They Made US Cycling History

In less than a week, we've lost three people who, in different ways, helped to shape cycling culture in the US.

Perhaps the one closest to my, and many people's, hearts is Marty Epstein.  If you are not from the New York-New Jersey area, or don't ride in randonees, brevets or gran fondos, you might not have heard of him.  He did, however, start one of the first gran fondo rides here in the eastern US.  It turned Morristown, New Jersey into a cycling mecca.

The town also just happens to be the locale for his shop, Marty's Reliable Cycle, where you could be just as comfortable buying a steel bike of any kind as you could if you were in the market for a Trek Madone or S-Works--or a basic commuter bike, or something for your kid.  He once said his goal was to "change the world through bicycles."  At least he understood that such change would involve all types of bicycles and riders, not just one subculture or market subset.

He went to the Gran Fondo in the sky last Thursday, at age 69, less than a year after being diagnosed with prostate cancer.





How many people who haven't won the Tour de France get a funeral procession like that?

On Sunday, someone who, perhaps, helped to plant the seeds of cycling culture in America passed at age 93.  Unless you are a Schwinn historian or spend a lot of time looking at patent applications, you probably haven't heard of Frank Brilando.  He raced in the 1948 and 1952 Olympics, but his long tenure as a Schwinn engineer earned him his place in cycling history.  He, along with Al Fritz, created the Sting-Ray, Varsity and Continental bicycles during the 1960s.

You may think the Sting-Ray is an abomination only a 12-year-old boy could love, and you may turn up your nose at the Varsity and Continental.  Before Brilando and Fritz developed them, however, few Americans had ridden a bicycle with a derailleur.  Those Schwinns helped to popularize the multi-gear mechanisms and, arguably, paved the way for the Bike Boom of the '70s.  If nothing else, the Varsity and Continental probably got American adults to ride bikes for the first time in decades.

Frank Brilando

Brilando and Fritz also worked on the Airdyne full-body fan-resistance exercise bike.  Once, in a conference room in Taiwan, Schwinn's brain trust were trying to figure out the proper crossover pattern (the relationship between the rider's arm position on the handles and foot position on the pedals) when Brilando realized the best pattern would be reflected in the arm and leg coordination of a baby crawling on the floor.  "So Frank gets down on the floor and starts crawling like a baby," Fritz, who died in 2013, recalled.

Over the same weekend, Roland Della Santa, died at his Reno home, aged 72.  He began building bicycle frames in 1970.  One of his creations won the "best road frame" award at the 2009 North American Handbuilt Bicycle Show.  Like Brilando, Della Santa also raced, and sometimes the frames people ordered were delayed because he was training so much.  

Roland Della Santa with his award-winning frame at the 2009 NAHBS.

But a few frames of his in particular changed the course (pun intended) of American cycling.  He took a certain 16-year-old into his home and admonished the young man for wearing a yellow jersey to his first race.  "I didn't know you're only supposed to do that if you win the Tour de France," that rider recalls.  Della Santa taught the young man about racing, and the European scene in particular.   In fact, he inspired the youthful rider to plan a career in Europe.

Della Santa, of course, built frames for that young rider and became his first sponsor.  When that rider achieved fame and fortune, Della Santa built the first stock steel frames sold under that cyclist's name.

Here's a hint to that rider's identity:  He is the only rider from his country whose Tour de France victories haven't been vacated due to doping.

Yes, I am talking about Greg LeMond. You might say that Della Santa helped him to become what he became. 

"The First Brakes That Worked"

If you have a Peugeot--or almost any other French bike (Motobecane being one of the notable exceptions) made before the late 1970's, you are riding them.

No, I'm not referring to those plastic Simplex derailleurs or the longer-lasting but worse-shifting Huret models.  Unless you acquired a bike that was never ridden, you've probably had to replace your shifters by now.  Even If you didn't need to, you might have.

On the other hand, there's a good chance you're still riding your Mafac "Racer" brakes.  You might have replaced the pads and cables--actually, you should have because even if the bike wasn't ridden, the cables were probably corroded and the pads hardened.  If you did, and your brakes are adjusted, they work as well as--or even better than--most brakes available today.

