This is from Avi, who ended up being the poster boy for that edition of the Champs.
“Two NY guys thought we should skip the formalities and hand the prize to them. They rolled in on tricked out race bikes, and it was obvious they weren’t riding their “work bikes” as the rules specified, but nobody really gave a shit about things like that. They ripped on my fellow Bostonians for staying out ’til 6 am in East Berlin the night before the race. (Uh, it’s a MESSENGER race, in BERLIN! What, are you gonna come home telling everyone you were tucked in bed the night before?) I remember being very happy to beat both of them.”
I first heard about Rebecca Reilly sometime in 1995. I can’t remember where or from whom I heard the story. Perhaps it was Markus Cook, unofficial leader of the San Francisco Bicycle Messenger Association, who first told me of her. The tale was that there was a female messenger who was making a journey across the United States, visiting cities where there were messengers, living and working in each city in turn. And that she was writing a book, a collection of messenger experiences. She was reputed to be hard and fast. I was told that she was going to come to the 1995 Cycle Messenger World Championships in Toronto and win.
I didn’t get to meet her in TO, for various reasons, but when I went to SF the following year to visit Andy Capp, who had got married to a US citizen and moved there so Heather’s baby would be a US citizen
I was near Market Street, uptown somewhere near the Wall, when I saw this bare-armed messenger careering down a hill, fixed, no-brakes. As she got closer, I could see that she was female, and that she was missing front teeth. I knew, somehow, that she must be Rebecca. It was one of the meetings that Erik Zo, SF messenger bag maker, describes as the Great Dispatcher doing a good job. I hailed her, and she skidded to a stop. She knew who I was, too, somehow.
The above is from a blog post on the Moving Target site written way back in 2006. When I wrote it, that meeting felt a long time ago; now it feels like ancient history. To preserve the memory of events like the above, and many other, much more significant, events in messenger history, Rebecca has started an oral history podcast, in which she interviews exengers & others that she views as significant to that history. The podcast series is called ‘What’s My 20?’ and I recommend it.
Ironically, almost the same week that I posted the article about Ozone’s defamation of the IFBMA, she posted an interview with Ozone. She is more sympathetic to Ozone’s point of view than I am, but that’s OK. Even though we were friends and comrades, we didn’t always agree with each other about everything – in fact we sometimes disagreed with each other quite strongly.
After those posts we finally hooked up for a series of long conversations about everything from fixies to my little sister’s political career, which was much, much longer than the published pod. Somehow Rebecca found the patience to edit down those conversations into something more or less coherent. You can find all the episodes here. I don’t endorse the ‘legendary’ bit. I don’t especially like being described as a legend. In fact, I’d go further & say that it’s annoying and if anybody describes me as a legend (and there have been many) should give me £1 for each time they have done so & £10 if it’s done in print (Jon, Matt & Emily, I’m looking at you). I’ll give Rebecca a one-time discount and make it a pint of beer, for old time’s sake.
I can not claim that I was there at the beginning of messenger history. That would be ridiculous. One of the first notable and, in my view, heroic messengers in recorded history was Pheidippides, who delivered the happy news of the victory of Marathon and then died, thousands of years before I was born. Rudyard Kipling erroneously alluded to sex-work being ‘the oldest profession’, (it was probably tool-makers) but the rise of civilisations and empires in the fourth millennia BCE (six thousand years ago) was reliant on the development of a civil service, for the chattels of the ruling castes must be counted, and the results of the accounting would have been transmitted to the rulers via a network of state controlled messengers. According to the Wikipedia entry ‘History of Writing’, the following is an excerpt from a Sumerian poem recounting the events of the era: “because the messenger’s mouth was heavy and he couldn’t repeat (the message), the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay”. I’m not going to give a potted history of messengers as Rebecca Reilly provided a much more extensive and better researched version in her book, Nerves Of Steel, and also I am here concerned with messenger history of far more recent times, specifically the history of Cycle Messenger Championships (CMC hereafter).
It’s a deep dive into stuff of very little importance that happened over twenty years ago. So be warned: it’s beyond niche. Most people will have little interest in any of this.
Why am I writing this now, after so long?
Over the past few months a ridiculous but seriously unpleasant campaign of slander, abuse and misogyny has been waged by Michael ‘Ozone’ Odom against the representatives of the international messenger community, which is the International Federation Bicycle Messenger Associations (IFBMA hereafter). It has included personal abuse, lies and threats of legal action. I have hesitated to address this campaign in public because I had not wished to dignify this nonsense with a response. I have tried to engage with Ozone in private, to see if his grievances could be resolved without an almighty public slanging match, but he has made it clear that he finds my interventions entirely unwelcome. In a now deleted thread on an internet forum, he described me as: “Bafoon Bill”, which is pretty funny, and at least original, but there was a whole load of other less amusing stuff about being a white man on a white charger riding to the aid of a damsel (the principle object of his abuse is a woman).
His principle claim is that he is the founder of the IFBMA, and his part in its history was consciously erased by nefarious actors using the name of the IFBMA as a cloak for their plot to supplant Ozone as the rightfully heralded Father Of The International Messenger Community. He has thrown in some claims about this plot being possibly overtly designed to obscure the rôle of Minority Ethnic messengers in creating the IFBMA.
To me, this is a very tortured version of the old ‘not a real messenger’ thing. As in, you’re not a real messenger if you don’t ride fixie-no-brakes, if you have worked for less than 5 years, if you work in a city where it’s not necessary to lock your bike, if you haven’t worked in more than one city and so on and so forth. Some of my former colleagues would say that they weren’t messengers but were actually couriers, but that’s more of the same to me. I know that advent of food apps have blurred what it means to be a messenger / courier, and I remember most of my North American colleagues would never have considered the food delivery guys (yes, food delivery by bicycle existed before the iPhone) to be brethren (Chirping’ Chicken, anyone?) but to me a working cyclist is a working cyclist. But anyway.
As a response to Ozone’s calumnies, I am first going to set down what I remember about messenger events and the development of the IFBMA in the 90s. This stuff happened 25 – 30 years ago, so my memories are not necessarily reliable, but I am able to refer to contemporaneous accounts, some written by me, some written by others.
The First Cycle Messenger Championships
The first CMC was held in Berlin in 1993. I was working in the office, or on the road, at Security Despatch sometime in 1992 when we received a letter from The International Federation of Cycle Messengers and Companies (IFCMC hereafter), announcing that the I. CMC would be held in Berlin the following year. We said, wow, that sounds interesting, and then promptly forgot about it until the following, was it May?, can’t remember exactly, when we got a second message, and then we said, oh shit, it’s really happening, and got our act together and got out to Berlin. The event was amazing.
I am not going to write too much about the event, (my own report for a UK cycling magazine is here). To briefly summarise, we met a whole lot of people like us from other countries, slept I can’t remember where, raced, hung out and drank beer. Andy Capp and I had swapped bikes, so I was riding his fixie and he was riding my road-bike, which meant that I was made part of the very small affinity-group of fixed people at the CMC: Eric & Steve from D.C., Erik Zo from S.F. and Andi from Berlin.
