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 don’t really want this blog to become just a regular whinge. It may already be too late. It’s just that if you’re a bike rider you do sometimes feel a little unloved. My local village newsletter flopped through the letterbox yesterday morning.

This month, among the local news (there is a pothole on Church Street – be careful) and the local churches’ propaganda, is a complaint about inconsiderate cyclists using the footpaths that run beside the busy A-road through the village. Which, I’m bound to say, would feel less like persecution if the footpaths weren’t designated and signed as shared-used paths.

It would feel even further from persecution if the main road itself was not the most dangerous place to ride a bike I’ve ever seen. I’ve mentioned this before, and often, but if you lived here you too would find that you talk of little else. I’ve ridden round Hyde Park Corner on a folding bike at night with less concern for my longevity that I have ever managed on the village High Street. Just in case the speeding lorries were going to miss you, the council has installed traffic islands every hundred yards or so to narrow the road and make damn sure they don’t. I’ve had more near misses and arguments in the 800 yards to the paper-shop than I’ve had in the rest of the county put together.

It’s the same everywhere else – you can ride on the shared-use paths and get shouted at to get onto the road, or you can ride on the road and get shouted at to get onto the path. I usually go for the road, because most of the time I reckon it’s safer. That and the fact that the shared-use paths are often rutted, strewn with glass, and sometimes so narrow that there isn’t space to pass a pedestrian.

None of this is really news to anyone. What worries me is I let myself get far too annoyed by these things. It’s similar when I’m out on my bike – someone chucking something at me from a passing car, even if it’s as innocuous as a plastic bottle – will irritate me for the next hour, when more laid back friends are capable of ignoring it altogether.

I know that I’m not alone in this – from my Cycling Weekly column, I know that nothing generates reader emails like writing about road safety, or the hostility of other road users. It’s tempting to write about things like that every week, simply because it’s always nice to know that someone is reading. But it doesn’t half start to get you down after a while.

So. More thoughts about spring, birdies, daffodils, bunny rabbits, and the sheer joy of the open air.

Until the next time I’m belted up the arse by a bottle, obviously. Probably tomorrow afternoon.

For the last week, I’ve been watching the Winter Olympics like it’s my job. I’ve been doing my job as if it’s the washing up. And the washing up, well, just take a guess. I’m simply entranced by the various means devised of sliding down a hill, while flapping your arms to keep your balance. If I knew why I’m so fascinated, I suspect I’d know a lot more about myself.

It may just be that, like a cat, I simply like brightly coloured objects moving about on a plainly coloured background – see below for an embarrassingly large number of entries celebrating golf. Or it may be – golf again – that the less I know about a sport, the more I like it, just like my late Great Aunt Florence, who spent her declining years watching any form of televised competition she could find, from five-nations rugby to Bullseye, without ever really having the faintest idea what was going on.

Or it may just be the simplicity of the whole thing. Mostly you only have to watch one brightly coloured object at a time, while watching for the split times. And for the most part, it’s reasonably obvious whether or not things are going well. Man in Lycra flashes past the camera in a low tuck. (‘He’s going for it!’ says the informed commentator. Even I can see that.) Or, perhaps, man in Lycra enters the shot at high speed, upside down four feet off the ground and proceeds to drive himself into the snow like a nail, leaving only his skis showing. (“Oooh, that hasn’t gone at all the way he wanted,’ says the commentator, as some Canadians extract the victim, to hopefully dust him down and send him on his way.)

I even like the fact that things like half-pipe have made a virtue out of manoeuvres that look to me like a crash right up to the point where the victim’s snowboard comes bottom centre at just the right moment for them to ski away.

I know all this is based on ignorance, indeed I know I’m saying just the kind of stuff that sometimes grates when an outsider writes it about my own sport – though I like to think I’m fairly tolerant up to the point where someone suggests killing us.

But maybe the best thing about it isn’t the ignorance, it’s the innocence. When a snowboarder falls out of the sky over the half pipe in the style of a skydiver who’s parachute has failed, gets up, smiles for the camera, and slides away humming to themselves, I can convince myself that they’re driven more by the pleasure of the thing than anything else. It may well be so, or at least, more so that for a lot of other sports, but I’m almost certainly wrong in most of the time. For me to be right, they’d also have to be not really competitively driven, and that’s not how you get selected for the Olympics. I can make myself believe it, though, and that appeals immensely.

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. 

Ok, here’s a question to which I’m sure I should know the answer, but don’t. Let me take you back to the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony last summer. Lin Miaoke, you will doubtless remember, was the nine-year-old girl whose singing apparently accompanied the arrival of the Chinese flag in the Bird’s Nest Stadium.

You will doubtless also remember that she was miming – the song was actually sung by seven-year-old Yang Peiyi, who won a competition to take part in the ceremony but who was judged by a member of the Politburo to be too ugly to be seen representing China. (Incidentally, Yang Peiyi had already replaced another girl who was apparently even less visually suited to the job.)

There was something of an outcry, and petitions to let Yang Peiyi sing at the closing ceremony. All jolly splendid. But here is the question: Just why is it more important to be fair to ‘ugly’ kids than to tone-deaf ones? Maybe Lin Miaoke was just as wounded that her voice wasn’t acceptable?

I know the traditional answer is that how well you sing is down to years of hard work and dedication, it’s something you can improve, so you have a choice about it. Your appearance is just a given.

This ‘choice’ logic is the same that’s used to determine what groups attract protection from discrimination. (Just while we’re in the area, I may as well point out that this is why cyclists never have much joy in arguing that some of the abuse we get from newspaper columnists is equivalent to racism. You can’t stop being black, but you can stop being a cyclist.)

But with seven-year-olds? Most kids I ever remember being good at singing just were – it wasn’t something they’d worked at, not at that age.

The real answer I suppose would to have been to let Yang Peiyi mime to the singing of Lin Miaoke at the closing ceremony. I wonder why no one suggested that.

The British love an underdog. Apparently. I’m not sure that the miscellaneous indigenous peoples who were wiped out to make space for the British Empire would have seen it that way, but hey ho, never mind.

 I mention this because Wimbledon approaches, when all of a sudden people with no real interest in any other sport pop out of the woodwork to spend hours a day flipping between simultaneous tennis coverage on BBCs 1 and 2. In reality it’s not just that they don’t like sport, they don’t even like tennis (or they’d watch the French Open too). What they like is looking at nice green grass, and the Duchess of Kent’s hat. Ah! How relaxing.

 For the most part, they support anyone other than the player who’s expected to win, unless it was Tim Henman, in which case they supported his opponent so that they could continue to make jokes about Tim being a loser.

 I’ve never quite got this. It’s very egalitarian, I suppose, and I guess that by supporting the guy who’s probably going to lose you can feel that you’re doing your bit to prolong the match and increase the entertainment value. But it’s still a strange way to go about it.

 I’m a fan of the best player winning. It’s the same in other sports – golf, for example. Or even, to the extent that I care, football. (Well, who I support in football is the result of a more complicated algorithm, mainly revolving around how much dodgy cash clubs have access to.) I like the players with the talent, and those who’ve put in the work, to win.

 I know this means I have a dull, predictable outlook on life. Although it’s a view I share with the French – who supported Roger Federer at the French Open, even when he was against a French player. In France, this isn’t being dull and predictable; it’s being knowledgeable about the game, or respecting the best player. I think I like that way of doing it.