I am mentioning them because, for about two decades, they achieved a distinction very few other bike parts held:  They were used on bikes at all price and quality levels, from the machines ridden by Tour de France winners to the most utilitarian city and town bikes.  Some time in the mid-1970's, Mafac came out with the "Competition", which was really the same brake with a shorter reach.  Later, it was cleaned up and polished (and still later offered with gold anodizing).  A longer version of the Competition --i.e., one with the same reach as the Racer--was also marketed.

 

The one other difference between the "Racer" and "Competition" was the straddle cable:  The one on the Competition had double ball ends, while the Racer used what was essentially a shorter link of derailleur cable (with the barrel-shaped end used on Campagnolo and Simplex shifters) bolted into hex-shaped ends.

While some may see these brakes as anachronisms, they have an important place in cycling history. Some cycling historians say they were "the first brakes that actually worked".  That is almost not hyperbole:  There seemed to be a mentality among brake-makers (at least those that made brakes for road bikes) that was expressed by a Campagnolo representative at a training session:  The purpose of the brake is not to stop, but to decelerate.  Some would argue that notion gave the brakes of the time too much credit.

(When I first got serious about cycling, there was a joke that the Universal 68 side-pull--commonly supplied on bikes that were otherwise all-Campagnolo--was a "courtesy" brake.)

One reason for Mafac's superior power was the way the brake block attached to the arm:  through an eyebolt.  This allowed a far greater range of adjustability along the vertical and horizontal planes.  This was particularly important with rims like the Constrictor Asp, which did not have flat parallel sides.

(The Asp seems almost like an embryonic version of today's V-shaped "aero" rims!)

Another advantage offered by the "Racer" brakes was that the length of the straddle cable could be adjusted to optimize the mechanical advantage of the brake.  This allowed the brakes to work well with a variety of different levers, as well as with the pads set all the way up or all the way down--or anywhere in between--on the brake arm.

Now, you might be thinking that the first working center pull--and the one on which others were based, at least in part--is not so important because sidepulls have advanced so much, and so Mafac has been relegated to la poubelle de l'histoire.  Well, even though Mafac hasn't been in business for about three decades, their place in cycling history is sure because of the very first product they made, about seven years before the "Racer" was introduced.

Their cantilever brake, introduced in 1946, remained in production throughout the company's history (about four decades).  It's not the first of its type.  But, compared to the ones that had been made before, it was easy to set up and use, and was more powerful.  For as long as Mafac made them, nearly every lightweight tandem was equipped with them.  So were many high-quality bikes made for fully-loaded touring, and most cyclo-cross racers.  For the latter, cyclists often brazed the necessary posts to old racing frames to accommodate the cantilevers which, in addition to offering superior stopping power, were not as easily clogged by the mud that is an essential element of any cyclo-cross race.

The early mountain bikes also used Mafac cantis.  When Dia-Compe and Shimano made  cantilever brakes that appeared on off-the-shelf touring bikes (and second-generation mountain bikes) sold in the US, their designs were basically adaptations and refinements of Mafac's.  Weinmann also more-or-less copied Mafac cantis and, apparently, bought Mafac's tooling and continued making cantis, in steel as well as alloy, until their own demise in the 1990's.

Many of us still use cantis today.  Those of you who use V-brakes also have to thank Mafac, because Vees were developed from cantis.  And even those of us who use dual-pivot sidepulls owe a debt of gratitude to Manufacture Auvergnoise de Freins et Accessories pour Cycle for developing the centerpull that helped to make it possible!

For me, it's interesting to recall that Frank Chrinko, the proprietor of Highland Park (NJ) Cyclery when I was working there, would not ride any brakes but Mafac centerpulls.  In fact, he put a set of Competitions, along with a mixture of Campagnolo and top-shelf French and Japanese parts, on a frame that was built custom for him. 

Building in 3D

I guess we shouldn't be surprised.

On Friday, I wrote about a 3D printed airless tire.  When I learned about it, I knew that other 3D printed parts were being made somewhere. 

Turns out, I underestimated the speed of technological progress.  Now there's a 3D printed bicycle that looks like a sci-fi version of an urban commuter bike--and is said to be stronger than titanium.

The new machine was made by Arevo, a Silcon Valley (where else?) startup that specializes in "additive manufacturing" (tech-speak for engineering-level 3D printing).  The company is backed by the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, which isn't surprising when you realize that the armed forces are the main drivers behind 3D's evolution from a novel way to make chintzy plastic figurines to a sophisticated technological process used to make weaponry.

