Gironimo! Read online

  Nature had short-changed his son on the inheritance of mechanical talents, but courtesy of nurture the cupboard under our stairs is dominated by a plastic cabinet filled with surplus IKEA fixings, dismembered washing-machine motors and three dozen other drawers of reclaimed ironmongery, most notoriously the one labelled ‘Shit Nails’. For twenty years I have repulsed my wife’s efforts to rationalise this ever-expanding collection, insisting, with ever-shrinking credibility, that one day its time would come. And now it had.

  Quite suddenly, significant things were beginning to happen. I retrieved my blasted frame and forks from Elliot – stripped back to smooth, old gunmetal – and delivered them to Lance’s recommended bodyshop nearby. Along with two litres of period-correct black cellulose paint, which I’d sourced with great difficulty: the substance is so exciting to work with that the EU banned it in 2007. Three days later I was back out on my patio, peeling away several yards of bubblewrap to expose the deep and timeless lustre of my freshly ebonised frame. I felt excited by how excited I felt. Who was this new Tim, thrilled to speechlessness by a diamond of metal tubing that some bloke in Uxbridge had just sprayed black? Who felt something close to shame in the contrast between this diamond’s glossed magnificence and the merely presentable components he planned to attach to it? Who not only vowed to eradicate this contrast, but actually kind of did?

  Courtesy of the tonton archive, this same new Tim discovered and slowly mastered la méthode Piotr, which sounded like a practice that would see you cold-shouldered by a disgusted community, but was in fact a potent burnishing regime named after the Polish-born tonton who devised it. Saturate extremely fine-grade wire wool with renovating car polish, gently rub in, gently rub off, repeat, repeat, repeat. Tim 2.0 acquired a number of microfibre cloths, and several delicate buffing attachments for his electric drill. He sent off to France for a large tin of rust-proof metal varnish, a gaggingly malodorous substance that took a fortnight to dry and endowed his patio with many of the most complicated stains that still besmirch it. He was, in all, quite a fellow, a tirelessly dedicated restoro-lord who only came to grief, as so many have before him, in the Great Roundening of the Wheels.

  Matthew had already flagged up my severest challenge when he described wheelbuilding – the task of connecting a central hub to a rim with a load of spokes, then making the whole thing roll straight and true – as ‘a dark art’. I put it off for weeks, then one sunny morning found myself with nothing else to do, nothing except arts that to me seemed even darker, like making sense of the brakes and bottom bracket. Now for it: when the last child had left for school, I squatted down on the patio with a wooden Super Champion between my knees. Arranged about me on the soiled paving slabs lay many packets of Max’s new-old spokes, in assorted lengths and gauges, a big petits pois can full of oily brass spoke nipples – the former tin of mysteries whose significance Max had emphasised – and a step-by-step guide printed out from the fabled website of Sheldon Brown, late lamented Bikefixer General. Arranging the spokes of one wheel in Sheldon’s recommended ‘36 cross 3’ lattice was the work of minutes – 240 of them in all, after two false starts and one particularly enjoyable false ending. By the time I’d laced the second, the last child had returned from school, and indeed eaten supper and gone to sleep.

  The next day it was raining. ‘Don’t even think about doing that filthy stuff in here,’ said my wife when she left for work. This screamed out for a riposte involving nipples and rims, but I’d long since stopped seeing the funny side of the whole awful process. At the same time I just wanted it over and done with, so as soon as the house was empty I starting doing that filthy stuff right there on the kitchen floor.

  Over the course of the next 72 hours, I discovered that my children have reached the age where a furiously foul-mouthed father is not to be feared but pitied, then sniggered behind. All that angry, contorted squatting also endowed me with the life-blighting industrial disease, Wheelwright’s Arse – my first experience of an occupational condition since student-era flirtations with Asteroid’s Finger and Miser’s Bowel.