Cycle Messenger Championship 1993 article – James Moore is the rider – photo: Kenny Brown
The night before the races there was a reception for the teams in the hall by the camp-grounds where some of us were staying. Various people were celebrated on stage, including Ozone and James ‘The General’ Moore. Achim Beier, organiser in chief of the CMC and MC of the party, made a big fuss of these two, crediting them with inspiring him to organise the CMC after meeting with them in Washington Square Park in New York City.
Achim said something like, and I heard him retell this story a few times, that he was amazed to be able to go to a completely different city and find that he had a bond with a foreign stranger because they were all bicycle messengers. This would have been a long time before bicycle messengers or anyone, really, used the internet to make friends across continents with people who had interests in common. And, even now that billions of people are able to reach like-minded persons, there is something really cool about meeting in real life people you have only interacted with via message-boards and other forms of social media.
I can not remember when this momentous (for Achim and, by extension, all the participants in I. CMC) meeting took place but it must have been before we got that fax in 1992 and, given that Achim started his company messenger Berlin (the ‘m’ was always lower case in all the logos I ever saw) in ’90 or ’91, must have been after ’90. What Achim’s mind was blown by was that Ozone, then working for messenger Berlin, had been a messenger in D.C., and James was a NYC messenger and they knew each other. Ozone says on his Instagram that he started the 1% club in D.C. with another courier called Suicide, which was an informal social gathering for DC messengers. They had a regular ride up to NYC for the NY Century, which is how the D.C. crew made contact with the NYC messengers. Or something like that.
I heard from other DC messengers, for instance, Larry Parks & Scrooge, about this ride, which sounded epic then & now, and I had a look in Rebecca’s book ‘Nerves Of Steel’ at the section on DC, which was published in 2000, and, sure enough, Ozone & Suicide are name-checked in the various oral accounts. In other words, Ozone & Suicide were legends in their own messenger community for organising cool events that connected D.C. messengers with messengers in other cities.
It was the idea of connecting messengers globally that inspired Achim to organise the CMC. Inside Germany there were already networks of courier companies, so contacting them to invite them to the event was merely a question of consulting the company rolodex. His messenger Berlin employee Stefan Klessman must have done a lot of the work of finding addresses outside of Germany.
Messengers and companies in cities all over Europe and North America were reached. Achim said that over 200 people from 20 countries participated in the event. Exactly how their contact list was compiled I am not able to tell you. I was given access to their list the following year and I can tell you it was long, but obviously with significant gaps in the global South, something that Stefan constantly emphasised.
Achim had realised his dream, and the international messenger community was born. In my view, and that of most fair-minded people, that makes Achim the father of the international messenger community, no matter where his inspiration came from. At the end of the event, I remember everybody asking, “where’s the next one? What happens next year?” There was some talk of Toronto hosting the event in 1995, but there was nothing about 1994.
The London crew didn’t even consider the possibility of organising a CMC at all, never mind in 1994.
Cycle Messenger World Championships, London, 1994
And then the fax arrived from Berlin, in the name of the IFCMC, announcing to us that the event, now called the Cycle Messenger World Championships (CMWC hereafter), was to be held in London, August 1994. This was a complete surprise to us in London and requires some explanation then and now. The CMC, although organised through a sporting club, which was financially responsible for the event, and therefore at arms length from messenger Berlin, had made a large loss.
So when Achim was approached by a London PR company with an offer to pay for the right to stage the event in London, he felt that he had no choice but to accept. Whether or not the club or the company actually retained the rights to license the event I am not absolutely sure, but that the rights were held by Berlin was the impression that we were given. Afterwards, I can’t remember any occasion where Achim mentioned that the rights were legally held by anybody except the messenger community itself. As part of the deal, Achim insisted that we, the representatives of the London messenger community, were to be fully involved as consultants in order that the event was organised in the correct messenger spirit. We met with Achim, and then we all met with the people that were supposed to organise the event and off we went.
Except they didn’t. We heard nothing for some weeks from the ‘organisers’, and began to get a little anxious what might or might not happen. By this time, we had gone from scepticism to enthusiam, and were concerned about the lack of activity or even communication from the ‘organisers’. Achim got in touch, and came over to London. My recollection is of hanging out with him in Burgess Park on a summer’s day, so maybe, June? The CMWC was scheduled for the middle of August. Time was short. Achim told us that he had cancelled the agreement with the ‘organisers’ and gave us the go ahead to organise it ourselves.
Erik Zo winning the cargo bike race – photo: Steve Levy
Again, so much was written at the time about the event that I am not going to write about here, at distance of nearly 30 years. I have included some press stuff and the cover of MT from way back then. Suffice to say that the event was life-changing for me and others, and we managed the organisation side of it by the seat of our pants. That is to say, we hadn’t a clue what we were doing most of the time, but we just about held it together and the event was more or less successful, despite some moments of complete chaos. We were overwhelmed mentally, emotionally and physically by the demands of the event.
And now the question of who controlled the event, in the sense of who decided where the next events would be held, was beginning to become salient. The Toronto messengers had come in force to London, and had been crucial to the organisation of the event. Of course, London messengers, friends and, in my case, family, provided essential support but undoubtedly the willingness of the TO crew to muck in & help out provided moral and physical encouragement to us when we, inevitably, suffered moments of doubt and weakness, was inspirational to us. Other people and city crews were also incredibly helpful and inspirational, but I mention the TO crew in particular because of what was to happen the following year.
They appeared to have every intention of successfully organising the event in TO in 1995. People outside of London & Berlin were aware that there had been a change of organisers in between the announcement of the venue and the actual event in London. This led to the question of, well, who actually is in charge of the CMC / CMWC? Achim said that it was the IFCMC, which meant him and Stefan, and they realised that the IFCMC needed to have a broader leadership group than just the two of them, so they convened a council consisting Boris, the London Race Captain & organiser, and myself from London, Eric the Commander from D.C., Erik Zo from S.F., Stefan Klessman and himself. The arrangement was not at all inclusive or representative, but it was presented as a fait accompli. In another fait accompli, the IFCMC Council awarded the 95 Champs to TO. ‘Red’ Nic, as organiser, received written confirmation that his company had the authority to organise CMWC 1995 in TO.
My recollection is that iteration of the IFCMC Council did not meet again after that thunderous night (literally: an electric storm broke as we were having the meeting in one of the still standing dock warehouses) in London. The IFCMC seemed an irrelevance, as we had no mandate, other than that we had awarded ourselves. Boris & I resigned from the council, saying in conclusion, “in all honesty, we would rather follow the SF model and have the IFCMC form as the IFBMA. No leaders & anyone can be a member at any time. Thus the IFBMA would be a front that anyone could use when necessary.”
CMWC 1995 Toronto
Photo: Steve Levy
And so to Toronto. Toronto was significant because it was the first Mess Champs that was conceived and organised by local messengers. I’m not saying that Achim wasn’t a real messenger, but, by the time he had decide to organise the CMC, he was the boss of a large messenger company and had resources to draw on, e.g. office-space, photo-copier, dedicated phone line for the fax-machine, access to business networks. The situation of the TO crew was very different.