(Few people realize that the Silicon Valley became, well, the Silicon Valley largely because of military contracts during the Cold War.  So, if you're going to thank a soldier or sailor for anything, make sure it's for making the iPhone possible, not for invading Iraq!)

The bicycle's frame was made first, as a single piece, and the other parts were made.  According to Arevo CEO Jim Miller (formerly of Google), it took about two weeks to make the bike.  

Knowing that answers the question folks like me ask about carbon fiber bicycles: "Why does something made of plastic cost so much?"  Well, carbon bike frames--whether of custom chassis from the likes of Land Shark or the Specialized items your local bike shop offers--are made by workers who lay, by hand, individual layers of carbon fiber impregnated with resin around a mold of a frame.  The frame is then baked in an oven to melt the resin and bind the carbon strips together.

Arevo takes workers out of the process.  It uses a "deposition head" on a robotic arm to print out the three-dimensional shape of the frame.  The head then lays down strands of carbon fiber and melts a thermoplastic material to bind the strands, all in one step.   The result is that Arevo can build a frame for $300, even in The Valley.  That is about what it currently costs to build a similar frame in Asia.

Of course, even though Miller is reportedly a cyclist, he doesn't see Arevo as the next Schwinn or Trek or Specialized:  The company is working on a head that can run along rails and print larger parts, avoiding the need of ovens in which to bake them.  "We can print as big as you want--the fuselage of an aircraft, the wing of an aircraft," he says.

Surely he knows the Wright Brothers started as bicycle builders...

The Gear Maker

During the 1970's Bike Boom, millions of Americans bought ten-speed bikes.  Many people rode them only a few times, or once.  Some didn't like the dropped handlebars or small "hard" seats; others couldn't quite get the hang of shifting derailleurs.  Given the fragile nature of most derailleurs of the time, the results weren't pretty, especially when the derailleurs were out of adjustment or the rider tried to shift while standing still or under pressure.

Then there were the engineering types and tinkerers who look at any mechanical device and think "There must be a better way."  And, finally, there were lots of newly-minted lawyers with too much time on their hands who saw all sorts of potential lawsuits lurking. (Some of them helped to found the CPSC.)

One of the best-remembered attempts to correct the "deficiencies" of derailleur gearing was Shimano's Front Freewheeling system.  Basically, it incorporated a freewheel-like mechanism between the chainrings and crank so that the chainrings spun as long as the wheels were spinning. This allowed riders to shift without pedaling. 

Some people who were accustomed to internally-geared hubs (like Sturmey-Archer three-speeds) liked this new innovation, which is probably the reason why it developed something of a following in Germany, where many people still cycled for transportation but few were accustomed to derailleurs.  However, the FF system was heavy and complicated, and was equipped only on entry-level bikes.

Another attempt to bypass the idiosyncrasies of derailleurs and multiple rear sprockets is all but forgotten today.  But it was interesting in its own way.

Before its foray into the bicycle business, Tokheim had about seven decades' worth of experience in manufacturing fuel dispensers and pumps, and equipment for payment terminals and retail automation systems.  So, if you've ever owned or managed a gas station, you've seen or used Tokheim equipment.

Like a few other American companies, Tokheim thought the Bike Boom was an opening for a new profitable market.  And, like those other companies (including, of all companies, Beatrice Foods!), they thought they could make bike parts and accessories even though they had absolutely no experience with them--or, it could seem, cycling. 

Then again, Tokheim's experience with pumps and other kinds of machinery had, it would seem, at least some applicability to designing and manufacturing a bicycle gearing system.  It was at least somewhat in evidence in their "Gear Maker" system.

The Tokheim Gear Maker

When drivetrains with derailleurs are shifted to their extreme positions (small chainring with the smallest rear cog or largest chainring with largest rear cog), severe chainline angles can result.  This usually results in noisier running; in worse cases, it leads to premature chain and cog wear.  In the worst cases (especially with an inexperienced and unskilled rider), the chain can be thrown off the cogs and into the wheels or get stuck between the chainrings and chainstay.

Most cyclists learned, in time, not to shift into the extreme gear positions--or to do so carefully.  However, some could never get past that first experience of a missed shift.  Or, if they had no previous experience with multi-cog systems, they were intimidated.

