Michael Hutchinson

The latest development in the world of doping in sport appears to be some doubt on behalf of the World Anti Doping Agency about clenbuterol. Clenbuterol is, of course, at the centre of the current long-running Alberto Contador saga – the 2010 Tour de France winner failed a test for a very, very small quantity of the asthma drug during last year’s Tour, and claimed, rather memorably, that it was from a contaminated steak he’d eaten. Specifically, a steak from Spain, where clenbuterol is, he clams, used (illicitly) in livestock farming.

WADA seems recently to have admitted the possibility of this sort of contamination, which is going to have knock-on effects on the Court of Arbitration for Sport hearing on the Contador case that’s scheduled for after this year’s Tour.

The real issue is not what drugs are banned, what quantities they’re banned it, where they come from, or even what their effects are.

The real issue is the strict liability element of current drug-enforcement. As things stand, if something banned is found in your system, that’s it. You’re guilty. Certain cases, on a wildly inconsistent basis, seem to find gaps in this, but that’s the principle, and the only real flexibility is the punishment handed down.

Now, if this were a criminal matter, that’s not how it would work. While strict liability does exist for some criminal offences, they’re rare, and doping in sport would not be one of them. Criminal offences require not only a ‘guilty act’, but a ‘guilty mind’. In doping, you’d have to show that a substance was taken, and then you’d have to show that it was taken knowingly, with the intention of improving performance.

The reason doping regulations don’t follow the criminal model is simply one of practicality. It would be very difficult to prove the mental elements of the offence. Strict liability increases the conviction rate. But it does it at the cost of convicting some athletes who are innocent in all the respects that matter to justice. Alain Baxter, the skier, is the classic example. He took an over-the-counter cold remedy that had different ingredients in North America from those that he’d carefully checked in the UK version, and which had no influence on his performance anyway. Still guilty.

WADA are now in the deeply uncomfortable position of pursuing Contador, while at the same time having raised doubts about the mental elements of his offence. In effect, they’ve come close to admitting he might be right after all, while at the same time maintaining a set of regulations that in essence say that even if he’s right, it doesn’t matter.

The Court of Arbitration is now in an impossible position. They can’t find him guilty, but they can’t let him off (assuming they accept the evidence of the dope test) without essentially taking WADA’s decision for them.

I’m confident this is going to run and run, and the consequences in the fight against doping in sport are going to be significant.

I’m never really sure quite what to say about a time trial result. Win or lose, the result sheet contains pretty much the whole story. Ruling out mechanicals, accidents and freak weather conditions (which we only accept if certified as such by the Met Office), whatever it says on the sheet is what happened, no more, no less. It is the whole joy of an otherwise dry discipline. TTers are especially fond of making excuses, the more outlandish the better, and it’s because we know that ultimately they don’t count.

What the sheet says is that I got 41 seconds put into me in 10 miles by Brad Wiggins. Which seems like quite a lot to me. Certainly it’s more than I’d have liked, but then again, I’ve never taken a defeat yet that made me wish I’d been beaten by more. But given Brad’s power output for the ride, I should probably be grateful it wasn’t worse. He brought the computer off his bike to the prize-giving for a bit of show-and-tell. I’d never seen a number that big on the ‘average’ display. I was hoping it was a sticker on the screen that would peel off. It wasn’t. It said 476w. Or maybe 478w. I couldn’t see properly because my eyes were filling with tears of jealous rage.

His presence at the National 10 was a bit of a surprise in the first place – he’s done the British TT champs in September a couple of times, but not normally the fixed distance champs in spring. They normally get left to domestic toilers like me. It was a pity, given the presence of a proper star, that the event itself felt a bit flat. The ferociously busy course on the A19 dual carriageway wasn’t exactly spectator friendly (it scared the willies out of some of the riders too), and the lack of a proper HQ was a little frustrating.

It all felt a bit more grassroots that it really needed to. Though to give Brad credit, I think that was what he liked about it. He said it reminded him of being a junior, and I think most of us appreciate anything that makes us feel young again.

The final few days in Delhi were busier than the rest. That’s why I haven’t managed the final blog until the plane home. I’m trying my best to ignore the low-hairlined member of the athletic community in the seat behind who has formed the conviction that the harder she thumps the touch screen entertainment system in the back of my chair, the faster it will work. A month in Delhi seems not to have taught her that nothing in India happens quickly, but it all gets there in the end.