Sarah Hood provided PR support free of charge, bless her, but they lacked everything else. We in London had some help from the original so-called organisers because they had booked the venue, (the Royal Docks), and we are able to steal photo-copying and faxes from one of our employers, but the TO crew had to do everything from scratch, apart from having access to the now expanded contact list and considerable word-of-mouth awareness amongst the international messsenger community of the event. Despite ‘Red’ Nic’s attempts to turn the CMWC into a proper commercial sports events, with a budget to support a ‘professional’ organisation, it was the same as ’94 – a grass-roots event run on the thinnest of shoe-strings, albeit with an international dimension.
CMWC 95 was also significant because it was the first Mess Champs in North America, which meant that the North American messenger community was in a majority for the first time. Those who had never been to such an event duly had their minds blown. We all hung out, drank beer, and did stupid things on bikes. (Once again, I wrote extensively at the time, so see here, here, here, and here, as I’m not going to recap.) There was a large contingent from San Francisco, many more than had come to Berlin & London, and one of their leaders, Markus Cook, publicly announced their intention to organise CMWC ’96 in SF on the Sunday night, to the loud approbation of the large crowd.
Who decides?
My recollection isn’t clear enough to be sure, but I think that Achim pulled Markus and I aside immediately after. My memory is that we had an impromptu meeting under a trailer. I can’t remember who else was there, if anyone, and Achim announced that he was organising a bid to host in New York City in 1996. Earlier in the year, Trèvol, a messenger coop based in Barçelona, had proposed that they would organise CMWC 1997 in Barça.
The question: “who controls CMWC? Who decides?” had become pressing. Also, the question of what should a CMWC be?, was also being raised. Everyone agreed future events needed to be better organised. But some saw a pathway to inclusion in the Olympics or the X-Games, with promises of serious rewards & recognition to the racers, rather than a home-made trophy, a hang-over and a pocketful of love and memories.
Achim’s proposal was very much in the former, promising big ticket sponsors (free plane trips for competitors!) and a race-course on closed roads in Manhattan. SF had nothing down on paper. On the other hand, their (SF) proposal had been made publicly and had been approved vocally and loudly.
Nothing was resolved by the ‘meeting’ under the trailer. There was another meeting the following day and it was agreed that nothing had been agreed about where CMWC ’96 was going to be. The SF crew were really upset by what was an ambush by Achim, even if it was not intended as such.
A process was agreed, which I can hardly bring myself to describe, because it was so unnecessary and such a total waste of everyone’s time. Essentially, Achim foisted a committee of ‘grown-ups’ on us (according to his narrative, the ‘children’ had tried and failed to organise a successful CMWC in TO, and this could not be allowed to happen again) to decide where CMWC ’96 would be. The committee consisted of: Achim; Howard Williams (an actual messenger but also then US head of the charity Afghan Amputee Bicyclists for Rehabilitation and Recreation) of SF; Lisa Byrne (boss of Creative Couriers, who I then worked for) of London; Oriol Salas (an actual messenger) of Trèvol, Barçelona; James Moore (an actual working messenger) of New York. The two cities, NYC & SF, would submit bids to the committee and then the committee would decide.
The recriminations started immediately after everyone had got home. I still have in my IFCMC box file (see, I always knew that keeping all this stuff for decades was worth it!) a hand-written note from Howard setting out his objections to the process. The killer line was from Omara Khan, one of AABRAR’s employees, who had been in TO: “the people supported San Francisco on Sunday night. There was no objection. Why is there now a problem?”
At this point, most of the communication between the various messenger city communities took place by letter, fax and, very occasionally, if it was international, phone calls – not by mobile phone – none of us had one! Very few people had access to email and people did not browse the Web. This made coordinating anything internationally in real time pretty much impossible for the average messenger – even international faxes cost money.
But some of us did have email, and after CMWC 1995 the messenger email list began to become the most important means of communication within the international messenger community, which it remained well into this century. All of the various lists that existed on the various servers have been archived on the website of the late, great, Bega. Yet again, I find myself grateful to Bega’s selflessness. Miss you lots, man.
There then followed weeks of toing-and-froing about ’96. I met with Achim, Stefan & Grey (a SF messenger then working in Berlin) and we talked and talked (meetings: take minutes, last hours). In the end, Achim went out to SF, literally banged his head on the Golden Gate Bridge and eventually bowed to the inevitable: he withdrew the NYC bid and, finally, SF got to host CMWC ’96.
CMWC ’96 & The Open Forum
After all that nonsense, the SFBMA had to get their shit together and actually organise the event. In January, Marcus Cook died. This was unbelievable, shocking, but meant that the SFBMA crew redoubled their efforts.
As well as organising for the CMWC, people were also thinking about who should control the CMWC, and how should this control be validated. As Barçelona had already been selected to host 1997, there was no need to spend time on selecting the host for the following year. No-one wanted a repeat of what had happened in ’95.
The feeling was that the event belonged to the participants, whether volunteer organisers or competitors. The event was about more than who was the fastest on the day. Messenger culture’s growing celebration of DFL (Dead F*cking Last), which I think was originally an SF thing, showed that. There were still some that wanted the event to become some sort of pro sport, but most participants came because it was a fun event to be part of. You could not have a Messenger Championships without racing, but the racing was less important than the hanging out and drinking beer.
It was decided that there would be an Open Forum on Tuesday 3rd September, after the event had finished. The first Monday in September is Labor Day in the US, and is a public holiday, so the SFBMA held the event over 3 days. The Open Forum would be open to all who wanted to come together to discuss the future of the CMWC.
Full Metal Basket!
The event itself was amazing. There were some glitches and some bitching by people who should have known better, but as far as most people were concerned, it was the best Champs yet. Once again, I wrote up the event for a magazine, so if you want to read it, you can find it here, here and here. And on the Tuesday those of us that wanted to, and were still in town, went to the Open Forum.
The minutes of the Forum are in the archive, for those that can be bothered to read them, here. You need to scroll down to find them. As far as I know, the accuracy of the notes have never been disputed. It’s only a shame that there isn’t a list of attendees. There probably is somewhere, but I can’t find it. [Edit: of course, Joel Metz had the list. Thanks Joel!] I can tell you that Achim wasn’t there, as he wasn’t able to come to CMWC ’96.
The key paragraphs are as follows:
We no longer consider the IFCMC as “founded” in London by Achim et al to be any kind of overseeing, mandating kind of mother/father body. We consider the group of people at the forum to comprise the decision making body of the CMWC at this time. We assumed this position because we all chose to come to the meeting and make decisions. This is not a set body, but will vary from year to year depending on who shows up at similar forums. We dont have a name for this body [sic].
As this blog post has gone for so long, I am going to skip on to the Barçelona Open Forum, 1997, where it was decided that the name for the organisation that controls the CMWC host city selection would be the International Federation of Bicycle Messenger Associations. Here’s the key paragraph:
DECISIONS: The IFBMA (International Federation of Bike Messenger Associations) now exists.