That is the "need" the Tokheim system was intended to meet.  Imagine an old-fashioned Ferris wheel:  the kind with a "spider" that rotates around an axle at its center and "cars" or "gondolas" at the end of each arm.  Those cars and arms are in fixed positions and will always reach the same height at the peak of their rotation. 

Now imagine that between those arms, there are other arms, except that these arms are expandable and retractable.  Thus, the Ferris wheel operator could expand the diameter (and height) of the wheel for more adventurous customers.  But the cars of those expanded and contracted cars would rotate in the same plane as the cars on arms with fixed lengths.

The gear in the "gear maker" was like that Ferris wheel.  It was operated with a twist-grip shifter.  When the shifter was in its "high" position (slackened cable), the chain ran on the smallest gear, which was fixed to the axle.  Shifting down made an interposer arm push a series of bars out successively.  At the end of each bar were teeth like those of a typical rear sprocket.  The chain ran on a larger sprocket something like the "skip tooth" cogs found on some 1970s freewheels.  A tensioner--basically a derailleur cage and pulleys--took up chain slack.

For a time, the Tokheim system came as standard equipment on a few Huffy and Murray bikes.  I never saw a bicycle sold in a bike shop that was equipped with the Tokheim system, and I don't know whether anyone ever retrofitted it to a bike.  For that matter, I didn't know anyone who rode it, and only got to work on a couple of them, so I don't know how they performed in the "real world".  However, as the gears were made of plastic, I suspect they wore fairly quickly.  And, as Tokheim stopped making it around 1980 and, to my knowledge, never offered replacement parts (and because most of the bikes that came with them have long since ended up in landfills), I don't suspect that very many Tokheim Gear Makers are in use today.  But, I think, they are interesting nonetheless.

Velosteel: My First Coaster Brake In 40 Years

Now I'm going to tell you a little more about the wheel I was building--and Marley was "inspecting."

As you may be able to see, the appendage hanging from the hub is a coaster-brake arm.  (That's the kind of brake you backpedal.)  The wheel I built with it is going on the rescued Trek frame. 

I don't know what possessed me to go and buy the hub--one of two new parts I've bought for the bike--or to decide that it was going on the Trek frame.  After all, I haven't owned a bike with a coaster brake in about 40 years.

At least I know that I will end up with a very simple bike.  In fact, the only way I could make the bike simpler would be to use a fixed-gear wheel in the rear--without brakes, of course.  I had such a bike in my youth, and rode it on the streets.  There's no way I'll do that now!

Anyway, the hub is a Czech-made Velosteel.  From what I understand, the owners of Velosteel purchased the machinery used to produce the classic German Fichtel-Sachs coaster brake hub before SRAM bought out Sachs.  

Three things are immediately noticeable about the Velosteel hub:  the weight (definitely more than a Shimano coaster-brake hub), the shape and structure of the shell, the lush chroming and the way the cog is attached.  

On most coaster brake and internally-geared hubs, the cog is splined, slides onto the hub body and is held in place with a snap ring.   In contrast, the cog screws onto this hub in the same way as a track (fixed-gear) cog.  Another feature this hub has in common with a track hub is the reverse-threaded lockring.  In other words, the cog screws on one way (clockwise) but there is a second set of threads on which the lockring attaches counterclockwise.  This prevents the cog from unscrewing when you backpedal or do a "track stand".  

And, yes, you can use track cogs and lockrings--as long as they're not Campagnolo or Phil Wood. 

While looking at the above photo, I'm thinking of the very first fixed-gear bike I ever had:  a converted Peugeot UO8.  In those days, very few people (at least here in the US) were riding "fixies," and I couldn't find any instructions on how to do such a conversion in any of the books or magazines I owned or borrowed. (Remember, we didn't have the Internet in those days!)  So, I screwed a track cog onto the Normandy hub that came with the bike and tightened a bottom-bracket lockring as hard as I could against the cog.  

I got away with riding it for about a year before I did an unintentional "track stand" while stopping for a light.  Whomp!  I just-as-unintentionally found myself spread over the frame's top tube after the cog unscrewed and my legs imitated those of a collapsible table!

But I digress.  The Velosteel cogs and lockring look to be well-machined, if not as nicely finished as the hub.  Another interesting feature of the hub body is that it's cast as one piece, as the better road and track hubs are.  Most other coaster-brake hubs have flanges that are pressed onto the hub shell.   I once had a rear hub (non-coaster brake) with pressed-on flanges that collapsed into each other.  While this may have been an unusual occurence, I've never heard of such a thing happening to hubs with one-piece shells.  