My race, after two weeks of sitting about, was last Wednesday. The air temperature was about 40 degrees. Finding a cool place to put the rollers for a warm up was a challenge. In the end we used the men’s changing room, on the basis it was air conditioned, and hence merely 32 degrees. I’d have used the women’s, which was cooler, except that David Millar and the Scottish delegation had barricaded themselves into it.

The race itself was among the dullest 50 minutes of my life. The sun beat on an empty three-lane highway. There were no spectators after the first few hundred yards, just mile after mile of security fence and soldiers. If you looked up, the road disappeared into a vanishing point just this side of the pollution haze. It seemed best not to look up. Anyway, if you did that, you missed all the entertainment possibilities offered by staring at your handlebars. Next time I’m taking a book.

By ten minutes in, I was hot. By 20 I was hotter, and until then I would have said this wasn’t possible. By 30 minutes I’d formed the paranoid delusion that this ride was just a qualifier, and the finals would be later that afternoon.

But I rode about the right pace, didn’t do anything stupid, kept my temper when someone parked their official car on the racing line at the turn, and oh-so-slowly the time dribbled past. There isn’t much else to say about it. The course was so featureless that my personal 10km-to-go landmark was a funny smell that had been there all week, presumably from a sewer.

I was leading when I finished, but as I suppose I should have expected, I ended up in fourth place, for two Commonwealths in a row. Not good enough for a medal, but good enough to get taken to dope control for the second time in fifteen hours. I was last to leave the venue. When I got out of dope control there were 200 men waiting to dismantle everything and take it away so they could open the road again for the rush hour. I might not have got a medal, but I can be justly proud that my recalcitrant bladder caused one of the biggest traffic jams in Delhi’s history.

(Incidentally, the two Welsh athletes across the aisle of the plane have just decided that what they’re looking forward to most when they get home is, ‘a proper curry, not the shit we had to eat in India.’)

I did finally get out of the Village the night after my race. I might well write a postscript to the Village blog about it sometime in the next few days, because several people have asked me about it. But it doesn’t really feel like it belongs with everything else.

I think that’s because outside the wire, the Commonwealth Games hadn’t taken over everyday Delhi the way it did Manchester or Melbourne. There were a few posters, but that was almost it. There were no souvenir shops, no ticket shops. There were no crowds of tourists who’d come specially, and there were no athletes around. There was no need for the usual uniformed volunteers to look after visitors. There was little sense of a community that felt involved. The Games were almost invisible.

I think it’s fair to say that there are three Games happening at once. There is the event that you see on television – which is the most important product because it’s for the largest number of people. There is the Games that the athletes experience – and bear in mind we number only a few thousand. And there are the Games that the city lives through.

The TV Games were probably very good. I don’t know, because I couldn’t really watch, even if I could get BBC2 on my TV.

The Games experience the athletes had was mixed. The volunteers in the Village were quite exceptionally friendly and enthusiastic, even if dealing with the Village bureaucracy was sometimes wearing. Most of the accommodation was all right, even if it was a bit on the grubby side. (You could ruin a pair of white socks beyond any hope of cleaning on one stocking-footed walk to the bathroom.) One of our balconies didn’t have a wall round it, but they’d replaced it with a bit of cardboard and a small sign saying ‘low wall’, so as long as you didn’t get lost on the way to the bathroom in the night, I guess it was OK.

But the security was overwhelming. Other athlete villages I’ve lived in have involved airport-style security. But this was up a whole level. I’ve had less physically intimate relationships with my underpants that I had with several of the security friskers. The metal detectors were so sensitive that if you got through without a siren going off, you knew you’d forgotten your iron supplement that morning. And if the amount of weaponry on display had been wheeled past the Politbureau as the stood atop Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square, they’d have thought it was a little over the top.

I can only assume that it was all necessary. Even a normal Metro trip in Delhi, or a visit to a decent hotel, involves an x-ray machine. And, apart from one incident where I was marched back to the residential zone at gunpoint, it was all done reasonably courteously.

