Michael Hutchinson

I was at the launch of David Harmon and Jeremy Hasting’s tandem team last week. They’re planning to go and break a few of the British place-to-place records – Liverpool to Edinburgh. Pembroke to Great Yarmouth (that’s the ‘side-to-side’ record, for those who find the more traditional end-to-end a bit too vertical).

I like this. This is old-style British bike riding. Place-to-place record setting was what high-spirited young chaps turned to in the 1890s when bicycle racing on the road was banned because it literally scared the horses. Record breaking dodged the ban, because it involved only one rider at a time. (Time trialling over fixed distances developed from this, and went on to be the mainstay of British racing for most of the 20^th Century.)

The place-to-place idea is older than that though. Very early in the days of the bicycle – moments, in fact, after it had occurred to someone in the 1860s to put pedals on a ‘dandy-horse’ – the same variety of young chap devoted considerable efforts to racing mail coaches about the place. This had a professional edge. The aim was to demonstrate that the bicycle was a viable means of transport, and as fast as the state-of-the-art road-going coach. Think of it as solar-powered car racing for the 19^th Century. Whoever could convince the public he made the fastest bicycle was likely to get rich. Fellows with big legs and the ability to pace an effort evenly were much in demand. I truly missed my calling by 135 years.

But what the tandem plan really brings home is the change in the roads since mass car ownership in the 1950s. The queen of place-to-place records used to be London to Brighton and back – a bit over 100 miles. From Hyde Park Corner, down and up the A23, back to Hyde Park Corner. That’s not a mission you’d volunteer for lightly these days. The current record was set in 1977, and I can see why attempts are not common.

As if to underline this, at the launch I came across a photo of two cyclists on the Great North Road in, judging by their bikes, about 1900. The Great North Road, of course, became the A1 trunk route. In 1900, it looked like a farm track. If my driveway looked like that, I’d get it sorted out. I appreciate the difficulties of riding on that kind of thing, but the peace and quiet must have been nice.

On the other hand, there are also plenty of contemporary accounts of cyclists being the victims of aggression from coachmen. It’s nice to know that some things haven’t changed.

I’ve had the good fortune to have a cold to coincide with the freezing weather of the last few days – which is a bit of a result as a cyclist, because it’s two inconveniences that I can get through at the same time.

It’s given me lots of spare time time to contemplate the launch of Team Sky, Colonel Tom Brialsford’s latest swing at world domination. I’ve always been a bit sceptical of Sky’s involvement – I’m not a fan of the Murdoch empire and its often rather ruthless approach – but I’ve learned better than to express doubts too forcefully. The consensus among cycling fans seems to be that Sky loves cycling and is involved for purely altruistic reasons, and will never, ever dream of moving on if cycling falls from its current celebrated position in the UK. I’m sure this is right.

No, the thing that really struck me this week is that in just a little over ten years, from almost a standing start, British Cycling has used Lottery funding to create an almost instant elite sport. The mid 1990s was, so we thought at the time, a golden age for British riding – we had Chris Boardman, who won a couple of world titles and an Olympic gold, and Graeme Obree, who won a couple of world titles. They both broke the hour record. That was more or less it. There was no real depth of talent; everything depended on a handful of individuals. The number of serious British pros could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Then Pete Keen and subsequently Dave Brailsford devised and ran a system that rapidly became a factory for elite cyclists. There are now dozens of British pros in various teams here and abroad. This has been created from almost nothing. It many ways it has bypassed domestic racing as a means of finding the best talent. It can afford to run its own in-house selections using carefully picked events, some here, some abroad, in a whole parallel cycling world. It’s efficient, but it’s made it hard for someone who’s not been on the squad from a young age to break into it. I’m tempted to say it’s, well, ruthless, but that would be to miss the point – that it has been hugely successful at doing what it was supposed to do, and that’s win medals. Bear in mind that several other sports got the same kind of Lottery funding, and didn’t manage to capitalise on it.

The downside to all this is that it’s inevitably taken a lot of the interest away from domestic racing. Bike racing in the UK is becoming more about watching than it is about doing. I’d hate it to get to the position of some of the rest of Europe, where racing is for juniors and under 23s, and everyone else does long-distance sportive rides. That would be a real pity, and an ironic consequence of all that racing success.

It’s cycling-safety study time again. This time, research from the University of Surrey has concluded that cycling is more dangerous than driving. All the studies conclude this, so I suppose it must be true.