Helpfully, there IS a list of attendees. One name stands out by its absence, at least in the context of what Ozone has been screaming the house down about: yeah, Michael ‘Ozone’ Odom. In fact, after 1994, I don’t remember seeing Ozone at ANY CMWC at all, and I went to all of them between 1993 and 2002. Maybe he was there and I missed him but I doubt it.
Based on what I have written above, Ozone’s central claim, which he is the OG founder of the IFBMA, is totally false. He may have a point about under-representation of Minority Ethnic messengers. I can only see Scrooge (DC) & Hodari Depalm (NYC) on the list. It is an overwhelmingly white and male list. Ok, we probably should have done more to change that. But it’s a bit of stretch to claim that, based on what was a bit of irresponsible editing by a thoughtless CPH messenger, ME messenger history was deliberately erased. Absolute f***ing bullshit, in fact.
As to his claim that the 1% club was the first messenger crew to think of reaching out beyond their own city, this is also nonsense. Zero, who pre-dated me as a London messenger (he would called himself a courier) writer, was in contact with Bob McGlynn from New York, who was an organiser of the Independent Courier Association, which successfully fought Ed Koch’s mid-town bike ban. (BTW, in his obit that I linked to above, it says that Bob McGlynn proudly called himself the “King of All Bicycle Messengers.” Oh, the irony.) In my files, I have an original ICA newsletter dated Dec ’89. Click here, if you don’t believe me. My old messenger ‘zine Moving Target and its SF equivalent, Mercury Rising, were swapping articles in 1992. When I met Markus in Berlin ’93, it was pretty cool, as we had only exchanged paper correspondence up until that point.
Finally, if all this messenger stuff was oh, so important to you, where the hell have you been? Your narrative is all about what happened in the early 90s and seems to stop at Berlin 1993, as if that event was the beginning and end of messenger culture. You may have been a central figure in ’93, but so much has happened since within the international messenger community, that what happened then is barely relevant now. And I say that as someone who is likewise barely relevant to the messenger community now. That is not false modesty, that’s the truth.
By all means, please do go along to the next IFBMA meeting and pitch in and help. But do so in the spirit of community, not because you want to assure your place in messenger history as the OG whatever-it-is. No-one should care that much about their own place in ‘history’. You’re making yourself look stupid, petty and egotistical and some of the stuff you have written is vile.
Updated: Rebecca Reilly has interviewed Ozone for her podcast. The transcript and podcast is here.
I edited this post after I posted it for grammar, spelling and clarity.
We woke up on the morning of the time-trial of le Tour de France in our tents pitched by a roundabout about 1500 metres from the finish line in Combloux. Breakfast was a minor fiasco. Sam & I had separately bought a melon each two days before in Morestel, intending to have a fruitful breakfast. The following morning, Sam had cleverly started cutting up ‘his’ melon before I had had a chance to whip mine out, thereby forcing me to manfully shoulder the melon burden for an extra day. However, when it came time for me to display my obviously superior knife-work (see, I was shown how to use an Opinel on a melon when I was barely out of nappies), the well-travelled melon was nowhere to be found. Possibly I had left it on the side when I was repacking so that I could fit in all the booze we bought at the supermarket the night before. Much wailing & gnashing of teeth on my part, much merriment on the part of my riding companions, and schadenfreude on the part of Mark Hill. I will only say this to Mark: my melon achieved a pointless elevation gain of about half of yours, and what’s more, as you pointed out, it probably weighed about half of yours. So ner.
Combloux is on the south side side of the valley that leads up to Chamonix, with spectacular views in all directions. The evening before a local pointed out the highlights of the panorama away to our right, lit up by the sunset to the most beautiful effect: l’Aguille du Midi, le Dôme du Goûter and, of course, le Mont Blanc, peeping out from behind veils of cloud.
We were in the heart of Savoie, the département of the high Alps. Places like Megéve, Saint-Gervais-les-Bains and Chamonix did not need to be placed on the map of France by le Tour in same way that, say, l’Alpe d’Huez did when it was first built in the early fifties. The first ascent of le Mont Blanc was made in the late 18th century, and the area was already famous as a centre for practising winter sports before le Tour visited in 1911. I know that not everyone who has ever skied was or is rich but, especially in the first half of the 20th century, having sufficient leisure time and money to be able to travel to the Alps to spend time skiing means that it was a pretty exclusive milieu, at least to begin with, and the Chamonix-Mont-Blanc area reflects that history.
View towards Chamonix, which is behind the mountain centre-right foreground. L’Aguille du Midi is slightly obscured to the upper right. Pretty spectacular.
Saint-Gervais, in particular, oozes exclusivity and wealth. This part of the Alps could be (and probably is) a case study of the effects of holiday homes and gentrification on rural deomgraphics. I doubt that many dairy farmers live in or near St-Gervais today, for example. Parts of Haute-Savoie can feel a bit snobby, in other words. Not the sort of place that would be the natural home of what was a relatively proletarian pastime such as cycle-sport or even cyclo-tourisme.
L’Alpe d’Huez & le Bourg d’Oisans fully embrace their iconic status within cycle-sport, welcoming with open arms the hundreds of thousands of cycling enthusiasts that visit every summer, as well as being a proper ski station in the winter. Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, on the other hand, well, I sometimes get the feeling that when le Tour visits the general attitude is something like, oh what? Not you lot again.
I am probably being a little unfair, but it’s fair to say that the prices in some of the local shops and bars are not at all inclusive. On the other hand, I do not know what Combloux paid ASO, organisers of the le Tour, in order to host a stage finish of such importance, but whatever it was, the locals went all out to make each and everyone of us very welcome and to show its best possible face to the world. The bar from which we bought the pitcher above (one of many pitchers we bought that day) was staffed entirely by volunteer locals and was still open for business long after Vingegaard crossed the line. The following morning, the normal le Tour clean-up operation was supplemented by locals out with bin-bags, making sure that the parcours was spotless.
ASO’s schedule had the la Caravane publicitaire passing us around midday and the first rider at twenty to two. I was up and dressed around eight and this Danish family had already bagged a top viewing spot on the roundabout by eight thirty. Around four hours before the CP, five and a half hours before the first rider and a full nine hours before Vingegaard’s scheduled arrival.
Waiting for Jonas. The Danes got up early.
There would be nothing to do many hours before the action proper started. I had absolutely no intentions, zero desire, to ride any part of the course. I cannot stress enough how much I did not want to ride anywhere. Even though the conventional approach to the rest day (this was ours) is to ride the bike a little, I was too fried to want to. It was still too early to start drinking beer; I know it’s the breakfast of champions and all that, and I can hear some of my friends saying, oh Bill, you’ve changed, but I would have been passed out hours before the top ten GC even got to the start ramp. Fortunately, on a really big day in the Alps, people watching never gets boring. It helped that we were right by a gendarme who couldn’t really decide whether our spot was an official crossing point or not. His ever more infuriated scolding of unauthorised entry into the official parcours was entertaining, as was his language. Much use of “bordel”, “idiot”, “putain” etc and so on. Speaking of bad language, I learnt a very rude appellation from someone in a semi-official hi-viz: “connasse-dieu!” An inexact translation might be ‘king c***’ or ‘massive w*nker’.