But the sense of confinement started to spill over at the end. I was in the main dining hall one night at about half eleven, and it had the pent-up atmosphere of a rough pub just before the punches start flying. I had a hasty bowl of Sugar Puffs, and got out before the boxers and the wrestlers threw years of technique training to the winds and started hitting each other over the head with chairs. I’ve never experienced that at another Games. In Manchester and Melbourne, a lot of people didn’t really want to go home. In Delhi, most of the people I spoke to (admittedly mainly UK or Australia-based) weren’t going to be terribly sorry to leave.

I can’t presume to speak for the locals about their Games. All we really saw of them – apart from the volunteers – was their being herded about by the military to ease our passage about the city on our busses. One morning we passed a bus-stop where the dozen people in the queue had been required to crouch down behind the seats in the shelter while two soldiers with guns watched over them. I can’t imagine their feelings towards us were especially warm.

Out on the courses for the time trial and the road race, spectating for non-VIPs was limited to small, brutal-looking pens with high fences. They were in direct sun, and you weren’t permitted to take any water into them for fear you’d throw it at the riders. The riders were sufficiently far away that anyone who could it them with a water bottle should have been down at the stadium chucking stuff for the glory of India. Events like cycling and the marathon are normally the ones that anyone can see for free, and which ought to make the whole city feel involved. Not in Delhi. Watching a bike race in Delhi looked potentially lethal.

Even less would I want to speculate on the cost of the Games. Given some of the poverty on Delhi’s streets, you wonder a bit. But I’m not going to join the patronising westerners declaring that India should have spent its money on something else. It’s a democracy. It’s up to them.

Despite the reservations, you have to say the Games were a success. Down at the closing ceremony, the interminable speeches were triumphant. Indian athletes had won unprecedented numbers of medals, and best of all, no one had been shot.

I haven’t updated for a day or two – I’d say things have been busy, but they haven’t. I’ve done a lot of sitting about, a lot of drinking coffee slowly, and a lot of quietly becoming unhinged at the sheer tedium of our incarceration. There is a three-foot diameter hole the wall of the dining hall that leads into an air conditioning exhaust. When I got to breakfast yesterday, someone had stuck a bit of paper above the hole saying ‘escape chute.’ We’re all going nuts in here.

I had a bad morning. I took the bus out to the time trial course – an hour’s trip – and when I got there found I’d packed two right-hand shoes in my bag. So I had to sit there for three hours till the bus back. Then I still had to go training, so I thought I’d go and try to have a ride on the access road to the Village, which I thought would be OK since it is still inside the security cordon. No. It wasn’t even nearly OK. I was marched back into the Village at gunpoint by a soldier who had raised not-seeing-the-funny-side-of-things to an art form. The Welsh lads tried the same thing, and got arrested.

Out at the course, I did at least have a look around. The facilities look good at the start-finish (which we hadn’t seen until today). Big changing tents, decent pits, power points, lots of good work. Some things haven’t gone so well. The start-ramp was being finished. In Manchester 2002, the ramp was about five feet high, and dropped at 45 degrees. You went down it so fast your ears popped. I certainly know someone who kept their brakes on the whole way down. Delhi’s, in contrast, bears much similarity to a shoebox with a bit of wood leaning on it. It has a roof, to shelter you from the sun. Unfortunately, when they grabbed a passing cyclist this morning for a trial run, they discovered that the roof is about neck-height. Still, they’ve coped with bigger snags around here than that.

The grandstand is small. But, and I think that describing the weirdness of this is probably beyond me, they’ve supplemented it with about a hundred sofas. Honestly, sofas. They’re laid out alongside the course, all in a matching Indian ethnic fabric, and look like they’ve been borrowed from ‘Stereotypical Indian Restaurant Furniture R Us’. I’m guessing you can hire yourself a sofa for the day, and watch the TT while reclining like an oriental potentate, eating grapes and being fanned by, let’s say, the Jamaican women’s 4×400m relay team.

Kind of makes me sorry I’ll have to ride a bike. The race is on Wednesday, starting at something like 9am BST, in case anyone is interested.

I’m not really looking forward to coming home from Delhi next week. It’s partly because I’m going to be dumped from 33-degree temperatures into winter. It’s partly because I haven’t yet figured out how I’m getting 80kg of personal luggage home from the airport. But it’s mainly because if anyone asks what I thought of Delhi, I’m not really going to have an answer. I’m not in Delhi, I’m in Commonwealth Games land.