And one-piece construction makes for a more elegant shape, and allows the nice chrome finishing you see on the Velosteel. 

I built the hub onto a Mavic rim that had previously been laced to another hub and sat in my closet for I-don't-know-how-long.   It has the older grey "hard anodized" finish which, to my knowledge, Mavic no longer uses.  So I had no "mate" to this rim, which is one of the reasons it's been entombed in my closet for so long.

To mate the Mavic rim to the Velosteel hub, I used Phil Wood spokes.  Guy Doss of Elegant Wheels--from whom I bought the hub as well as the spokes--recommends Phils for the Velosteel hub because, like other steel hubs, it has thinner flanges than alloy hubs, so spokes designed for alloy hubs (such as DT and Wheelsmith) won't fit as well.   If you build a steel hub (whether Velosteel, Shimano or an old Sturmey-Archer, SunTour or Sachs three-speed hub) with one of those brands of spokes, you should use spoke washers under the spoke heads.


In time, I'll find out how the hub works and lasts.  For now, I like the look of the wheel and it seems to fit nicely into the old Trek frame.

By the way:  I highly recommend Guy Doss.  He's very helpful and personable, and can also build you a wheel from  a Velosteel hub if you've neither the skills nor the inclination to do it yourself.

N.B.--Apparently, Velosteel offers a coaster-brake hub with a cog that slides on and is held in place with snap ring:  the same configuration most other coaster-brake hubs, and most traditional internally-geared hubs, use.  However, I don't know whether Velosteel's slide-on cogs and snaprings are interchangeable with those of other brands.  At least the "track" configuration I bought can use cogs and lockrings from a number of other manufacturers.

 

 

A Way I've Never Commuted

In my four decades or so of cycling to and from work, school or any other place I had to be on a regular basis, I carried stuff in a variety of ways. 

Most recently, I've used my Koki pannier and Carradice Nelson Longflap saddlebags for the purpose.  At other times, I've stuffed the panniers I used on my previous bike tour with books, manuscripts, student papers, changes of clothing and shoes, lunch or other food and a few things I won't mention.  At other times, I've used backpacks, messenger bags (I was a NYC messenger for a year.), front baskets, milk crates zip-tied (or cinched with old toe straps) on a rear rack and plastic shopping bags tied to my handlebars orframe (or dangled from my fingers),  I've carried everything from baguettes to an Andy Warhol work under my left arm as I steered with my right, and even balanced things on my handlebars or head. I've even carried pizzas in a variety of ways, including balancing i in my raised left hand (a la the Statue of Liberty) while steering with my right, or clamping the corners of the boxes between my thumb and forefinger while grasping my handlebars with the other three fingers of each hand.

But for all of the ingenious (if I do say so myself) and stupid tricks I've employed as a bicycle commuter and messenger, I have nothing on this person:

From Bike Roswell

Assuming A Postition: Scott DH And Cinelli Spinaci

Today, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) is one of those organizations almost nobody loves.  There are plenty of good reasons for that:  The organization is often accused of looking the other way when riders are doping--and taking bribes to do so, and threatening lawsuits against those who accuse it of wrongdoing.  It was, essentially, duped (or so it claims) into violating a country's sovereignty.  And the UCI makes and enforces all sorts of rules that defy logic or reason.

However, there was a time--believe it or not--when the UCI actually made rules that made sense.  One of those occasions came in 1997, when it banned aerobar (a.k.a. "tribar") extensions from competition.

Scott DH bar, circa 1988.  Don't you just love that neon yellow? ;-?

 

You have no doubt seen, and possibly ridden, them.  Originally, they were designed and ridden by triathletes.  They caught on with other racers and wannabes after Greg LeMond rode the final time trial stage of the 1989 Tour de France on a bike equipped with Scott DH bars.  He began that day (23 July)'s stage 50 seconds behind race leader Laurent Fignon.  Rarely does any cyclist--barring a crash or mishap to another--make up so much time on a single stage, let alone the final one, which is usually an individual time trial and is, as often as not, ceremonial rather than consequential.

Greg LeMond on his time trial bike--with Scott DH clip-on aero bars--in the 1989 Tour de France.

