What Did You Do In Your Youth?

My first multiday bike tour took me from New Brunswick, NJ (where I was attending university) into the Poconos.  From there, I rode down to Island Beach where, more than three decades later, Superstorm Sandy would blow a Ferris wheel into the ocean.  Then I pedaled gingerly up the Jersey shore back to New Brunswick. 

All told, I spent a week on the road.  For two days, I wandered the Poconos, and I spent a day hanging out at Island Beach where I slept on the beach and, surprisingly (in retrospect) nobody chased me.  Sometimes you get away with stuff like that when you're twenty years old and, in the eyes of the world, male.

That ride was one of the few things I'd done up to that point in my life that impressed anybody.  As a friend of my mother's said, on that ride, I pedaled more miles than most people ever pedal.  She was being a bit hyperbolic, but I understood what she meant.

I was not impressed with myself because the ride was actually a bit easier than I expected it to be.  (Don't forget, I was twenty years old and full of testosterone!)  In fact, I castigated myself afterward because, even though riding wasn't difficult, I brought far more stuff with me than I needed.  Now it seems comical, especially since, in my memory of that ride, I hauled even more than this guy:

 

He spent 28 days on the road.  Actually, I use the word "road" loosely, as Edward "Ryko" Reichenbach's journey from Adelaide to Darwin took him through the Australian outback.  He tramped through sand, waded swamps and dodged all manner of obstacles.  In contrast, the most remote rural roads I rode were paved and never more than an hour's ride from a store or some form of habitation.



The time Ryko took to complete his 1914 ride was a record that stood for quite a while.  And being the keen photographer he was, he left a rich visual chronology of his adventure.

 

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!

Monday Funnies

I know that most bloggers save their "funnies" for Friday or Saturday.  But I imagine that some of you can use a laugh or two on Monday, today.  And the weather has been dismal:  Not enough snow to create a winter wonderland, but enough to turn into a glacier of soot when the temperature drops at night.  And subsequent layers of rain, sleet, snow and freezing rain encase ever-more of this city's detritus in ice.   Hopefully, they won't remain for as long as a beetle found encased in amber.

Anyway, I thought I could pick up your spirits (or, at least, mine) with some photos from the wall of I Love Cycling.

I've outrun an animal or two in my time. But I never had to keep one step (or tire-tread) away from a mad cow:

I imagine the bike needed to be cleaned after that.  Maybe this isn't the best way to go about it:

Nor is this:

After showering, you can change into something more comfortable:

I couldn't help but to think about the joke I played on Stella Buckwalter, who worked in a few NYC bike shops and owned one--Rock'N'Road in Park Slope, Brooklyn.  She had just bought a new bike, on which she installed a pair of SPD pedals.  

I found a pair of stiletto heels in her favorite color, orange, in a thrift shop.  I drilled the soles of those shoes to accept SPD cleats.

Now, of course, she never could have walked, and probably would have had a hard time riding, in those shoes.  They weren't even the right size! (I figured as much when I bought them.)  But, hey, for a dollar, I got more than my money's worth in laughs--both mine and hers.

And like any woman in New York, she complained of never having enough closet space.  I can certainly relate to that!


 

A Steady Chain Of Events In Cycling: From Sedis To SRAM

I'm running SRAM chains on all of my bikes.

That's what I've done for about the past thirty-five years or so.  You might say it's one of my few brand loyalties (along with Mavic rims, Brooks saddles and, yes, Mercian bikes) in cycling.

In a sense, though, my use of SRAM chains isn't a brand loyalty.  You see, when I first started riding with them, SRAM didn't exist.  How's that, you say?

Well, back in the '70's, before Campagnolo, Shimano and SRAM became the main suppliers of quality bicycle components, there were many more independent manufacturers than there are now.  Most of them were relatively small, owned by the families that founded them.  Some, like Brooks and Mavic, survive today, though under the umbrella of larger companies.  However, many--like SunTour and Lyotard, which I mentioned in earlier posts--folded because of mis-steps (SunTour with its indexed shifting system) or simply not updating their products (Lyotard and many other European companies).  Others were bought out by larger companies and saw their venerable names relegated to the tire tracks of history.

