Cycling Wizards

One of the great mysteries to me of cycling, is how few pro’s have, or have had a proper beard. For “proper beard”, read a big bushy Ned Kelly number. Definitely no sculptured goatee’s. Now I would accept a Sean Connery, well groomed beard, but even these are hard to find.

I knew that Sean Eadie, Aussie sprint star of the late 90’s to early 00’s had a good one, but I always thought that he was trying to be a bit clever by half and that it was an image thing rather than a real love of the fluff that drove him.

Just when I had given up hope of a pro beard bearer, I can across something that frankly shocked the hell out of me. It was not just a bad beard by cycling standards, but was possibly the worst beard I have ever seen in any arena.

For those who need a scary example of why personal grooming should be taken seriously, lest a picture be taken of you that will lead to your mocking for years after the offence took place, I present you with Chris Horner in his Mercury days. Rock on Merlin.

I am the ....

Today I was out surfing with a group of 15 year old girls. I run a program for young people on an isolated island and we do a lot of surfing on totally deserted beaches.

As we were waiting for the next set of waves to come in, one of the girls asked about sharks. I earnestly explained that we were close to the continental shelf and that the shallow water from around the island dropped to the very deep water of the great southern ocean not far off the coast, and this meant there were lots of sharks around.

I explained that the sharks would hunt for the seals that had colonies on the rock islands around the coast. I then said jokingly that it was a pity that they probably looked a lot like seals with their wetsuits on.

One of the girls looked me in the eye, emotionless, and said "Do they attack walruses?"

My First "Real" Bike

Like most people my age, my first bikes and gear were hand me downs, from various people. A frame that was given a quick spray with hardware store spray cans and a mish mash of old wool jerseys, knicks with rock hard chamois which inevitably allowed your balls to slip down the side and get crushed between the seat and the side of your leg, and an ancient pair of black perforated leather shoes.

Getting my first “real” bike was one of those peak life events that remain etched into your consciousness. Now understand that your first real bike was still going to be a second hand bike, but it was going to be “your” bike and you were going to have to buy it.

I grew up in the town of Bendigo in central victoria and Bendigo was famous for “The Madison”, a cycling event that seemed somewhat out of place for the small country town that it was held in, often attracting people like Danny Clark, Tony Doyle, and Stan Tourne, to come and ride – world champions all and genuine superstars of track cycling. There would be a whole load of Belgian and Dutch cyclists come over to race the Madison and other track races around the place. It was from this rich mine, that my bike appeared. The custom was that the riders would sell all their gear before they returned to Europe for some extra cash, and that equipment starved Bendigonian’s would snap it up.

My bike had originally been the road training bike of a Dutch bloke who no one could remember. It had been purchased by someone in the club and was coming up for sale. It was a white Plum Vaniquer, with yellow stickers. It had a yellow “turbo”seat and campagnolo groupset bar the white modolo speedy brakeset. It had mavic singles (tubulars or sew ups) and was a pretty classy looking machine, wearing the scrapes and scars of a number of years of training and racing.

My favorite part was the aero campag seatpost which looked, to my eyes at least, to be the classiest thing ever to have been invented. The bike was a perfect fit for me and I wanted it bad.

I had some money saved up and seeing my pain, my parents chipped in a few bucks, and it was mine. A beat up old bike that was just about worn out, but boy did I love that bike. I only raced on it and it was cleaned and oiled to within an inch of its life after every outing. And then of course it sat propped in my bedroom, waiting for the next chance to be unleashed.

Learning the Ropes

When I was a kid, I did most of my training on my own. None of my friends were cyclists and so this was just the way it was, particularly as we lived out of town and back in those days there was no such thing as the Sunday bunch – just a group of hard arses who would put in about 150 k for their “long” ride and who made it pretty clear that you were not welcome until you had paid your dues. Dues really just meant that unless you rode off scratch or second scratch you could piss off.

Anyway, one day I was riding along when I saw a bloke riding about 500 meters in front of me. I put my head down and buried myself to catch up. I was so shagged when I got to him that I needed to sit 20 meters behind for 5 minutes to catch my breath. When I could talk I rode up beside and asked if I could ride along with him, which he grunted would be OK.

The guy was one of the hard racers of the club, getting old but still very competitive. He was riding tubulars (singles to us when I was growing up), with a spare tucked into his back pocket. We rode along for a while and he started to chat and ask me a little bit about myself and to give some advice about cycling which I was lapping up.

After a while my eye caught his leg and I realized that he was only wearing one sock. I nonchalantly mentioned the missing sock. He didn’t look at me, but said “Oh yeah – I needed to have a shit a while ago and I used it to wipe my arse”.

While in retrospect I can see that this is a completely predictable explanation, at the time I have to admit that it threw me a bit. All I could come up with was “Oh that’s was a good idea.”