We bagsied this spot early on in the day, not wanting to be out-done by the Danes. Who’s laughing at the picnic blanket now, eh?
Most spectators eschewed our section because of the barriers and gendarmes, preferring to head down past them to the steeper sections of la côte de Domancy, so they could indulge in the sorts of stupid behaviours that would have got them a serious talking-to from the hi-viz-vest-crew (even the gendarmes working on le Tour wear hi-vizs) higher up. That was fine by us: less competition for all the Caravane publicitaire swag. At around 1030, the road was closed completely to everyone, even accredited vehicles, except team cars and riders, causing much consternation in the spectating peloton and much amusement to us: ha! Let’s see you walk downhill on uneven pavement in those cleats, sucker! (To those that think I am being over-contemptuous, I say this: if you wear that ridiculous get-up in anything other than a race situation, you should expect to have the piss taken.)
Go on, off you go and walk down that in your silly clippy-cloppy shoes.
It was time for those riders who wanted to do a ride in the TT to do the recce. Not all riders did a recce. You would only go to the trouble of a recce if you had hopes of doing well in the stage, were involved in the team competition (best 4 times on the stage count), competing for the mountains competition (the steepest part of the climb counted for points) or involved in the fight behind the top two for a place in the top ten, aka the part of the GC rankings that is shown on TV after the stage.
I reckon not more than 50 riders did a recce. Some came past us going at close to race pace, like van Aert, some a little slower and some, like Pogačar, came up going really easy (although still way, way faster than any average person going all-out). Fi’s comment when Sam & I explained what was going on was: why would you ride up a climb twice when you don’t have to? Fi doesn’t like pointless climbs, and the recce was, in her view, the perfect example of a pointless climb. At least none of them, and I’m pretty sure about this, carried an entirely superfluous soft fruit item all the way up.
After that bit of fun, there was a brief hiatus before the CP was due and our gently simmering gendarme decided that it was a semi-official crossing point after all. Well, actually, some hi-viz guy, who had a radio (Monsieur Le Gendarme didn’t, so was clearly was out-ranked in this context) came and told him it was. It took three other guys & MLG five minutes to figure out how to cut the zip-ties and move one barrier. A perfect example of a successful public-private partnership in action.
Yes, that is a man applauding a giant imitation chicken on wheels
Midday rolled around and Sam went to the bar for the beers that he & I had been manfully resisting for hours, whilst we waited for la Caravane Publicitaire to come through. The CP, and the average French person’s reaction to it, is indescribable in any way that might make sense to someone without knowledge of the socio-economic context of the event. Briefly, professional bicycle road-racing is unable to charge road-side spectators for watching the event, so race organisers are forced to raise revenue in other ways. The road-side spectators represent a captive audience, especially on a popular stage like the TT. The CP is a means of monetising that audience (I know that they are mostly seeing but all of the various floats in the commercial carnival have large speakers which are blasting various commercial messages, as well as questionably-sourced music).
Why? Look, I don’t know either
Apart from watching & hearing the floats, staff on board distribute free samples of the goods being advertised, if it was possible to scale them down to a small enough size (sachets of sauce, small packets of sweets) or some trinket or a ‘bob‘ (French for a bucket hat) or a cap if not. When I say distribute, I mean throw. Throw at the spectators. As in 2013, we got the distinct impression that the staff were aiming at our heads. Having had the best part of three weeks to get their eye in, they were pretty good at it. Head-shots or not, the spectators were desperate to get their hands on something, anything (well, maybe not the C21 key-rings). People lose their minds in their hunger for swag, to the extent there are regular collisions between Caravane vehicles and spectators which is why the gendarmes are under instruction to strictly keep people out of the road. Mind you, Sam climbed into the road to get his hands on a LeClerc t-shirt á pois under full view of MLG. His thermostat popped as the steam came out of his ears, and he nearly arrested Sam when he came back across the road. I tried to mollify MLG with the offer of some zip-ties from my tool-roll. He refused, but seemed to calm down to a rolling boil.
Fi sports a bob and a can of her favourite French soft drink – top swag!
The French, whether young or old, really love this free swag. A young girl was moved nearly to tears when I let her have my Krys bob. She thanked me profusely on two separate occasions, much to the amusement of MLG. The following day, an older lady accosted me on the train to ask my where I had got my t-shirt á pois. She told me that she had been unable to obtain one as the LeClerc vans hadn’t been handing out swag where she had been standing. She was obviously angling for an act of charity, but there was no way I was taking my top off on the train and, anyway, Sam had nearly got arrested in the act of securing the shirt. It would have been churlish to give it away to a random little old lady. After ninety minutes of this objectively distasteful and mildly venal spectacle, it was time to watch actual bike racers racing actual bikes up a steep hill. It had already been thirsty work, and the day was only going to get hotter and more arduous. Good job a friendly and inexpensive bar was only metres away.
This photo must have been taken when we were still relatively sober – Sam and I are perusing a copy of the official start list.
The reason that I had chosen this stage over the other twenty was that we would get to see all of the riders left in the race individually and relatively slowly, rather than as part of peloton which passes in seconds. Even at the end of a long mountain stage, the race will pass in less than forty minutes, and the back markers are not generally of interest to the overall race. Grand Tour TTs also build to a nice crescendo, as the last rider on GC starts first and the first rider on GC starts last. There is nowhere to hide in a TT. If a rider is having a not-so-good day, on a mass start stage they are able to hide in the bunch. On a TT stage it will be evident immediately. Also, on such a short and steep stage, elimination because of being hors delai if you take it too easy – a lot of riders without aspirations to win, or at least compete, would take it a little easier on a flat TT, but almost all the riders would have to really kick it all the way through, given the difficulty of the stage, especially as the time cut is calculated as a percentage of the winner’s time and, as the likely winner would be one of the much later starters, the earlier riders would not be able to surf the edge of the cut-off in the way that they would in a road stage, where the winner’s time, and therefore the hors delai time, would be known to the later finishers some way from their finish.
First starter, Lanterne Rouge, Michael Mørkøv
All in all, it meant that we were in for afternoon of watching the world’s best male bike riders riding pretty much as fast as they can. We were checking for updates, but the riders come through so frequently that we weren’t checking enough to know why DSM were having such a disastrous day (two riders showed up late for their start, and two more crashed on the very first corner) – Fi noticed the blood on Degenkolb’s knee, and the other DSM guys just looked slow, which we put down to them using their TT bikes all the way up, rather than switching to their road bikes at the bottom.
Mostly, you could tell who was going well and who wasn’t – after the first twenty or so, you got a sense of what fast and faster was. The catches made it a lot easier. Anyone who had caught the rider in front was easily spotted, if you had the start sheet to hand. Then we looked round to see the caught. There can’t be many worse feelings for a pro bike racer than being caught. They had our sympathies, particularly the guys who had been caught by two riders who started behind them. Wow, what humiliation.
