wondering how far ahead of them he would finish, he probably would have gotten all of those offers he had for commercial endorsements.  I even think he would have been mentioned as a candidate for public office, as he was before his now-famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) with Oprah.  

What I’ve said in the previous paragraph makes sense when you realize that even before he won his first Tour, he was in demand as a motivational speaker.  Of course, some of that had to do with his bout with cancer, but even if he hadn’t faced such adversity, he would have been invited to give pep talks.  He’s not a great orator in the classic sense, but he is the sort of person to whom people would pay attention even if he weren’t so famous.  Although not necessarily loquacious, he’s articulate.  But, perhaps even more to the point, he is an intense and fiery personality who doesn’t have to tell a particularly compelling story or use florid language in order to capture the attention of his audience.  At least, that was the impression I took away from the one brief in-person encounter I had with him, and from the times I’ve seen him interviewed.

If Lance indeed consumed as many illicit pharmaceuticals as has been alleged, and if he bullied his teammates into doing the same, the story of his rise and fall is a sort of Faustian tragedy.  But his tumble from grace is also sad for cycling and its fans because it denied the sport its first universal household name.  For that reason, it will be a while before the early Spring Classics will generate as much attention in the US as the beginning of baseball’s Spring training season.

On Ice

For the past two weeks, there has been ice and snow on sidewalks and streets all over the city.  Last week, I managed to sneak in a couple of commutes on my bike, but encountered glacial patches even in the car lanes, let alone those designated for bikes.  I'm starting to feel a bit sluggish, but I figure that, at my age, I have a greater chance of doing damage to myself as well as my bike if I slip and fall.

I've always resisted the idea of getting tires with metal studs because during most winters I've experienced here in NYC, they would have been useful for no more than a couple of days every year.  However, this winter and last, we've had fairly extended periods of snow and ice.  They are also the only two consecutive winters I can recall in which the Hudson River iced up along the Manhattan piers.

Hmm....Maybe I should ride what this guy's riding:

From Funny Games

Rumors Of The Mechanical Bicycle's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated For 120 Years

Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child.

So said Cicero in 46 B.C.E.  Almost two millenia later, George Santayana wrote, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

You don't have to be a graduate student in history to understand how true both statements are.  Having spent a decade or two or three as a cyclist or in the bicycle business will teach you that.

I think of Cicero's and Santayana's pearls of wisdom whenever I hear or read about how electic bikes, or e-bikes, are going to turn pedal-powered bicycles into museum specimens.  

That notion wasn't propogated for the first time five, ten or even tweny years ago.  Such a prediction was made in 1970, when Sanyo demonstrated its first electric bike at that year's Expo (a.k.a. World's Fair) in Osaka.

Even that wasn't the first time someone predicted that two wheels powered by two pedals would not survive the shock of electric bikes bursting onto the scene.  The same prognostication was made a century ago, in 1911, when bicycles with electric motors first became commercially available seven years after Popular Mechanics reported that an electric motor could be fitted to a bike.





But predictions that attaching a motor to a bike would turn human-powered vehicles into roadkill go back even further.  Check out an excerpt from a December 1896 Cycling Life editorial:


“Have horseless carriages come to stay? They are still curiosities and only curiosities, although a few limited purposes they may soon be suffienctly practicable. Perhaps, it illustrates what may be expected that the bicycle was a languishing commodity of trade for many a year before it reached that degree of practicability at which wiseacres commence to ask the question “Has it come to stay?” A similar languishing business may be looked for in motor-cycles for all-around purposes…Dealers in bicycles who have the future in view might do worse than by employing their spare time and energy to familiarising themselves with motor construction. Any suitable widening of the scope of the bicycle business can only contribute to enhance its stability and reduce its risks, and there is little doubt that the motor-cycle business, when it comes, will fall into the hands of those who have trained themselves most specifically for the task of taking care of it.”

Compare that with this slide presented by Hannes Neupert--founder of ExtraEnergy, an electric vehicle lobbying organization based in Germany-- at a Light Electric Vehicle Conference in 2010:



How a man can claim to be a visionary while completely ignoring history is beyond me.  Yes, the guy  who delivers your Chinese food may have ditched his old mountain bike for a new e-bike.  But he probably was not riding a bicycle when he wasn't working and if he ever gets a job in which he didn't have to make deliveries, he'll probably never ride anything with two wheels ever again.  

But when he traded pedals for a lithium-ion batteries, someone else started riding a human-powered bike to his or her job at a school, office, studio or store.  And others are signing up for Bike-A-Thons of one kind or another.  Moreover, the cities in which those delivery people and those new cyclists live and work may have started a bike share program.




The reason is simple:  Aside from having two wheels and one rider, an electric bike really doesn't have much in common with a pedal-powered bicycles.  Their purposes and the ways in which they can be used are completely different for a number of reasons, not the least of which is how many miles per charge (or battery) the electric bike can yield.  For that matter, an e-bike has no more in common with a motorcycle than either has with a pedal-powered bicycle.  

But I'll concede that there is one difference between today's e-bike bandwagon and those of decades past:  Today, the e-bike is touted as a "green" form of transportation.  While it doesn't belch smoke or burn gasoline, it still has, potentially, as much of an environmental impact as a few cell phones or other electronic devices.  For one thing, the electricity used to charge e-bikes has to be generated from something.  Chances are, it's derived from fossil fuels, the very stuff from which, we are warned, we must wean ourselves.

Another reason why e-bikes aren't as green as they seem is that, like many other electronic devices, they use lithium batteries.  Lithium itself is highly flammable and reactive, but that's not the least of the batteries' impact on our planet. The US Environmental Protection Agency has linked the solvents used in the manufacture of lithium batteries to cancer and neurological damage.  Even worse is the cobalt used in manufacturing the batteries:  It's been linked to pulmonary, respiratory and neurological issues.  And, as you might expect, cobalt mining is an assault on the environment.  Like other kinds of mining, it results in soil erosion and silting of water. Perhaps even worse, the tailings that are often dumped into rivers and other bodies of water are often contaminated with mercury and cyanide, which are used in the extraction process.

Almost anything degrades the environment also enables the exploitation of undeveloped countries by developed ones, which in turn leads to a widening in the gap between the rich and the poor (and for those in the middle to be pushed into the latter).  Nearly all of the world's cobalt comes from Africa; most of that from the Democratic Republic of Congo.  While the Congo has laws to protect the environment and rights of workers, they are rarely enforced.  So mining companies based in the industrialized world routinely don't pay workers, who are often children or women captured in tribal conflicts. Miners end up in slavery because they can't pay the debts incurred from the exhorbitant costs their employers charge them for their equipment. And, not surprisigly, sexual violence and substance abuse flourish in such an environment and fuel the spread of HIV/AIDS.

In other words, the mining of cobalt used in the making of lithium batteries is one factor enabling a new kind of colonialism in Africa.

Now, I'm not saying that the manufacture or maintenance of mechanical bicycles is completely pollution- or corruption-free:  No industrial process is; some would argue that no industrial process can be.  But as long as the mechanical bicycle remains the only machine that amplifies human energy without any help from an outside energy source (e.g., electricity or gasoline), it will have its place for commuting and other kinds of utility riding.  And the exhiliaration you feel (along with the exhaustion) of pedaling kilometer after kilometer, up and down hills, with the wind your face or at your back, simply can't be replicated on anything powered by electricity or any other non-human energy source!