I’ve mentioned the security presence before, so I don’t want to go on about it, but it is the overwhelming characteristic of these Games. I’m sure it’s necessary, and it’s done with every courtesy, but it’s made the games even more insular than ever. I tried to ride my bike out of the village last night, and at every gate I was turned back by the army. I don’t think they really like you to walk out either. We’ve only seen the airport, the Village, the interior of our tinted-window, air conditioned, army-escorted busses, and the heavily-guarded venues. If they had enough Indian volunteers to man the village, and a big mural of Delhi for us to look at while the busses to drive past, we could be anywhere.

This impression is only enhanced by the catering, which is the same as it was in Melbourne four years ago. The same company has set up the same huge marquee, with the same layout and the same food. I think perhaps the chairs are different. There is a toaster with a dent on the top that always burned my toast four years ago. I didn’t half look clever on the first morning with I predicted that it would do the same thing here.

The only change in the food is that there is, obviously, no beef. For the most part it’s replaced with buffalo. Which leads to some slightly curious combinations, like ‘Hungarian Buffalo Stew’, the Hungarian authenticity of which I doubt. I’m also certain that exactly the same dish is available from a different counter (each counter serves a different regional cuisine) as ‘buffalo curry’.

But the food is good, it’s available in infinite quantities, and it’s served up with considerable cheer. I was in a queue behind a skinny lad who asked for chicken. The helper put some chicken on a plate. ‘More,’ said the skinny lad. And ‘more… more… keep going… more… look, I had to lose 9kg to make weight, I haven’t eaten for a week, and two hours ago I got the crap beaten out of me in the first round [he was a boxer, or at least I hope he was a boxer], so keep bloody going with the chicken, because eating is all I have left.’

The server gave him two plates of chicken, and brought him over a third when he was halfway through the second.

Meanwhile, in the Velodrome, the Northern Irish are through to the bronze medal ride-off in the team pursuit. Which isn’t bad, considering that we didn’t have a pursuit team when we got here. We lashed one together at the request of the organisers (and the Kiwis, for some reason) when only three teams originally signed up. The Welsh did the same thing, but got disqualified for false-starting. The guys are racing India tomorrow night, and unless something goes pear-shaped, I’d say they’re looking pretty good for the medal.

I’m in Delhi, at the Commonwealth Games, where, to expressions of surprise from most of my friends that I don’t find entirely flattering, I’m racing a bicycle for the glory of Northern Ireland.

Delhi got a fair amount of criticism in the run in – which may well have been perfectly justified, I don’t know, I wasn’t here two weeks’ ago – but by now the Village is OK. It’s not finished, not as such, but it’s fine. (Incidentally, we’re not allowed to publicly criticise the Village. But really, it’s fine.) What we gain in the marble bathroom fittings we lose on the leaky shower. Did I mention the marble bathroom fittings? In an athletes’ village? Come to think of it, the shower in Melbourne in 2006 leaked too.

The problem might well have been the scale of ambition. They said they wanted the finest Village ever, and they didn’t quite get there. Here’s an example. There is a TV in my room. I’ve never seen such a thing at a Games before. I mean literally, I’ve never seen a TV. This one is a 32inch flat screen, with hundreds of channels, a live feed from every venue at the Games whether there is anything happening there or not, and an option to view everything you missed later, even if what you missed was someone sweeping up at the weightlifting hall.

The only problem with this TV was a total lack of functionality. So I got a man round to fix it. He couldn’t. He summoned another man. He also failed, so he summoned a third. Within about half an hour there were a dozen technicians in the room, all watching the last one to arrive, who fixed the TV, and told me how to work it. (I have a secret suspicion that telling me how to work it might have been about 90% of the solution, but don’t tell them that.)

When it worked, it started showing India vs. New Zealand at table tennis, so they all sat down to watch. I announced I wanted to go and have dinner – they told me to go right ahead, they’d be right there when I got back. The Indian volunteers are all like that – they’re helpful, funny, welcoming, and always just a little offbeat. The same TV at, say, Manchester 2002 would have stayed non-functional.

The thing is that an ordinary TV would have done very well. In fact I’d have been delighted with it.

The other theme here is security. I went out to see the road time-trial course today. You’re not allowed to ride out of the village, you have to go by bus, under armed guard, which takes you to the secure venue. The bus left on time, and screamed out of the Village at 60mph, accompanied by sirens, and escorted by army jeeps front and rear, each bristling with weaponry, ready to repel attack from any direction including from directly over head. Then the bus stopped, sat for 20 minutes while more guys with guns checked papers, then, more sirens and flashing lights, and it took off again with neck-stretching commitment. And stopped. And went. Anywhere else, we’d have gone at half the speed, and we’d have got there at the same time.