Pinot
We looked out for our own favourites, Pinot & Alaphilippe for me, for the denizens of what was now the Danish roundabout any Dane, who got very vocal & visible support. We noted the various national TT champions (they wear national champions jerseys, as opposed to their regular road jerseys) and commented on who had and who hadn’t taken a bike change and why; noticed who was being followed by a van instead of a ‘proper’ team car, who had more than one car following them, who was being followed by a TV chopper and / or a TV bike, and waited for Van Aert to come through.
Early on we saw one guy go the wrong way (right) round the roundabout, costing himself a couple of seconds – maybe that pointless hill wasn’t so pointless after all – but he was an early starter, so it didn’t seem as if it would matter very much. Much later on, a rider came up towards us on the right (left as we were looking at it) and we started shouting “go left, go left”, but too late: he went right. That DS, we thought, he had one job, ONE JOB, godammit! Van Aert came through, very obviously one of the fastest, if not the fastest. A little while later Pidcock was caught, almost in front of us, for two minutes. What a monster that Gall is, we thought.
Pidcock about to be caught
Top ten, all at least ninety seconds apart. All looking strong and apexing the roundabout. Now every rider had more and more following vehicles. We could hear the arrival of these riders at the top of the Domancy climb below because we could hear the noise of the several thousand people screaming their heads off. First of the Yates brothers, stomping on the pedals where Van Aert had been rolling like the rouleur he is. Second of the Yates, also stomping but not quite as quick as his brother. Then, shockingly soon after the second Yates, Tadej, dancing where the Yates had been stomping. Then pandemonium: Jonas, so soon, so impossibly soon – the Danes went mad, we were stunned. He was quick, so quick, so inhumanly quick. The Pog had looked so much faster than everyone else, it seemed unthinkable that anyone could be any quicker but just as we were thinking that, Vingegaard smashed the thought completely. Then it was done. The road opened and a hundred thousand cyclists streamed, ok, maybe not streamed, let’s say struggled, up the road. There was more beer to be drunk, but that was it. Race over, in more ways than one.
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, goes the much repeated quote from Mike Tyson. Mr Tyson was paraphrasing Clausewitz, who actually said something like: most plans do not survive contact with the enemy. My plan had been for us (Fi, Sam & I) to ride from Lyon to Aix-les-Bains on Sunday and then to Combloux yesterday (Monday), so that we could watch the time trial stage of le Tour de France on the Tuesday.
On the map, it looked sort of possible, but the map, and my plan, had not taken into account the effect of adding two full panniers and a saddle-bag to an already weighty touring bike. We finished the first day short of Aix-les-Bains in Yenne, at the rather lovely camping Kanoti. According to my plan, i.e. ride all the way to Combloux, the next day’s mileage would be something around 90 miles, including over a thousand metres of vertical ascent. Even if we had had the legs to do it, there was no way I would contemplate more than twelve hours in the saddle – not a fun ride, for many reasons, not least of which was the heat: 35+ degrees centigrade heat predicted for most of the day. La canicule!
We started the day with a climb, not a high or long climb, barely counting for my l’Ordre des Cols Durs total, le Col du Chat. I chose to go over rather than around to avoid a long detour around the north end of Le Lac du Bourget. The tunnel was not even considered.
According to Strava, some leggy bastard has the record at just over 10 minutes for the 4-odd km, average 4.5 % climb. We took 45 mins, and had to stop twice. I was desperate to have a fag from about 10 minutes in, but knew that it was even more stupid idea than thinking that we would be able to ride all the way to Combloux. Eventually we reached the ‘Col’ sign. It was mid-morning and we hadn’t even reached Aix. Turns out that 35 years of booze & cigarettes really does slow you down when you get past 55 years of age. We were going to have to rethink our itinerary.
Celebration very much in the category: ‘ironic’.
We needed to use the train to skip at least half of the discarded itinerary. But where to get the train to? Trains hate mountain passes even more than we now did. There wasn’t a suitable train to Sallanches, at the foot of the TT climb, and, anyway, we weren’t going to give up on the whole cycling through mountains just because we had completely blown our brains out on the very first climb of the day, were we? No, we were not! (Apologies to all those who hate the writers who ask a question and then answer it. It’s a rhetorical habit I can not seem to ditch.)
Le Lac du Bourget
So over lunch at a restaurant in Aix, we booked a train to Albertville. I was thinking: ride the valley road from Albertville to Ugine and then take the N212 up les Gorges d’Arly. I don’t like Alpine valley roads much. The ride up the Romanche from Grenoble to Bourg d’Oisans is a classic of the kind: wide, shallow grade and very popular with huge lorries making their way to Italy and beyond. There is not an alternative route that does not involve ridiculous goat-tracks masquerading as ‘piste cyclable’. Yeah right, Google, do I look like a fucking chamois? Actually, don’t answer that.
But the map showed a solid blue EV route from Albertville to Ugine. I have learned to know and trust the EV network on this trip. Solid blue means a proper traffic-free bike path with a decent surface. At Ugine we would have turn right up onto the road to Megève. Looking at the map, I could see that, not only was it a valley road with no viable alternative route, but also that there were tunnels, suggesting that the road was narrow. I hoped that as the road is not a major alpine route, that there would not be much afternoon traffic.
How wrong I was: about the road, dead right; about the traffic, dead wrong. The gradient was ok, just about. We stopped a few times on the way up, to recover from the stress of riding at little more than walking pace, which was making the bikes twitchy, next to a sheer drop, with traffic passing us at more than the 70 k/mh speed limit. I was really feeling my age, bad habits and the weight of the picnic blanket & the melon that I had been dragging around with me since we stopped the day before in Morestel. Oh, and did I mention the unlit tunnels? It was a real grind, and by the time I had decided that I never wanted to ride this road in either direction ever again, we were too far up it to contemplate riding back to Albertville and checking into a luxury spa, which is what I really wanted to do – the climb was unpleasantly claustrophobic and the heat and humidity and the bloody helmet (had to wear one for the insurance) were driving me slightly mad. Seeing as turning around, riding back down, and checking into a luxury spa wasn’t an option, my second choice would have been to smoke at least a couple of roll-ups, but that would have been even more stupid than continuing to ride up.
We were really crawling up the climb. I was using my two lowest gear ratios for long stretches, let’s say 8 or 9 k/mh, and watching my heart-rate; every time I hit threshold (i.e. making an effort such that I was not able to speak conversationally without getting out of breath, say 10 k/mh) Fi would drop off the back of our little chain-gang. Repeatedly tailing off a riding companion on such a hot day on such a long climb is really poor form.
Anyway.
Gorges de l’Arly
After around an hour or so, we climbed out of the gorge into open Alpine meadows, riding through which we were able to actually see the mountains around us and arrived at Flumet. We pulled over at the Bar Tabac Boulangerie De La Chaumiére (tobacco products, cakes & bread? La Belle France), got blanked by the obviously Britannique cyclists (Rapha kit is such a giveaway) lolling around the place discussing tube-socks and Strava times (yeah, we didn’t want to talk to you either) and, after some cold liquids, a couple of baguettes, and several roll-ups, we were ready to ride up to Megève and down to Combloux. Reluctantly, because Boulangerie De La Chaumiére serves beer as well as cakes and fags, we slowly rolled away from Flumet.