  My brother, a more considered cyclo-technician with much related experience to call upon, came round on day two to advise me. The pursuit of roundness was, he said, a matter of delicate adjustment, a clockwise quarter twist of a spoke here, an anti-clockwise semi-tweak there. He explained the physics – tightening a spoke pulled the rim towards the edge that spoke was laced through, or something – then offered a demonstration. Complete with tilted head and gentle half-smile, this brought to mind a kindly piano tuner at his wise old work; ten minutes after he left me to it I was once again wrestling the wheel like a roaring-drunk pirate captain in high seas. I dragged the colossal bike stand indoors and bitterly rammed a rim into the LFD frame’s rear-axle dropouts, the better to monitor my doomed quest for circularity. Great armfuls of angry lock with the spoke key stripped the threads off many an ancient nipple and began to ease my shoulder joints asunder. My thumbs burned and my haunches screamed for their lives. When my wife returned to find the kitchen commandeered by an apprentice wheelwright and the many tools of his unmastered trade, her cry of protest was muted by one glance at that terrible red face, aglow with rage, sweat and WD40. The family retreated to the front room with a takeaway, then filed silently upstairs to bed.

  Five hours later I followed them on all fours. I had built a wheel that span without lateral deviation, but at a price: pulling the stubbornly warped rim straight had required a novel blend of spokes, thirty-two of them one size, and the other four half an inch longer. I can’t imagine Sheldon would have approved, and there was a definite egg thing happening when I span the wheel and appraised its side-on profile, but it didn’t look that bad. Certainly better than the second rim, which I had done my best to buckle into a scale model of that Anish Kapoor sculpture outside the Olympic stadium.

  ‘Do you know what a Mobius strip is?’ asked my son three days later, when it was safe to mention the wheels. I Googled it and saw what he meant. Then I put the rims, and everything to do with their stupid fucking adjustment, into a big plastic crate and hid it at the back of the shed.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘Please, Mr Coppi, sir,’ asked the wide-eyed young reporter, ‘could you tell us what it takes to become such a great champion?’

  ‘You must do three things,’ replied the campionissimo, leaning forward and speaking in a significant, confidential murmur. ‘Ride your bike’ – and now those around pressed in to hear – ‘ride your bike, ride your bike.’

  AHEAD LAY MANY ordeals at There Cycling’s wheel-trueing jig, but to cleanse my soul in preparation for these I now belatedly decamped to my training retreat. This state-of-the-art facility featured an exercise bike and a big telly, and was handily located in our loft. With a forty-eight-tooth chainring to power, I apparently had an awful lot of physical conditioning to do, and it is no exaggeration to say that in the following weeks I did some of it.

  The cornerstone of my regime – in fact, all its other stones, plus its roof, front door and windows – was pedalling along to live coverage of real bicycle races. The 2012 Giro d’Italia kicked off on 5 May – in Denmark, obviously – and I was in the saddle from the prologue onwards, reacquainting my legs with prolonged rotary exertion and my loins with the unsettling sanitary-pad sensation of a chamois-cushioned gusset. I threw open the Velux, stripped down to shorts, socks and shoes, and lined up water-filled bidons on a bike-side table. What a stirring training-montage video sequence it would have made. I was there, spinning away furiously, when Mark Cavendish came horribly to grief at 70kmh near the end of stage three, eventually wobbling over the line with his left leg looking ready for a butcher’s window. I was there when he somehow recovered to win the following bunch sprint. Up in the saddle and forcing round the pedals with the magnetic-resistance knob set to max, I was there for the ‘queen stage’ – a fearsome multi-Alp parcours that climaxed atop the 2,800m Stelvio Pass, a climb that pretty much did for me when I’d tackled it
nine years previously, at the wheel of a Peugeot 206.

  However, I wasn’t always there. In fact, never once did I manage to complete more than three hours of any single stage – it was simply too dull. Beyond my manifold physical shortcomings, I was if anything more troubled by a total inability to match the peloton’s relentless focus: my self-discipline was feeble and my powers of internal motivation seemingly nonexistent. I’d get distracted by the gorgeous scenery, or the race doctor’s absurdly voluminous hair, then at misty-eyed length gaze down and note that my legs had stopped turning. And if the choice was an hour on the exercise bike up in the attic or an entire afternoon staring gormlessly at bits of La Française-Diamant on the patio, gormless staring won out every time.