This one just tots up the total hospital admissions for injuries sustained from cycling on the public road, so it has the merit of simplicity. There are some curiosities – many more injuries in summer (more people cycling), but a much smaller proportion of serious injuries. And, not unrelated I suspect, a smaller proportion of injuries resulting from collision with a car.

I’m guessing this is simply because a higher proportion of winter cyclists are commuters, who are probably using busier roads because, especially in London, trying to stick to the back streets means taking forever to get where you’re going. All the one-way systems designed to stop cars from making rapid progress that way stop cyclists just as effectively.

There is also some stuff about how injuries rates are vastly higher here than they are in the Netherlands or Denmark. This is more interesting, since the Danish model is the one that we keep hearing about. The problem, as far as I can see, is that Copenhagen (or Amsterdam) is very different from most British cities. It’s more compact, and the population is much more centralised. Most bike journeys are therefore short. In London especially, most trips are longer, so riders want to go much faster, which is why sales of fast commuting bikes are high, and why those crappy little shared bike-pedestrian paths are useless. They’re designed for pottering, not commuting.

I was originally booked to talk about this on Radio 4 last night, and got pulled at the last minute. But I got to hear the transport minister Paul Clarke explaining how much money they’re spending on bike lanes and the like.

You need to spend money wisely for it to help. I have only very rarely seen a bike facility that I thought was designed by a cyclist. Everyone who rides in London knows, or ought to know, that the one golden rule is never, never ride up the inside of stationary traffic coming up to lights. Never. Yet that’s exactly what the bike markings at most junctions require you to do. Obeying the current markings places you in danger. And that’s what they’re spending money on.

The other thing he said was that the government was spending money on training young cyclists – which is nice, but for the most part, injuries aren’t caused by bad cycling, but by bad driving. The dangers that cyclists are exposed to are not their fault – despite the efforts of the government to claim they are.

I’d rather they spent money on training drivers – like the ass who nearly flattened me yesterday, because apparently no on had ever told him not to overtake round a blind bend in a busy village. Improving the quality of driving would do more for cyclist safety than any number of bike lanes and ‘cyclists dismount’ signs. But I don’t suppose we’re going to see any such thing.

Given my distinctly patchy record on updating my blog (OK, it isn’t patchy, it’s just bad), I thought I ought to offer an explanation, and apologise to the three people who I know still occasionally check in and find nothing new.

The problem is this: wide, open spaces make me panic.

A lot of my writing, the stuff I get paid for, is constrained. It’s a book about a particular topic, or it’s a column for a cycling magazine. When I sit down I know that I’ve got to come up with something on, for example, cycling. It’s limiting. I can’t write about the pleasure I derive from my three-year feud with the over-privileged trustafarian bastards in the flat downstairs, or my heel-clicking delight at discovering my favourite lamp-shop is having a clearance sale (I have a lamp fetish — see pictures of my favourite lamp here). Not unless I can somehow bend it all back round to bike riding.

Sometimes I do manage to stray quite far from the heartlands of how to clean your chain. In the last year my cycling writing has covered French canals, wet rot in my windows, the vagaries of the average Welsh B&B landlady, cross-dressing, the origins of World War 2 in the Treaty of Versailles, neo-Keynesian economic theory, and the best threats to include with an invoice if you want IPC media, who publish the magazine, to actually pay up. But the thought process still normally starts with bike riding.

I thought that was terribly limiting. It was a regular source of frustration until I tried to write a blog entry every week. Clearly I can blog about anything – and the sheer choice stops me in my tracks, in the same way I that as a child I was silenced by my first sight of the selection in a full-width Italian gelateria freezer. I tend to try to stay on sport as a general theme, but normally, for some reason, I seem to end up writing about golf. (Golf in the Olympics? Bah! No Olympic team should have to devote time to deciding on a suitable design of team jumper.)

I’m tempted to ask other people to suggest topics – but then I’ll discover that even my last three readers have abandoned me.

You haven’t, have you?

More golf, anyone?

I came across this article about laziness in The Guardian. We’ll skate over, for the moment, the irony of a newspaper article about laziness that’s presumably been lifted from a press release about another less-than-essential sociological study. It’s August, there’s not much going on.

To summarise, one in six people would rather watch a TV programme they don’t like than get up to change the channel if they can’t reach the remote. One in three won’t run for a bus. Two in three would take the lift rather than walk up two flights of stairs. We’re not going to hell in a handcart, but only because there’s no one prepared to wheel it. We’re going to hell in a golf buggy. Fortunately we’re still bickering about who’s going to drive.

Hmmm. The only thing is, all that perfectly described me in my days as a professional athlete. No way would I run for a bus. Stairs, absolutely not. Get up to change the channel? Nope.