When it was over, LeMond--whose 1986 Tour victory was the first by an American--left Fignon in second place, 8 seconds behind in the overall classifications.  That was, and remains, the smallest margin of victory by any overall Tour winner. 

Until then, the jury was out on aerobars.  But a lot of cyclists looked at that result--an 8 second lead over a three-week-long race!--and thought that if the aerobars weren't the reason, then maybe, just maybe...

Sales of Scott DHs took off.   The "forward" position mimicked the "tuck" of a downhill skier, which is where the "DH" came from.  (Before they started making aerobars, Scott was a ski-equipment company.)  At that time, a lot of road bikers were taking up mountain biking, some in the form that would later come to be known as "downhill".  That, I believe, accounted for at least some of the popularity of Scott DHs with wannabes.  And, at that time, some cyclists who'd started off as mountain riders were "discovering" road cycling.  And those triathloners who hadn't adopted aerobars up to that time couldn't wait to get them.


The popularity of those bars, naturally, spawned imitators and tweaks.  Some, like Profile, were made by companies that had never before made bike components.  And most of the handlebar manufacturers of that time got in on the action.



Cinelli Spinaci, circa 1990.

One of the best-known of that new breed of bars was the Cinelli Spinaci.  Its forward reach wasn't quite as far as that of the DH.  So, while it wasn't quite as aerodynamic as the DH, it allowed the rider to assume a position more aerodynamic than the normal road-riding position for longer periods of time.   Also, the Spinaci could be set up in a greater variety of positions.  That latter quality also was one of its downfalls.

The ideal position, or at least the one recommended by Cinelli, set the clamps at 45 degrees and the bars parallel to the ground.  But some riders tilted their Spinacis to the "wheel licker" position in the mistaken belief that being in a below-horizontal position made you more aerodynamic.  Others rode them with the bars tilted so that the end were almost in a direct line with the rider's face.  That position was about as aerodynamic as a boulder.

How do I know so much about the Spinaci? All right, I'll make a confession that might cause some of you purists to lose respect for me:  I used it.  I like to think I was young enough to consider it now as a youthful folly.  Although I knew that the bars would wreak havoc with the aesthetics of my Colnago, I rationalized installing the Spinaci because, well, it was Italian--because it was Cinelli, the same brand as the handlebars to which I was clamping it.

I didn't ride them for very long, though.  As I have  mentioned, there was no benefit in tilting them upward or downward.  And even though riding them in the horizontal position was relatively comfortable (especially with the arm rests), I didn't spend much time riding that way.  So, after acquiring them in the spring, I had little trouble selling them in the summer, as they were at the peak of their popularity.

The biggest drawback, though of Spinacis, DHs or any other aerobar lies in using them while riding them in a peloton or any other kind of group or pack.  When you're riding on the extensions, your hands are nowhere near your brake levers.  On traditional road bars, if you're riding in the drops, you can move your hands to the levers relatively quickly, usually enough to avoid a crash or lessen its impact.  The real danger, though, is not just in one rider using it.  As the UCI folk realized, in one of their rare moments of anything resembling clarity or magmamnity, if a hundred riders are using them and one of them goes down, or there is any other emergency, the result could be, essentially, a race that ends by attrition.

Now, having said all of that, I am not trying to dismiss aerobars.  I never cared for the aesthetic, but I can understand why some riders, especially time trialists, would like them.  The UCI, in one of its increasingly-rare instances of clear thinking, realized that there are some situations in which those bars shouldn't be used, and banned them for that reason.
 

What Were They Riding From?

 

Some elite racers continue to ride after retiring from competition.  Then there others—like Jacques Anquetil, the first five-time winner of the Tour de France—all but stopped cycling. From the time he retired in 1969 until his death in 1987, he mounted his bike only three times. “I have done enough cycling,” he declared.

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.

The Flash Hub Is Gone--Or Perhaps It Never Came!

What is this?

No, it's not a vintage Campagnolo Record front hub retrofitted for disc brakes. (Oh, perish the thought!)  Instead, it's something I mentioned in an earlier post:

It's none other than the Cinelli Bivalent.  It may be the only hub in history that was designed to be used either on the front (as shown in the first photo) or the rear. 

The toothed wheel served no purpose on the front. On the rear, however, the gear cluster or cassette fit onto it.  This was supposed to make wheel removal and installation easier.  From what accounts I've heard and read, it seems to have fulfilled that purpose.