One such component-maker was Sedis.  Actually, they made one category of bike parts:  chains.  Nearly all French bikes came with them. They also were common on machines from England and other European countries, as well as Schwinns.  Also, Sedis chains were commonly purchased as replacements, sometimes for chains that hadn't worn out.  I'll explain that in a moment.

Sedis chains were popular mainly for the same reasons as SunTour drive train components and Lyotard pedals:  They worked well and were well-made and reasonably-priced.  Those attributes were most apparent in what might be the most iconic product Sedis ever produced:  the Sedisport chain.

Until Shimano came out with the Uniglide in 1977, nearly all chains had flat side plates.  Shimano designed this chain, with its bulged outer plates, to work with the twisted-tooth sprockets made for their then-new cassette freehubs.  (Until 1985 or so, Shimano also offered thread-on freewheels with twisted-tooth cogs.)  Around the same time, SunTour developed its "Ultra-six" freewheel, which fit six sprockets in the same amount of space as the five rear sprockets that were standard at the time. Sun Tour also marketed a chain, made for them by HKK, with narrower outer plates and pins flush with them. All bike chains up to that time, including the Uniglide, had pins that protruded slightly from the side-plates.

The Uniglide and HKK/SunTour chains shared a problem all Japanese derailleur chains  had in those days:  They stretched and wore very quickly.  And the Uniglide was one of the noisiest chains ever made:  Comparisons were made with Harleys and trucks.

In 1978, Maillard (which would later share Sedis' fate) made its own version of the Ultra-Six freewheel.  The Sedisport was created to work with it.  Originally, the chains were available only in a traditional black finish, but gold and silver versions would become available. 

The Original Sedisport Chain, 1978

The basic black version could be had for about $5-6, the same price as just about any entry-level derailleur chain.  The gold and silver versions were, naturally, a few dollars more.  They were among the greatest bargains in the history of cycle componentry.  

When you took a Sedisport out of its packet (for the black version) or box (gold or silver), it seemed almost floppy, especially to someone accustomed to a Regina Oro chain.  That was a function, not only of its narrower side plates and flush pins, but also of its most revolutionary design features:  slightly flared inner plates (as opposed to the bulged outer plates of the Uniglide) and, most important, its bushing-less pivots.

Those features made the Sedisport both stronger and lighter than any of the other chains I've mentioned.  And, the fact that it had fewer moving parts meant that it didn't need to be cleaned and lubed as often, and didn't jam or develop stiff links.  And, best of all, it shifted even better than any of those other chains--yes, even on SunTour's Ultra-Six or Shimano's Uniglide sprockets.  And on Regina freewheels.

Sedisport with gold finish.

As a result, nearly anybody riding any derailleur-equipped bicycle of anything more than department-store quality had a Sedisport chain.   It's what I rode on my Colnago; I knew other riders who installed it on bikes equipped entirely with Campagnolo Super Record equipment.  Up to that time, the custom was to team up a Regina Oro freewheel and chain with a Record or Super Record gruppo, as Campagnolo did not make freewheels or chains.  But Oros cost about three times as much as Sedisports and didn't last as long or shift as well.  Regina developed its own Ultra Six freewheel (They had a standard six-speed, which was wider than the five-speed) but their quality was slipping.  So, many racers and other performance-oriented riders switched to SunTour Winner freewheels along with Sedisport chains even as they continued to ride with Campagnolo cranks and derailleurs.

Every new model of derailleur chain made since the Sedisport--whether for seven, eight, nine, ten or eleven speeds--has been made without bushings, and with curved or flared inner plates and pins that are flush with the outer plates.  Among those modern chains are today's SRAM chains.