View north from Flumet towards Pointe des Verres, Col des Aravis is around to the left
Even though the first section was still uphill, it was not nearly as oppressive as the canyon ride. We crested the watershed and started to descend towards Megève. On the way down I decided that I need to write to whoever is in charge of signage at Le Marie de Megève and ask them, in the strongest terms possible, why there is not a ‘Col’ sign somewhere up there. It clearly is a Col, so I have been cheated of a counting Col. I am getting on a bit now, and I am going to need a bit (ok, a lot) of help accumulating the quota.
We stopped at a supermarket to pick up alcohol and some token food items before we left Megève. Looking back at this stop the next day, I surmised that this where the melon error occurred. Back in 2013, I had persuaded Mark to take a whole melon up le Mont Ventoux for no particular reason that I can remember. I think maybe that I was planning to meet him at the top and thought that sharing a melon at the top would be nice. Why he agreed to carry the melon over 1000 metres vertical is beyond me. I probably should not have made the suggestion and then ghosted him. On the other hand, he was a grown-up and a very learned man, so he should probably have known better.
The melon up highon Le Mont Ventoux
We left the supermarket and rolled down the hill. As we went through the next day’s stage finish in Combloux, we could see all the infrastructure of le Tour being assembled. Barriers, stages, men in hi-viz bibs getting very cross with people driving cars. And then it was time to find somewhere to pitch the tents.
Flat ground, compost toilets, first aid tent, bar just out of sight to the left. Shame about the view.
I can recommend the EV17 cycle route, AKA ViaRhona. We were able to ride from central Lyon traffic free out of the city and well beyond. We picked up another bike path in Cremieu, obviously a former train-track which spared us the unpleasant experience of rural Sunday drivers. We then picked up the ViaRhona at Evieu, as Le Rhône exits the Alps proper and snakes back up through the Ain towards the confluence with the Saône at Lyon. Although we were approaching well-done on the cyclist-cooked-under-an-open-sun scale, we were still able to appreciate the privilege of riding traffic and noise free in such a magnificent landscape: limestone cliffs topped with woods on either side. We rode up the amazing Gorges de Balme and then pulled off the horrible D1054 at Yenne & arrived Camping Kanoti, which is run by hippies, one whom is in bicycle acrobat troupe of the type well known to students of fixed gear culture. Not quite a perfect day on the bike, but definitely a very good one.
PS the picnic blanket that my companions thought so ridiculous at the start of our trip is now an object of envy. If I could be bothered to think of a hashtag it would be along the lines of: IToldYouSo. But then it always is.
PPS when we were leaving the hotel in Lyon this morning, the receptionist asked one of my riding companions where we were heading to. He said “Aix”, she asked if it was Aix-en-Provence, and he said yes. That would have been a Big Ride.
I got completely soaked on the way to Victoria and realised that my rear tyre was completely flat when we got to Lewes. Good start, and we had not even started the trip. My loathing of bagging the big touring bike had forced us to go via the night ferry to Dieppe, two trains to Paris, negotiating the holiday rush hour in Paris, finding the losers’ train from Bercy to Lyon, a one hour delay to an already long journey because of debris on the line (massive thunderstorm) and restful night in the heart of Lyon, finally ready to actually ride our bikes.
I am writing this because of the following quote from a recent article in the Evening Standard: “Women may be over-represented in (collisions with goods vehicles) because they are less likely than men to disobey red lights,” concluded one study. The article makes a lot of assertions about the difference in the way women are treated when cycling when compared to men which are pretty shocking, particularly the stat that women cycling are given a lot less room by people driving than men cycling. Shocking, because I have lost count of the conversations that I have had with women running along the lines of “I used to cycle all the time but I stopped because I was nearly run over by a car/bus/lorry”. This is the effect of the so-called ‘close pass’. If it is true that women cycling are close passed so much more often than men then this is something that needs to be looked into as a matter of urgency. Subjective safety is so very important to getting more people cycling. If people don’t feel safe cycling, they will not cycle – as survey after survey has shown.
On the subject of surveys and research, I hope that someone, somewhere has actually done proper research into the reason why women are so over-represented in collisions with lorries in London but, as far as I know, no-one has. If anyone knows different please get in touch, because I would be delighted to read such a report. I wrote about this 15 years ago and rather than rehash that I am just going to reprint the whole blog post, whilst also stating that, objectively, it is safer now to cycle in London than at any time since the invention of the bicycle.
Originally posted on Moving Target, 25th April 2007, under the title Red Lights & Media Spin
The Times, and others, picked up the female cyclist Heavy Goods Vehicle (lorry) story that was all over this site a few weeks ago, and added a bit of extra spin. As you might remember, the figure is 21 female cyclists killed in London, of which 18 were killed by a collision with a HGV, in the period Jan 1999 to May 2004. This statistic was compiled as part of a survey by the London Road Safety Unit of the circumstances surrounding all London cyclist deaths 1999 – May 2004, case by case.
I had also been in contact with Noel Lynch, then a Green Party Member of the London Assembly, who asked Ken what he was going to do about the problem, and when the LBMA could expect an answer to my letter. It was at this point that Ken started the HGV/cyclist process.
This process led to the ‘Share The Road’ campaign which has been much criticised by myself and Ralph Smyth.
Although the Times report, and also the BBC, described survey as having been leaked, the details of the report, including a mention of speculation about why females should be over-represented in the fatalities, was available on the LBMAsite shortly after we received the report. I was asked not to publish the whole report because it contained details of police investigations, and were therefore confidential.
No conclusions were, or could be, drawn regarding whether or not red light jumping contributed or otherwise to the numbers of cyclists killed. There was no survey of the number of cyclists jumping red lights, broken down by sex attached to the report. In some of the cases there was consideration of the circumstances, but not all, because some of the files relating to the cases were not available to the LRSU researcher. Therefore all of the media comment yesterday was just that: comment.
I recall that at the time we were shown the report, members of the group speculated as to why females, and someone, possibly me, possibly someone else, speculated that it was because female cyclists tend to be more submissive on the road, and generally more law-abiding. And it’s possible that someone, again, possibly me, would have mentioned that Seb would probably still be alive today if he had NOT stopped at the red light alongside Terence Fallow’s tipper truck. But again, the speculation was just that: speculation.
However, these statistics have been in the public domain for 3 years, and were published in the Islington Tribune and others, including by my esteemed colleague Matt Seaton in the Guardian. What was ‘reported’ by the Times, London Lite and the BBC was straight-forward speculation.
Why is this old report suddenly ‘news’ again? Because London cyclists are still being killed by HGVs. Thankfully, no London cycle courier has been killed by a HGV since Seb’s death, but at least 2 have been seriously injured by left-turning HGVs in the past 3 years, and as I reported elsewhere, at least 4 female cyclists have been killed by HGVs since 2004, and 9 London cyclists were killed by HGVs in 2006.