And so my education started.

Who is Responsible for Manscaping in Professional Cycling???

Look, let’s face it, there have always been cyclists who fancied themselves a bit, and played up to the crowd with their good looks. Clearly Jacques Anqitil and Rudi Aldig thought they were pretty hot stuff back in the day and perhaps spent a little too long in front of the mirror some mornings.

This was however contrasted by the fact that cycling was a hard working man’s sport and most cyclists were, how should we say, pretty rough around the edges. You might want to scrub up a bit for a special occasion, but this was a little bit like making an effort to clean up before you went to church – it was a socially accepted expectation.

Clearly when Francesco Moser came along, the game started to change, greater media coverage and the increasing value placed on the cosmopolitan meant that Moser started to create a template for the young up and comers that was as much about how you looked doing it as what you actually did. Make no mistake Franky was a hard arse and so there was respect and jealousy mixed in with the contempt for his swarthy Mediterranean looks.

This started to create a cultural divide. Hard working men with rough heads in Belgium, and good looking nancy boys in Italy. The French went a bit 50/50 as is their custom. All this fed into a change in the demographic of the average peddler in the new cycling countries, where cycling was becoming a bit of a rich boys sport and rich boys want to look the part.

With Fabio Baldato things started to get a bit out of hand, it is here that I believe the real manscaping issue started. Maurizio Fondriest had passed the baton of good looking Italian cyclist onto Fabio, and Fabio decided that he was going to start going for the sculptured goatee and oiled hair overkill. While Fabio was sprinting down one side of the barriers (a hazard I might say with the amount of slippery hair product being sloshed around), Mario Chipollini was fostering a ridiculous Glenn Close like perm down the other.

So next time you see Phillipo Pozatto looking like a picture of what would be in a dictionary entry for “Metrosexual”, you have a slightly better idea of how we got to this sad place.

Why is it so hard to create a good cycling uniform???

Before we had "brand management" and dorky blokes wearing bad glasses telling us how to present our "core values" as an organisation, designing cycling kit seemed to be pretty easy.

For a start you only had to worry about the jersey cause everyone had the same black knicks. My guess is that the manager’s wife would suggest a nice color and you would just whack whatever logo you had on and maybe add some stripes or something....

Whatever happened, the kit seems to my eyes at least to be about 1000 times better than most of the guff we currently get served up. Its bad enough when the HTC stuff gets worn by Cav, but when you have to follow some sweaty arse in white knicks for 30k on a Sunday morning ride you can really come to hate the stuff.

So what are the shining examples of how it should be done so the kiddies can see the way forward? Well lets look at exhibit a and b in the classic Bic and Salvarani tops - still available at hipster retro type places (which unfortunately means you cant buy them unless you are a wanker. But if you have an original then get that sucker out there, itchy wool and all). Clearly this is the way you do it - so come on team managers. Get with it.

Some like skill are going retro which is very good. I vote for Panasonic getting back into the protour - Phil Anderson in the big Oakley’s was pretty cool.

The modernish kit I liked was the short lived Asics - it helps if you have a manscaped Italian who has spent a lot of time practicing his victory salute wearing it at the end of Liege Bastogne Liege.

Great Bald Cyclists

In the modern world of stage managed media events and slick PR campaigns, we don’t get to see that many halfway baldies in sport anymore. You see every middle age dad figures he can look like a genuine “hard arse” the moment his widow’s peak starts to show, by going the full shave. It’s a reverse psychology thing. An affliction that should see you scorned as a dorky pussy can quickly be turned into
the complete opposite with a pair of 10 buck clippers from Big W. This is not the time or place to go into a sociological study about how being bald can also somehow make you tough, but it does raise the interesting question about the greatest half bald cyclist….

The only criteria is that they must be people who were still battling on gamely against the odds, believing that no one had noticed their rapidly receding locks. There is a chance that they were just half bald and proud. If this is the case they should be saluted as the genuine hard men that they were, but I personally have a huge believe in the power of denial.

OK, the first cab off the rank is the great Joop Zoetemelk, tour winner, world champ and genuinely classy rider who is somehow underrated when compared to his contemporaries. He was a classic daggy dad style and seemed to be half bald from the time he burst onto the scene. Marco Pantani started to fancy himself as a hard man after he became successful, but for me its his carerra days that will always be remembered – half bald and riding in mock stretch denim knicks is a look unlikely to be repeated. That is off course unless someone from the local bunch really wants to freak out the punters early one Sunday morning.

But the winner is of course Barne Riis. It is incorrectly assumed that his nickname, Mr. 60%, related to his heamatacrit level, when in fact it was his scalp to hair ratio. 60% scalp. While Ivan Basso is clearly on the decline hair wise, his manscaping and compulsory helmets will undoubtedly mean that we will never again see the likes of Bjarne’s sweating bonce bouncing up the Alps.