Being a Cinelli item, the quality was most likely excellent.  (Some have claimed that Campagnolo made the hubs for Cinelli.) When the system was introduced during the early 1960's, the hub had a three-piece shell, like most hubs of that time.  A few years later, Cinelli started to offer hubs with single-piece alloy shells.

Although it seems that those who tried the Bivalent liked it, the system never caught on.  The reason usually given is that racers didn't want to use it because if they had to replace a rear wheel, a support van or truck probably wouldn't have another on hand, and the threaded hubs (like Campagnolo's) almost everybody--including all racers--used at the time wouldn't work with it. 

(That, by the way, is also one of the reasons why Campagnolo Record (as well as Nuovo and Super Record) dominated the peloton for so long:  Everyone wanted equipment that was compatible with everyone else's.)

As I mentioned in my earlier post, during the ensuing two decades between the introduction of Bivalent and Shimano's Freehub system (the prototype of every cassette hub made today), there were other attempts to make something more convenient, versatile or stronger than the traditional threaded hub and screw-on freewheel--especially since manufacturers were adding more gears to bikes.  

One of those attempts was SunTour's UnitHub of 1969.  Like today's cassette hubs, it combined the gear carrier and hub into one unit.  From what few accounts I could find, it worked well and was sturdy. However, the public wasn't ready for it--just as it wasn't able to receive another SunTour debutante from that year, the Five-Speed Click indexed derailleur system.

A decade later, Maillard introduced their "Helicomatic" hub, featuring a bayonet-style mounting onto which a gear cluster mounted.  The idea was great (better, I believe, than the Freehub system or any of its descendants), but it was poorly-executed and thus prone to breakdowns.  Shimano brought out its Freehub around the same time and, as the saying goes, the rest is history.

But there was, apparently, an attempt to resurrect the idea of the Bivalent.  A company I had never heard of until I encountered it on Michael Sweatman's Disraeligears site made it--or, at least, made plans for it.  No one seems to know for sure whether any of those hubs were actually made.

The company, EGS, was based in France.  It made one of the most elegant or extravagant, depending on your point of view, and certainly most futuristic derailleurs ever created:  the UpCage.   In essence, it was a classic SunTour derailleur with its pulley cage mounted horizontally and a tensioning arm between the body and the pulley cage.  They weren't in production for very long, even though they were much loved by French downhill racers.

EGS UpCage.  From Disraeligears

Apparently, ESG had big plans:  its website--still up even though the company went belly-up in 2000--shows plans for a "Syncro-Shift" twist-grip control that operated both the front and rear derailleurs.  (Whenever I see any form of the word "Syncro" in a bicycle or component's name, I turn and ride as far and fast as I can from it!)  Also on EGS's drawing board were a brake system and something they called the "Flash Hub."

From the EGS website

ESG's website says the Flash Hub was to consist of a two-part hub, a fixed cassette mount and a moveable wheel mount.  The cassete mount unit was made to stay fixed to the frame's rear fork end.  I can't help but to notice their use of the term "fork end", which just may be a matter of translatation. Still, it leads me to wonder whether it would have worked with vertical dropouts.  No matter:  This system, according to ESG, would make it "child's play" to change the rear wheel.

There is no mention that the hub could be used on the front, so I imagine it wouldn't be possible.  To be fair, when Cinelli came out with the Bivalent hub, many frames made for derailleurs still had 110 mm spacing in the rear, as most freewheels still had no more than four gears.  Most road bikes then, as now, had 100mm spacing in the front fork.  So it probably was easier to make a hub that fit both front and rear than it would be to make such a hub now, when rear spacing is typically 130 or 135mm, and could grow if twelve or more gears and disc brakes become standard equipment.

Still, I have to wonder whether those guys at ESG--who, it seems, were downhill racers or had the attendant mentality-- knew about the Bivalent hub. 

N.B.:  Cinelli Bivalent photos were taken by Al Varick and appear on Classic Rendezvous.
 

Bridges to Deja Vu

There are at least a couple of different ways in which you can experience deja vu during a bike ride.


The most common way, of course, is to see familiar sights during along a route you've ridden before.  More often than not, that is a pleasant or at least agreeable situation.  After all, you wouldn't be doing the ride again if you don't get some kind of pleasure from it.