That last fact makes perfect sense when you realize that SRAM chains are Sedis chains.   In the early 1980s, Sedis's bicycle chain division, along with Maillard (which made freewheels, hubs and pedals bearing the Normandy and Atom as well as Maillard brands) and Huret were purchased by Sachs, a German maker of coaster brakes, multigear hubs and components for mopeds and motorbikes.  Through most of the 1980's, the chains were sold under the Sachs/Sedis marque.  Then, in 1996, Sachs became part of the SRAM group.  In the beginning, SRAM components were made in the original French factories that produced Sedis, Maillard and Huret stuff.  But in the early 2000s, most production shifted to Taiwan.  However, SRAM chains have been made in Portugal.  

Through all of these changes, SRAM chains retained the qualities that got me (and so many other people) to ride Sedis chains so many years ago.  I've tried Shimano (as well as other chains) on my Shimano cassettes and Rohloff as well as Wipperman chains on Campy stuff.  SRAM chains always worked better and lasted longer--and were usually less expensive to boot.

Interestingly, the Sedis name survived the buyouts. It currently manufactures chains for industrial purposes in Troyes, where Lancelot was born, if you will.   They first started making chains in 1895, when they were part of Peugeot. (Most people outside the Francophone world don't realize that Peugeot is a large, 200-year-old, industrial company that makes everything from peppermills to trucks.)  At that time, Peugeot manufactured in Isere.  In 1946, the chain division merged with two other chain manufacturers, Societe Verjoux of the Doubs region and Societe des Chains Darbilly in the Seine region.  The name SEDIS is an acronym of SEine, Doubs and ISere.  They continue to use the logo familiar to so many of us.

 

Eating Right During The Ride

I'm trying to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables and to season them with fresh herbs--especially when I'm riding.

When I was younger, I used to feel as if I could eat or drink damn near anything during and after a long ride.  Truth was, I could:  I am still amazed at how often I ate rich, fatty foods, how much pasta and bread I scarfed down and how unhealthy some of what I ate was (PopTarts, anyone?) yet lost--or, at least, didn't gain--weight.

But I'm going to be good--or, at least, try to do better.  I'm going to pack fruit and nuts in my Brevet bag if I'm doing rides of more than a couple of hours, and one or the other if I'm going to be out for a shorter ride.  

If I want fresh herbs or wheat grass to go with my other snacks, I could always grow them:

Hmm... Mini-planters on a bicycle?  What will they think of next?

Can You Top This?

For a few years, I was a fairly dedicated mountain biker.  I still preferred road biking, on the whole, but I used to enjoy going riding over rocks and through creeks, especially when accompanied by a "crew".

But I never did anything like the ride Danny Macaskill does in his native Isle of Skye, Scotland:

What Happened To Lyotard, SunTour And All Of Those Other Little Companies That Made Nice, Practical Stuff?

The posts I wrote about Lyotard pedals and clipless pedal designs that have come and gone got me to thinking about a way in which the bicycle world has changed during my nearly four decades as a dedicated rider.

I first started to take longer rides and made some commitment to training during the later part of the '70's Bike Boom.  At that time, about the only bike makers (at least, those with any pretentions of quality) most Americans heard of were Schwinn and Raleigh.  As big as those companies were, to call either of them the General Motors of cycling would have been preposterous:  Schwinn's sales peaked at 1.5 million bikes in 1974, about the same number of cars from just one division of GM--Oldsmobile--that were sold in the same year.  And, of course, the sale of a car generates a far more revenue than the sale of a bike.

Other bicycle and component manufacturers--like Lyotard--were far smaller in scale.  They usually made their products for local markets:  Relatively few bike makers sold their wares much beyond the region, let alone the nation, in which they manufactured.  Most, especially in Europe and Japan, were still owned and operated by members of the families that founded them.  In fact, a few founders were still alive at that time.



What that meant was that most Americans had never heard of them.  Perhaps even more to the point, it meant that even though there was a wide network of races, tours and other bike-related events, they were much smaller in terms of both participation and money than today's events.   So, it didn't take as much money to sponsor a team or rider as it does (both in absolute and relative terms) today.  Small and medium-sized bike companies as well as businesses in other industries (think of Molteni) could get in on the action.  