Wheelsucking versus Good Tactics

I get increasingly peeved off with people claiming that anyone that did not do 75% of the work at the front of the bunch is a wheelsucker (as in a person who only follows other riders wheels and does not do their fair share of work to ensure that the group is able to be in a position to win - not to be confused with the loony tunes type "weel sucker" which is a person of low intelligence prone to being taken advantage of by less than scrupulous characters. But anyway, enough of all that.

What I don’t like is the insinuation that a person who is tactically astute and made good decisions to allow others to do work at key times was in some way undeserving of winning. The commentary on this at times shows how little many "fan's" actually know about cycling. So let’s look at this contentious issue in a little more detail.

Tim Krabbe wrote "the" book about cycling when he wrote "The Rider". It is such an eye wateringly good explanation of cycling that I am actually tearing up a bit as I am writing this. So you should really read this book if you want to understand cycling at a deep level rather than the superficial that seems to be the way we are going. As a taster, he states "cycling is about licking your opponent’s plate clean before you start your own meal". This is a good starting point for further discussion of what is good tactics and what is wheelsucking.

Example 1 - Six riders have broken away with 40 km to go in a race in a club race. The main bunch is chasing furiously behind as 5 of our 6 breakaway riders swap turns off the front. Rider number 6 sits back and refuses to do any work. The other 5 have a decision to make, do they worry themselves with non-worker or do they get their heads down and allow themselves a chance of victory? They decide to just ride and as they approach the finish, with the bunch meters behind, our boy sitting on comes around and easily wins the sprint.

Verdict - His name goes in the paper, but it is a hollow victory and he deserves all the scorn he receives and will most likely be talked about by the old timers as a "sitting on (the Aussie term for wheelsucking) bastard" for the next 20 years no matter what he does from this point on.

Example 2 - In a club race with 15 riders, people start attacking with 10 km to go. Attacks are followed by counter attacks and it’s all very dramatic and exciting. The strong non sprinters know that they have to try and get away from the sprinters and the sprinters know they need to hang in there. With 2km to go, rider A launches a huge attack and gains 20 meters. There is a hesitation in the bunch as riders wait for each other to chase and at this point rider B launches from the back of the bunch and tries to bridge across to rider A on their own. They reach him with 1km to go. Rider A motions for rider B to come around and help work to the finish, but rider B sits impassively on his wheel. Bunch has now got itself organised and is coming fast. Rider A sees this and pushes on to the line. Rider B starts his sprint 200 meters out and manages to easily pass rider A, who is also passed by three riders from the fast finishing bunch in the last 10 meters. They don’t catch rider B however. During the post-race sandwiches rider A complains long and hard about "sitting on bastard" rider B.

Verdict - A cool and smart ride by rider B nets a well deserved victory. A risk needed to be taken, but it was worth it. Rider A is pissed, but the reality is that rider B did exactly what he should have done and after bridging across and connecting with 1k to go, they had no obligation to come to the front as they were getting ready to sprint. 10k to go would have been a very different story.


It is very easy to see any tactical decision as "wheelsucking", but this is overly simplistic. You should only be on the front in cycling when there is a reason to be on the front. Attacking 20 times and then claiming everyone was wheelsucking is just tactical stupidity.

Some good tactical rules of thumb:

Attack once and attack well.
A counter attack is better than the first attack.
Any attack in the last 2km is your last attack so give it everything.
Always attack from behind, the faster you can come past the better.
If you know you are the fastest, then your attack should be with 200 meters to go.
If you know you are not the fastest, then waiting for the last 200 meters is stupid.
Be very clear about how fast you actually are - if you have never won a sprint, then you are not the fastest.
If someone else is likely to chase, then let them go first if you are prepared to take the risk that they won’t.
If you are not prepared to take the risk then react immediately.
Be prepared to lose 10 races for every one you win.
If someone won't work then the last person in the group just keep rolling off the back and constantly make them come around to catch up to the bunch. They will start working pretty quick.
If there is an aggressive and classy rider who attacks and a good sprinter in the group, who is known for not working, let the aggressive rider go - they might repay you the favour down the track. Don’t just keep riding the fastest guy to the front.
Don't give up if the pack is 20 meters behind you with a couple of km to go. No one wants to close the last bit of a break and you can hold an advantage to the end if you keep focussed
The most satisfying way to win a bike race is to ride away on your own. This may happen in one race in your life. On a day where you have good legs and you feel like attacking every time the pace drops, wait until 5km to go and attack from the back on any type of climb. Don’t look back and ride to the finish. Hope someone there has a camera.