It's All About the Bike by Robert Penn

duller than lawn bowling. In Europe, massed-start rides were much more popular. Races entailed breakaways and sprint finishes, chases and crashes, suffering and solidarity, tactics and alliances, co-operation and competition, vanity and honour. Massed-start road racing is underpinned by the unwritten etiquette of the peloton, something so complex that not even a Victorian Englishman could codify it into a booklet of rules. As the French say of cycle racing:
Courir c’est mourir unpeu
(‘To race is to die a little’).
    Bidlake, a racing cyclist himself and later an administrator at the heart of British cycling, described the Continental style of massed-start racing as a ‘superfluous excrescence’. He protested too much, perhaps. The truth is that cycling in Britain never had the backing of the establishment. Time-trialling was a way to use the roads for sport without attracting too much attention.
    The glittering, lightweight and innovative componentry, the stylish attire and the cyclists with film-star good looks who came out of Italy were like rays of dazzling light in post-war Britain.Even the colours the Italians painted their bicycles — pearlescent white, yellow, pink, the ‘heavenly blue’ of Bianchi, said to be the colour of the queen of Italy’s eyes — filled the minds of English yeomen with wonder.

    The British thought they owned the bicycle. From the day that James Starley patented his Ariel bicycle in 1870 to the mid-1950s, they effectively did (UK output was 3.5 million bicycles in 1955). But you can’t own the most popular form of transport in history for ever and the rapid rise in car ownership in the late 1950s meant British cultural perceptions of the bicycle were changing. It was no longer principally a form of transportation. There was now room for new meanings: it could be a toy, as it largely was in America, or an object of desire as it was among the racing-mad Continentals.
    â€˜Why not both?’ Antonio said, when I asked him about this. ‘You have some bicycles that you ride and you have some bicycles on the wall of your house as art, no? Eric Clapton does.’
    We’d reached the far end of the factory. In a workshop, mechanics were building up Cinelli bikes, ready to be boxed and sent around the world. Antonio began plucking frames from hooks above his head and components off the workbenches: a‘Vigorelli’ track frame, ‘named after the great Milanese velodrome known as the “magical ellipse” . . . we sell a lot of these today,’ Antonio said; a set of ‘Spinaci’ bar extensions for racing bikes — ‘Spinach gives strength, yes? We were selling 500,000 of these a year when the UCI changed the rules and banned them’; a water bottle with a mint fragrance — ‘Smells better than plastic, yes?’ There were frame models named after electric guitars and components named after rock bands. I could see Antonio’s passion for the bicycle glittering in all these details.
    He was most animated when talking about the urban fixed-wheel scene: ‘It began in the people’s garages. That’s important,’ he said.
    It’s not a fashion. It’s an attitude. Never has there been such a big crowd of young people studying the heritage of cycling in order to play with the bicycle. They know the history of a particular frame-builder or maybe development of a component. They recognize the car is tired and they’ve linked the bicycle to real life. They put their personality in it. And they are utilizing high-quality products. We are grateful to cycle messengers. They were the first to live on the bicycle and create a simple, effective, durable machine. This is forcing manufacturers to make better and better bicycles. It means there’s more variety in bicycles. The fixed-wheel movement is connected to the rebirth of the bicycle, sure.
    Antonio was off now. He began to leap through