  I tried at first to keep a pedalling tempo sympathetic to Eurosport’s enthusiastic main commentator – Will anyone catch the big Dane? I don’t think they will, I don’t think they can! – but inexorably fell into step with the unexcitable, often unintelligible monotone of his ex-pro sidekick Sean Kelly. How fun it was trying to square Kelly’s feats of tarmac-ripping indomitability as the hardest of the 1980s hardmen with the faltering Gaelic-zombie mumble that earns him his living today. When Sean said a rider was ‘uh, majorly suffering there’ – as he did at least a dozen times every stage – he summoned all the vocal drama of Melvyn Bragg humming ‘Blue Monday’. I tried to majorly suffer, really I did, but the image of Sean’s great Easter Island head lolling towards the microphone put lead in my pedals. It didn’t help that the space between me and my televised fellow riders was entirely filled by an open sofa bed strewn with squashy pillows.

  As my virtual Giro petered out, I attempted to put a positive spin on its multiple disappointments. Twelve years before, I had set off to ride the Tour de France route with about 19 training miles in my legs. Wouldn’t it be fascinating, I told myself, to find out if a man of my advanced years could still get away with doing almost no preparation for a mammoth physical undertaking? Fascinating and perhaps of ground-breaking medical significance. One man’s monumental laziness is another’s bold and selfless scientific experiment.

  My training schedule was flatlining, and the restoration programme now suffered two reversals. I was in Jim’s workshop one afternoon, on my knees with the figure-of-eight wheel wedged in his trueing jig, when Lance popped in.

  ‘Of course authenticity is important,’ he said, frowning at the wheel, and the stack of mismatched spokes I was preparing to cajole into it. ‘But so is comfort and safety.’ He stooped to inspect the rim. ‘Is that woodworm?’ I told him I thought it might be. Lance drew himself upright and tugged the cuffs of his immaculate overcoat straight. ‘I love a risk, but I wouldn’t ride on those rims down to the shops, let alone all round fucking Italy.’

  A second opinion was waiting in my inbox when I came home. One of Jim’s regular customers, concerned by what he kept seeing me try to achieve on the trueing jig, had put me in touch with Harry Rowland, doyen of British wheelbuilders. I’d emailed Harry some photos of my wayward wooden rims, along with the old spokes and nipples. His response was succinct: ‘Last wood rims I built was twenty-five to thirty years ago but even then I had problems. Looking at what you have there I would go for new spokes and nipples and definitely new rims.’

  I accepted these expert verdicts with a heavy heart. My quest for slavish replication was over: my hundred-year-old bike would not be 100 per cent authentic. Two days later this percentage took a rather more serious hit. I’d emailed Roger Rivière some update photos, proudly showing off the repainted frame and close-ups of rejuvenated components, and received a brief reply requesting a photo of the La Française-Diamant badge affixed to the bike. This was a pièce-de-résistance ceremony I’d wanted to save for last, but offering up that golden starburst to its home on the head tube for Roger’s benefit I grasped the full and horrid significance of his enquiry. The rivet gaps on the rear of the badge completely failed to align with the requisite little mounting holes in the frame. I clattered out a panicky email, to which Roger responded with a gentle enquiry: had I noticed the word stamped into the cranks and saddle? I had indeed, but my assumption that ‘BRILLANT’ denoted a top-of-the-range La Française-Diamant model was now Rogered to death: Brillant, he explained, was an entirely unrelated manufacturer of complete bicycles.

  I Googled it and found myself presented with promotional posters of Brillants in period environments. The era was right but the scenarios were not. LFD adverts had depicted Garin and other moustachioed ‘giants of the road’ barrelling around banked velodromes or smoothly outsprinting rivals at a crowd-thronged stage finish. A Brillant, on the other hand, seemed pitched at the easygoing customs official with a lot of windmills to gaze at. The only poster to depict a Brillant in action showed one being piloted by a terrified caricature strongly suggestive of Kenny from South Park. There was no online evidence of a Brillant cycling team, or that any Brillant had ever been competitively raced.

  I shuffled wanly out to the patio, and looked at my bike through new eyes, the eyes of a less gullible imbecile. Of course that saddle – broad enough for a shot-putter’s arse and stretched over a monumental double-sprung chassis – wasn’t a racing saddle. The same went for those weighty, indestructible cranks, and the handlebars, distinctly more sit-up-and-beg than head-down-and-hurtle. Roger and I had both been confused by Max’s bewildering assortment of stuff, and deceived by his warm credibility. The old dog had sold me a pup.