So there is still a problem with HGVs and London cyclists, as tragically highlighted by the deaths of Amelia Zollner and Madeleine Wright in March. They were both killed by lorries, within 24 hours of each other, less than a mile apart. Therefore anything which raises awareness of this problem is good, especially when the solution is so simple: HGV drivers obeying the Highway Code and the law, by observing before they signal, and again before they manoeuvre.
Also, I got the chance to tell Simon Mayo where to get off on national radio, which gave me not a little satisfaction, and a more positive note, the lady representing the Road Haulage Association seemed very keen to learn what more they could do about the problem, which is definitely progress.
Cynthia Barlow was on BBC London yesterday, apparently commenting on the issue. She is chair of Roadpeace, the road crash victims charity. She was also part of the HGV/cyclist group. After her daughter was killed by concrete lorry on London Wall (left turn after over-taking) she lobbied the lorry owners (RMC) to get them to change their drivers’ attitudes. She is a very smart and formidable woman. It is worth reading some correspondence she sent to TfL before they embarked on ‘Share the Road’. She covered just about everything TfL should have done before launching the campaign. Needless to day they didn’t.
There are a lot of other words on this site about the problem of London cyclists being killed by HGVs. Some are here. I begin to wonder whether I should rename the site ‘London Cyclists Killed by HGVs’. What do you think?
UPDATE The more I look at it, the more I think that everyone with an interest in reducing road danger in London should take a look at the questions that Cynthia was asking of TfL, highlighted above. In them, she asks for evidence-based policy-making, with particular emphasis on the ‘red light jumping cyclists’ issue.
You’re riding casually along Oxford Street when one of those idiot parents decides to use their child in a pushchair as a “traffic tester”. There’s an impact, you feel terrible, it’s not your fault and the policeman spots you’ve got no brakes…. Think about the consequences….
I think it was maybe around 2002 that the brakeless thing started to become really fashionable amongst London’s bicycle couriers. Couriers had ridden fixed-wheels in London since bicycle courier year dot (1983 or thereabouts).
Fixed-wheel bicycles remained popular in the UK long after the invention of the free-wheel and variable gears between the wars. I remember John Humphries asking me if people still rode fixed-wheels as he used to in the 50s. But by the 80s, fixies were rare, and if you rode fixed, most people thought you were wierd, and you would get accosted by old men who would reminisce about their own fixed-wheels of yore.
By the 90s, lots of couriers were riding fixed. It is fair to say that we helped to popularise fixed-wheels. But we all, without exception, rode with a front-brake on the road.
The first time I ever saw a no-brake fixie was at the first Cycle Messenger Championships, held in Berlin, 1993. I was one of 5 or 6 guys riding fixed out of the several hundred attendees, and two of the others fixie riders, Eric & Steve both from Washington D.C., were riding no-brakes. I thought it was dangerous and stupid, but I was too polite to say so. They told me that a lot of messengers working in cities in the eastern part of the U.S., rode fixies, and some portion of those rode no brakes
Later on in the 90s some guys from Philly came over & worked in London with their fixies, and the riders at the company that they worked at, Creative Couriers, insisted that they put brakes on their bikes. I mention this to illustrate the point that at that time, not only were all fixie riders riding braked, but they considered that it was the right thing to do. It is also important to point out that at no point have fixie riders, front brakes or not, been in a majority amongst London’s couriers. There were times when almost no-one rode fixed, and other times when quite a few rode fixed, but never time when most rode fixed.
It was only after 2000 that this attitude towards front brakes on fixies changed. I cannot identify the exact cause, but there is no doubt that peer pressure and a desire to be like the coolest kids on the street were a major factor. A lot of European couriers had started to ride no-brake fixies, and when London hosted the 2003 European Cycle Messenger Championships, I am sure that a number of London couriers were influenced by hanging out with their European comrades.
And there is no doubt that couriers, in the same way as they had popularised fixies, also made it fashionable to ride fixed no brakes.
By the time that I published the article that I quoted above, a lot, but by no means a majority of London couriers were riding no brakes. I have no comment to make about what other courier companies were doing, but at the company for which I was by then a controller, we made it clear to our riders that we would not let them work unless their bike was road legal, i.e. had a front brake, and we checked their bikes. Some of the guys & girls were pretty resistant to our instructions.
Tofu, who I knew quite well, and was a good friend, was a loud no-brake advocate. He was an excellent courier and a really, really good urban bike rider (it’s not necessary to be a good urban bike rider to be a good courier, and not all good urban bike riders are good couriers – the skill-set is completely different), so arguments about not being safe and so forth weren’t effective, not least because I did not believe the arguments myself. He had been riding no brakes for years, and was unlikely to get himself into trouble on the road without a brake. So our only recourse was to say that he had to do it because we said so, and send him home when he did not have a front brake.
The day after we had sent him home, he called to say he was on the way in. I asked him if he had a front brake, and he said yes. A little later in the day, one of my co-workers told me that he had seen Tofu, and his bike did not have a front brake. Furious, I called him and started berating him for having lied to me. He said, “but you didn’t ask me if the brake was on my bike, you asked me if I had a front brake – I have – it’s in my bag” – I retell this story to illustrate how strongly people felt about it.
I felt equally strongly that it was stupid and wrong, but I was so sick of the constant rows about it, that I had someone, a very experienced and well-known courier, who had participated in proper bike races, including many seasons on the velodrome riding track bikes, and had in fact organised well-attended races for couriers on the velodrome, to write the piece which I published on Moving Target. Paul pretty much said everything I would have said, and I disagree with nothing at all that he wrote.
I write all of this to illustrate not only did I do everything that I could to discourage people from riding no-brakes fixed on the road, I even foresaw not this exact incident, but something very like it. Of course, I did not foresee the extent of the media coverage (it made national news, and not just for a day, either), but I was worried about the potential for such a case to cause big trouble for the cycling community. So I can say, I told you so, I told you this (or something very like it) would happen.
And for all those of you in the courier community saying Charlie Alliston is nothing to do with us, well, no, you are wrong, our community helped create the social conditions in which Charlie Alliston thought it was ok to ride around London without a front brake. By the way, I do not believe that Charlie Alliston did not know that his bike was not road legal. He bought the thing off the LFGSS forum, so he must have come across posts about the legality or otherwise of not having a front brake on the road.
An old friend (also an exenger) called John Mack and many, many others have sought to defuse the media furore by pointing to other fatal crashes and the lack of reaction to them. This is plain wrong. Tu quoque (sometimes called ‘whataboutery’ or more simply ‘but these other people did something worse at some other time’) is no defence at any time in any place. Seeking to excuse one crime by pointing at others is wrong-headed.
This whole thing is incredibly painful and upsetting, not least because someone has died in an unnecessary crash, which we would not know be talking about if Charlie Alliston’s bike had had a front brake fitted. Why did he not have a front brake? Probably because he thought it was cool not to. Why did he think it was cool? Yeah, right.
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