The Jersey Off His Back

A domestique is, literally, a servant.

On a cycling team, it's his or her job to help the team leader win the race.  That often means riding for long stretches in front of the leader, making a slipstream that allows him or her to conserve energy for a breakaway or climb.  It can also include inserting themselves into a breakaway and forcing other teams to chase, or to chase another breakway that threatens their team.    

A domestique can also  bring water or food from team cars to the leader.  He or she might also be called upon to give up a wheel--or even a bicycle--if the leader's machine fails.  I've also heard of domestiques giving leaders the jerseys off their backs!

How far should a domestique go to help the team's leader win?  

  

A "SMART" Tire?

The single most important innovation of in the history of the bicycle is the one that someone or another has been trying to render obsolete from the day it was introduced.

I am talking about the pneumatic tire, created 133 years ago.  Of all bicycle innovations, it's had, by far, the most influence beyond the world of cycling: Without it, motorized vehicles would be no faster, sturdier or more reslient than those powered by animals, and modern aircraft could not take off or land.

What makes pneumatic tires seemingly indespensible is also their flaw:  They are elastic membranes filled with air.  If that air is lost, whether through a puncture or leakage, your carbon fiber wheels ride as if they're cast in lead.  Having to fix your flat can make you late for work, school or a date (yes, I've ridden to those!) or lose time in a race.  And, fixing a tubular tire was probably the closest I've come to performing surgery--which is one reason I stopped riding tubulars a few years after my racing days ended.

So it seems that every few years, someone comes up with an "airless" tire.  About four decades ago, I had the opportunity to try a pair of Zeus LCM rim coverings.  Essentially, they were solid polyurethane donuts fitted to bicycle rims.  I did a half-century and a weeks' worth of commutes on them and felt as if I'd spent a year on a "boneshaker."  Since then, a few other tinkerers have tried their hands at making "flat-proof" tires.  Most never go beyond the prototype stage; a few are released and meet the same reception I had for the Zeus rim coverings.

The problem is that when you get rid of air, you also sacrifice buoyancy and resilience--the very qualities that made pneumatic tires such an important innovation.  I don't know whether this is an insurmountable problem, but there always seems to be someone with more technical expertise (or simply a different kind of imagination) than mine who believes it isn't.

Photo from SMART Tire Company

One such person is Calvin Young, an engineer based in (where else?) Portland.  As an intern at NASA's Glenn Research Center, he started to work on what would become the Martensite Elasticised Tubular Loading (METL) tire.  It's essentially the tire that allowed the Perserverance Mars rover to traverse the Red Planet, adapted for bicycles.  

The spacecraft tires were woven from Nitinol, an alloy of titanium and aluminum.  This makes them strong yet elastic--and flat-proof. (I would imagne they're more resilient than the Zeus LCMs I rode.)  But they don't make for very good grip on slippery surfaces.  So, one of the ways Young adapted the tires for bicycle use was to add a layer of our friend polyurethane.  As I understand, it can be re-applied, further adding to the tire's durability.

SMART (Shape Memory Alloy Radial Technology) Tire Company, for which Young now works, plans to make these tires available to consumers some time in 2022. I'd be interested in trying them.  They didn't quote a price, but I imagine it's a good bit higher than what you paid for your Continentals or Michelins or Panaracers.  

  

The Myth Of His "Accident"

Without even trying, I came across more than twenty articles about what happened to Shawn Bradley.  But only one called the incident what it is--or, more precisely, said what it isn't.

On 20 January, he was riding his bike near his St. George, Utah home when a driver struck him from behind.  Such collisions normally don't garner more than a report or two in a local or regional news medium.  The reason why this story captured more attention can be summed up from a sentence in the statement announcing his plight:  "Doctors have advised him that his road to recovery will be both long and arduous,  perhaps an even more difficult physical challenge than playing professional basketball."

The italics in the previous sentence are mine.  While Shawn Bradley's situation is terrible--he is paralyzed, with a traumatic spinal cord injury--it's unlikely that anyone beyond whatever communities he lives in or belongs to would have heard about it. But it just happens that one of his communities is that of former National Basketball Association players.  While he wasn't a star on the level of Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan or LeBron James, his career spanned 12 years--a geologic age in the NBA--more than eight of which he spent with the Dallas Mavericks, where he earned a reputation as a shot-blocker and rebounder. 

Shawn Bradley.  Photo by Jeff Mitchell, for Reuters

But, even with all of the attention paid to Bradley's story, there is one thing that every media account I saw, save for one, got wrong.  They called the collison an "accident."

Henry Grabar, in his Slate article titled (appropriately enough) "It's Never A 'Bicycle Accident,'" corrects this error. "A child falling off his bike in the park is a bicycle accident," he writes.  "A wipeout in the Tour de France is a bicycle accident." But, he admonishes, "Getting rammed from behind by a car is not a bicycle accident." 

Safe-streets advocates have tried, for years, to convince reporters, police officials and engineers not to use the word "accident" to describe car crashes.  As Grabar points out, the use of this word implies "the carnage could not be avoided through better policy and design." The use of the word particularly egregious when, say, a cyclist is run over by a minivan driven by someone who is looking at a screen rather than the road, or who is intoxicated.  It allows the police to spin the incident as a result of a bicycle malfunction--or, worse, to imply that that the cyclist was at fault.  "The press repeats the assertion, and the myth of the bicycle accident is renewed," Grabar observes.

Since retiring from the NBA fifteen years ago, Bradley has become a dedicated and, from all accounts, very skilled cyclist.  So it doesn't seem likely that he did something stupid, careless or illegal.  And I have to wonder:  How could a driver not see a guy who's 7'6"  (232 cm) tall?

So, of everyone who reported on Shawn Bradley being struck from behind while riding his bicycle, only Henry Grabar managed to say what the incident wasn't.  Unfortunately, it will take many more folks like him to dispel the myth of the bicycle accident.