It also meant that bike and component makers, like other small businesses, were risk-averse.  What I didn't realize when I started riding was that the designs for most bikes and parts (one notable exception being SunTour derailleurs and shifters) available at that time were already decades old.  Some actually worked well and were durable; if you used them, you learned to put up with their idiosyncracies or shortcomings.  Then again, if you hadn't used anything else, you didn't think they were idiosyncracies and shortcomings.

Most of the Lyotard pedals were examples of what I'm talking about. Now, I don't think they were deficient, but I don't think Lyotard had come out with a new pedal design since World War II, or not much later.  Even the Campagnolo Nuovo/Super Record parts were really just refinements of the Gran Sport products that made their first appearance during the early 1950's.



Around the mid-1980s, things started to change.  It might be fair to say that the ground shifted with Tullio Campagnolo's death in 1983.  His heirs discontinued the Nuovo and Super Record stuff Eddy Mercx, Bernard Hinault and others rode to victory.  In their stead came C-Record (actually, Record-Corsa or Record-C) parts.  Some, I'll admit, were quite lovely.  But none of them was really a functional improvement over its predecessors; in fact, some parts, like the "Delta" brake, were clearly not as good.

Other companies started to "innovate"--or, more precisely, create new novelties.  Designs became--or, at least looked--more and more radical every year.  To be fair, some new designs had legitimate purposes, at least for certain riders.  But too much of what was coming on the market every year was mere gadgetry:  stuff for the sorts of people who felt they simply had to have the newest and latest in everything.

In other words, the world of cycling was shifting from one that was guided by cyclists and riding to one driven by consumers and the marketplace.  That, in turn, turned the bike industry from a mosaic of relatively small companies to a pie cut into a few large slices by bigger companies.  Smaller companies, which didn't have the money or other resources to devote to research and development (or, very often, didn't see the need for such things) simply couldn't compete.  They, like SunTour and Lyotard, fell by the wayside or, like Sedis, Wolber and Super Champion, were absorbed by larger corporations, some of which had no previous involvement in the bicycle industry.  Even Mavic was bought by Salomon, which in turn was taken over by Adidas.  It could be argued that these turns of events enabled Mavic to develop the innovative (There's that word again!) rims and wheels that allowed it to retain its leading role in the 1990s and well into the 2000s.

Part of the pressure to create new things (or simply repackage old ones) also came from the ways in which the world of cycling events was changing during the 1980's.  By the time Greg LeMond won his first Tour de France, companies like Molteni (or mid-sized bicycle makers) were no longer sponsoring teams.  Corporations with much larger budgets were taking that on, and race sponsors included the likes of Coca-Cola and Nike.





Naturally, when companies put up money for riders and teams, they want a return on their investment.  So, the stakes became higher.  One benefit, at least for elite cyclists, was that the amount of prize money grew and the sport gained greater exposure outside of its traditional strongholds.  A downside was that it became more difficult for teams and riders with little or no money to compete, and smaller races and rallies became even smaller or disappeared altogether.


So, while 90 percent of the 1970s peloton were riding Reynolds or Columbus-tubed frames with Campagnolo components--all of which had been developed decades earlier--riders by the late '80s were astride newly-developed (and far more expensive) bikes with never-before-seen frame configurations and aerodynamic components made from exotic materials.  

It's easy to understand why racing-team sponsors would want their riders on the newest and most innovative equipment.  A race that takes hours or days but won by seconds (or fractions thereof) could well be decided by those extra few grams off the wheels or a frame or other part that's more aerodynamic.  And, as in any professional sport, there is really not as much difference as one might expect between the best and the rest of the peloton as there is between anyone who's in the peloton and anyone who isn't.  




That point is lost on club riders with lots of money and vivid fantasies.  They want to ride whatever's being ridden in the peloton.  If they didn't have such equipment, they seem to believe, younger and better-conditioned riders will make them look like the out-of-shape and not-so-young riders they actually were. Of course, those young and poor riders either get better or get better equipment, and the riders with bigger wallets and stomachs (I should talk, right?) want "better" equipment.

And so the world and industry went from being, essentially, a village of mom-and-pop enterprises that responded to cyclists' needs to an economy increasingly dominated by corporations that profit from anxieties they create in consumers.