Athletes’ lives revolve around training, as we all know, and also around not training, which for obvious reasons attracts less attention. The not training is just as important as the training. Not training consists of expending as little energy as possible, the better to recover and work hard again the next day. The ideal athlete life consists of a few hours of hard training, followed by the rest of the day in bed. Literally.

And, of course, huge numbers of athletes reckon they don’t do enough exercise – just as the study claims its respondents said.

I think they’d have learnt more if they hadn’t limited their study to professional sportsmen, which is what they seem to have done. 

Hmmm. I was a bit surprised to realise how long it’s been since I wrote anything here – I started off full of good intentions only a couple of months ago, and already it’s on the slide. If the contents of my ‘comments’ spam folder is any guide, by now Viagra salesmen all over South America will be distraught at my lack of blogging activity. With a bit of luck, they can cheer themselves up by getting in contact with all the Prozac salesmen.

But anyway, I’m here now. And gosh, what to write about? Oh, what the hell, everyone else is going on about MPs’ expenses, why shouldn’t I?

I’ll admit it’s been funny, at times absurd, occasionally just surreal – as when The Guardian found a duck expert (duckspurt?) who proclaimed that Sir Peter Vigger’s famous duck island wasn’t very well designed. As if that was the problem. ‘Well,’ said the Daily Mail, ‘it would have been OK if it had been a really good duck island. We’re all for duck welfare.’

The serious point is that, yep, some of the UK’s political representatives are not exactly moral paragons. Several of them, what ever way you look at it, are crooks, which when you consider the generosity of the rules they’ve managed to break  is an impressive achievement. Clearly, this is not something we should accept. I don’t want to be represented by a crook any more than anyone else does, and I don’t want to have to pay for the privilege either.

But the story has gone beyond reasonable; it’s become a sanctimonious witch-hunt. I heard an MP on the radio last week having to defend the purchase of a toilet brush for a London flat, rather than carrying one up and down from the constituency on the train.

What makes the story more difficult than most of the media would like is that MPs with constituencies outside London, if they’re going to do their jobs at all rather than just commute all day every day, do need a second home of some sort. It certainly doesn’t have to be big, but, amusing though it might be, it can’t be a cardboard box under Blackfriars Bridge. If there is no means provided to pay for this (I’d prefer Parliament to own flats outright), politics will become something you can do only if you’re rich. And that would be a pretty fundamental undermining of democracy.

What’s worse, though, is that none of this really matters very much. Like all personality-driven issues in politics, it’s just a distraction. It’s Big Brother with MPs. What does matter is that any kind of serious, general political discourse in the UK has fallen apart. No-one seems to want to talk about the principles, about how to make the UK a better place to live. These things matter a sight more than a toilet brush, or even a duck island. 

I’m not quite sure what I make of boxing. I can see the issues that some have with its brutality. On the other hand, the British Medical Association wants it banned, and I usually make disagreeing with the BMA a point of principle.

I was thinking about this while listening to the Hatton vs. Pacquiao fight on the radio. (It was at about 4.30am as I drove to an early morning bike race, a detail I mention since we’re on the subject of brutality.) Despite its brevity, it was an exciting listen – almost as exciting as the previous weekend when I accidentally caught the Froch vs. Taylor fight, where Carl Froch came back from a battering to win by a technical knockout in the very final seconds of the last round.

This is the problem. However hard I try to listen and think modern, civilised thoughts about brain damage, I can’t stop it from being exciting. It’s so basic, so simple. Compare it with Formula One racing – which is highly complex, remarkably safe, and about as exciting as watching the mould on my shower curtain trying to annex the curtain rail.

I have no desire at all to try boxing myself. I don’t even think I’d like watching a professional fight live – I suspect that would be too much for my squeamish nature. But I can’t quite get round to supporting the idea of banning it.

Like most of these things it comes down to an issue of consent – if two guys want to hit each other in a controlled environment, that’s pretty much their business. It might even discourage them from hitting me (probably without asking first), which has to be a good thing.

It’s also perhaps not irrelevant that I’m from a generation that just about remembers Barry McGuigan’s fights in the King’s Hall in Belfast during the 1980s as one of the very, very few things that united both sides of the community in Northern Ireland.

Mind you, I also remember McGuigan’s BBC1 chat show. However much you might be horrified by the savagery of boxing, trust me, even viewing through your fingers, the chat show was much, much worse.

By the way, The Robin Knox-Johnston interview I did for the BBC last week is available here.