Then there is what I will call, for lack of a better term, situational deja vu.  Any number of situations or other experiences can repeat themselves during a ride. Among them are weather, road conditions, fatigue, exhiliaration or some emotion or another that you're dealing with.


Yet another kind of deja vu is, paradoxically, the most ephemeral yet the one that affects us most deeply.  It's the one in which we recall feelings or memories which may have come to us on rides very different from the one we're on at the moment.  Or we have expereinced those emotions during rides we did much earlier in our lives, or in places very different from the one in which we happen to be riding.


There are other ways, I'm sure, in which we can experience deja vu during a bike ride.  I've just mentioned three I could think of at this moment.  They also happen to be the ways in which I experienced deja vu on today's ride.


Although this is my first visit to, and therefore my first bike ride in, Florida in two years, every inch of today's ride was at least somewhat familiar to me.  I had previously ridden every crack and grain of sand my tires tread, though not necessarily in the sequence in which I rode them today.  But it seemed that the flow of sense memories was all but seamless.


It began when I crossed the bridge from Palm Coast Parkway to Route A1A:

Hannibal is said to have shouted "Excelsior!" after conquering the Alps.  Whatever he was feeling, it has nothing on the sensation I experience as I reach the apex of a bridge that connects the mainland to a strip of land along the sea.  At such moments, I feel as if I'm exhaling for the first time, whether the bridge is the one I crossed today, the one that connects Broad Channel to Rockaway Beach, the one I crossed over the estuary of the Dordogne river to the coast near Bordeaux or the one from Highlands to Sandy Hook in New Jersey. 


It was over that last bridge that I took my first long rides during my early teen years.


And that bridge led, like the one I crossed today, led to a spit of land that stands, almost defiantly, between the ocean and another body of water.  When you ride along Route 36 from Sandy Hook to Long Branch, the ocean is never more than two hundred feet to your left and the Shrewsbury River is no further than that to your right.  When you ride A1A from Palm Coast to Flagler Beach, the dunes of Painters Hill (such an apt name!) and Beverly Beach are practically at arm's length on your left, and you're separated by no more than the width of a grove or mobile-home "campground" from the Florida Intercoastal Waterway.


Even though this is Florida, I'll admit that today's ride is more beautiful than the ones in New Jersey or to Rockaway Beach.  But in the end, I enjoy it--and, more important, it matters to me for the same reasons as those rides, and the one in the southwest of France.  They all are bridges to deja vu.

Driven By Double The Hate

A White guy knocks down a Black man, spits on him and calls him a racial epithet. 

I think that most people would agree that it sounds like the outline of, if not a hate crime, then at least a hate-fueled act of aggression.

Now, put the Black man on a bicycle and the White guy behind the wheel of a pickup truck.  Oh, and the White guy knocks the Black man down by reaching out and grabbing the Black man's arm while he's riding his bike.  And, for "good" measure, when the Black man pulls himself off his bike, the White guy drives his pickup truck over it.

I think most people would still agree that it's a hate crime.  So would I, but I would say that it's a hate crime on more than one level.

In saying what I have said, and what I'm about to say, I do not mean to minimize the hostility and worse too many people face for no other reason than the color of their skin.  But, even if that White pickup driver hadn't yelled a racial epithet, I would still classify his act as a hate crime, or at least a hate-motivated act of aggression.

Well, for one thing, much of the intentional aggression drivers commit against cyclist is fueled by hatred, or at least resentment:  We are often accused of "taking up space" on the road when a person on a bike doesn't even occupy a tenth of the real estate or air space a car, let alone a pickup truck (which, too often, is carrying nothing but its driver) fills.  Also, cycling--like almost every other act--has taken on political undertones in this polarized environment:  We are seen as avatars of environmental consciousness and sustainability and, therefore, a threat to the fossil-fueled economic and social structure.

From Bike Cleveland

That is why the incident I mentioned, which took place in Palo Alto, California last week, is, to my mind, a hate crime on two levels: While the driver verbalized his hatred of someone with darker skin than his, it's impossible (for me, anyway) to see how someone who's armored with a three-ton steel shell is acting out of anything but hate if he (or she or they, let's be fair) deliberately attacks a cyclist.

So, while I hope that driver gets the punishment he richly deserves for attacking someone who is of another race, I wish he could also be charged with acting out of the hate that motivates any act of--let's call this what it is--bullying.