The race course is the Noida Expressway. I’m no expert on Delhi traffic-management, but it looks like the M4 leaving London, a six-land dual carriageway of quite spectacular flat straightness. It’s shut every day for training. In both directions, even though we’re only using one side. A 10-foot fence has been erected along both verges. Every 200m or so, on each side of the road, there’s an armed soldier. Every mile or two there is a pen – not a grandstand – for spectators, from which I assume that just turning up on the day to stand by the road would be frowned on by the guys with guns. Each spectator pen has a watchtower with, you guessed it, some more soldiers. One of the Northern Irish shooting-team told me these guys are packing some serious firepower.

When you get there, the facilities at the course are great – energy drinks on hand, an air conditioned marquee in case riding in 35 degrees of heat (as it was today) gets to be too much for you, and, best of all, men at each end of the course to pass up chilled water-bottles. The water bottle men are dressed in white shirts and bowties and white gloves, which is just brilliant.

When one of the officials asked me what I thought of the course, I told him it was fine, the only detail was that there were some bits of grit on the road. He said he would arrange to have them removed. I don’t suppose he’ll succeed, but I know he’ll try.

I’m at a bit of a loss to know what to make of Dan Staite’s failed dope test. It’s the first drug positive for a domestic amateur that I can think of in recent years – the last thing I can remember was in the mid 1990s. And that one was not exactly clear cut, which is why I’m not putting a name or a date to it.

Doping in cycling certainly isn’t limited to the world elite. You don’t need more than a quick scan over the Wikipedia list of doping cases in cycling to see that most of the riders who’ve tested positive in the last few years are not exactly superstars. But I was still very surprised by Staite’s positive.

Maybe I shouldn’t be? To grow suspicious, you only have to look at the other things people will do to win – the time they’ll spend, the careers they’ll sabotage, the relationships they’ll neglect. I’ve done all sorts of things down the years that might have been honest, but which were shortsighted or inconsiderate or both. At the most basic, there are the knock-on effects of spending up to 20 hours a week on a bike – time when, as far as anyone who might want offer me work or complain I hadn’t cleaned the bathroom is concerned, I might as well be in space – and the further problems that arise from spending the other 148 hours either asleep or nearly asleep.  

Friends or family or employers reach an accommodation with that kind of thing, often by stopping being friends or family or employers. That’s just the chronic state of cycling.  It’s the acute state of cycling that they remember with a bitter edge. I am yet to be forgiven for once turning up to a friend’s wedding nine hours late because when I got up that morning it was a nicer day than I’d expected, and I had the sudden inspired idea of going to the wedding via a race 250 miles away. (The really dumb part was not realising that if you’re going to be that late, you’re better not turning up at all. Everyone is still cross with you. If you give it a few weeks, they’ll get round to thinking it was just loveable disorganisation.)

But somehow despite the kind of commitment that huge numbers of people are prepared to put into it, and the obvious temptation to take a shortcut, I’ve always persuaded myself that the sport in the UK is almost totally clean. I’m still convinced of this.

That’s because I didn’t have to do more than a race or two in continental Europe before it was very clear that at an elite level there cleanliness was next to stupidity. No one raced clean, because if you were going to race clean, you might as well not bother. I raced clean, and right enough I might as well not have bothered. (This was the case a few years ago. I’d be misleading you if I suggested any expertise in the scene now – my guess is that things are getting better.)

In contrast, in the UK, as far as domestic competitors are concerned, over God know how many races I’ve never come across anything more than vague anecdotes – sufficiently vague that I don’t believe them. Anyway, a doping culture, however sophisticated, still produces positive tests when people muff up their masking agents or get a bit over confident. If doping in the UK is commonplace, then the riders involved should be giving seminars to some of the world’s top pros on how to avoid getting caught.

I think doping in UK cycling is rare because whatever way I look at it, there just isn’t the evidence to support the opposite view. I’m not naïve enough to think there aren’t a few dishonest riders out there. But I sincerely don’t think there are very many. And I hope the Staite case scares the crap out of every single one of them. 

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.