  ‘Fuck-trumpets’ seemed as good a word as any to describe this development, though I also tried out a number of loud alternatives. All that time invested, all that acid infused, spilt and inhaled, all that hard sodding cash spent – on a pig-iron clunker built to lug some fat-faced district nurse about her rounds. But I was in too deep now, and no amount of garden swearing could get me out of it. I’d have to make the best of this very bad job, and get the bike formerly known as LFD back on the road and primed for the creaky, cumbersome sloth it was designed for. Bloody Brillant.

  *

  The history of transport is bound up with the twin human urges to invent, then recklessly compete. The horse and cart swiftly begat the chariots of Ben Hur. When dragon boats first raced on the Yangtze, over 2,500 years ago, fatalities were obligatory: if nobody fell overboard and drowned, crews put down their paddles and pelted each other with rocks until someone stopped breathing. In 1784, just months after the Montgolfier brothers launched a sheep, a duck and a cockerel into the Versailles sky, an inaugural balloon race for over-venturesome humans was held at Heveningham Hall in Suffolk. As the prevailing wind would have swiftly ferried competitors beyond the coast of the North Sea, it’s perhaps no surprise to find history drawing an embarrassed veil over the outcome.

  So it was with the velocipede – the ‘speedy foot’ whose very name implied something racier than just a practical means of getting about. The first bicycle was patented in 1818 by Baron Karl von Drais, in response to a famine that had decimated Germany’s horse population. His pedalless ‘Draisine hobby horse’ was propelled by pushing those aristocratic tippy-toes against the ground, a prancingly foolish spectacle that would have raised louder chuckles in the upper Rhine valleys if von Drais hadn’t been collecting taxes on behalf of the local Grand Duke. And with unparalleled haste: the Draisine was clocked at an ear-bleeding 12mph, enough to have it banned from the streets of Karlsruhe by a terrified citizenry.

  The baron’s invention sparked off a velocipede craze that swept through Europe and the US in 1819. The ‘dandy horse’ was so nicknamed in honour of its popularity with the fast young ponce about town, venting his Mr Toad tendency and wearing out his boot soles in lunatic pedestrian-slalom speed trials along city pavements. One London manufacturer sold 320 in the first few months of the year, and ran two riding schools in Soho and the Strand. But hefty £2 fines for dangerous riding, ratcheting public abuse and unsustainable cobblers’ bills killed the dandy horse off in a year.

  For half a century the velocipede receded from mem
ory, a pioneering false dawn in personal transport later emulated by heroic, ridicule-resistant early adopters of the Sinclair C5 and the Segway. It wasn’t until 1867 that a Parisian blacksmith, tinkering with an antique hobby horse in his workshop off the Champs-Elysées, made the advance that overnight transformed this defunct prannet’s plaything into a rapid utilitarian conveyance. By the standards of steam-age engineering, Pierre Michaux’s innovation wasn’t exactly Rocket science: taking inspiration from the handles that rotated his grindstone, he stuck a couple of iron cranks on the hobby horse’s front axle, and bolted pedals to them. The boneshaker was born, and almost immediately put to breakneck competitive use.

  The first races were held before the year was out, and in November 1868 several thousand spectators packed into a Bordeaux park to watch the inaugural women’s championship (after a ‘superhuman effort’ on the home straight, Mademoiselle Julie overhauled Mademoiselle Louise and won by a nose). Even before Michaux’s new firm organised the first international velocipede race in 1869, the need for two-wheeled speed had already claimed its first fatality: a fifteen-year-old boy lost control of his boneshaker on a steep valley, plunging straight into the Rhone and drowning.

  This tragedy and the others that swiftly followed exerted precisely no moderating influence: however fast you rode a boneshaker, it was never fast enough. Proposed braking systems were laughed off drawing boards around Europe in the quest to squeeze more speed from Michaux’s design. The principal drawback of his propulsive mechanism was that every full revolution of the pedals corresponded to a full revolution of the front wheel to which they were fixed. Try to get any sort of speed up on a toddler’s trike and you will understand this limiting correlation, before being asked to leave the playground. Boneshakers in consequence featured steadily larger front wheels – not yet penny-farthings, but certainly 10p-5ps. The advent of steel spokes opened the way for massively huger rims, and thus massively faster machines. And so the development of the bicycle was once again hijacked by cocksure speed-merchants. Penny-farthings were self-evidently difficult and dangerous to get on, let alone ride – but they were fast, and that was all that mattered.