Cyclopedia. Part 15

In 1999, however, globalization hit the UK operation. First the company stopped making frames in Nottingham, retaining painting and a.s.sembly. Losses increased, one financial restructure followed another, and a proposed move to a site outside Nottingham was aborted when planning permission was contested. a.s.sembly of bikes in the UK ended in 2002, but the company relaunched a UK-based road racing team for 2010. There are hopes that if this squad flourishes the name Raleigh may eventually return to the Tour.

Cycling names who "rode a Raleigh"

* A. A. ZIMMERMAN: sprinter of the Victorian era who was America's first cycling star.

* REG HARRIS: iconic sprinter of the 1950s who was the first British cyclist to have a national profile. The slogan was "Reg rides a Raleigh."

* Paul Sherwen: domestique of the late 1970s/early 1980s who was among the first members of the FOREIGN LEGION.

* Joop Zoetemelk: Dutch star known as "the Rat" who was the winner of the 1980 Tour de France.

* Hennie Kuiper: quiet cuddly Dutchman who was an Olympic and world road champion.

* Jan Raas: bespectacled Dutchman who was a prolific winner in the late 1970s, world champion in 1978.

* LAURENT FIGNON: bespectacled Frenchman who could have won the 1989 Tour de France but didn't (though he did win in 1983 and 1984).

* Caroline Alexander: English mountain-bike star of Scottish parentage who was first British woman to make it on the international stage.

* Rod Ellingworth: never quite made it as a pro with Raleigh but went on to be mentor to MARK CAVENDISH.

RaS Irish term for cycle race, p.r.o.nounced Rohsss, but usually referring to one Ras in particular. The Ras is an around-IRELAND stage race run in late May, dating back to 1953, and is unique because it offers amateur cyclists their only chance to partic.i.p.ate in a full-length national tour alongside professional squads. It should not be confused with the professional Tour of Ireland, a shorter event for pros only.

Attempting to survive the Ras is a highlight of any amateur cyclist's career. As well as being a tough race in itself, with daily 100-mile stages, the "night" stages are legendary: the music and drinking among the caravan (and some of the tougher riders) can last until the next day's stage start.

The first Ras was a two-day event named the Ras Tailteann, setting the tone for an event in which sport and politics rubbed shoulders. The Tailteann Games were a legendary Celtic sports festival that had particular significance for the Irish independence movement; the first trophy was a wreath of laurels picked at the site of the original Tailteann Games. The link was explicit when the first race started from in front of the General Post Office in Dublin, the focus of the Easter Uprising. The field were all members of the National Cycling a.s.sociation, a body which did not recognize Irish part.i.tion and was thus banned from international compet.i.tion.

Irish cycling was divided at the time between a body that recognized part.i.tion, the CRE (c.u.mann Rothaiochta na hEireann, which translates as the Cycling a.s.sociation of Ireland), and the NCA. The Ras was born mainly to create an alternative Irish tour to rival events run by the CRE; an article in the 1961 race program described CRE members as "traitors," "scabs," "a brood of vipers," and "reprobates." An early Ras organizer, Joe Christle, was also editor of An Phoblacht, the Republican newspaper; it was, says the Ras's official history, understood that "a core of individuals" within one club that contributed heavily to the Ras organization "were active within the IRA at that time."

In the early years of the Ras, Christle explicitly linked the race to the struggle for Irish nationhood, but there were other characteristics that made for long-term success. The race visited rural parts of Ireland, stages finished in the early evening so that locals could finish work and then watch, the distances were at the limit of what the riders could manage, and the field included teams from the Irish counties to maintain local interest. There was also an emphasis on Irish culture.

The first around-Ireland Ras, in 1954, was billed as "the greatest cycle race ever," in spite of widespread doubts that anyone would be able to complete the 900 miles and a lack of sponsors.h.i.+p; the budget was raised by raffles, dances, stories sold to newspapers by one organizer, Kerry Sloane, and a large unofficial donation from the Gaelic Athletic a.s.sociation. A field of 60 started the race, which had stages to Wexford, Cork, Tralee, Ennis, Athlone, Armagh, and Newry-the latter symbolically important, being over the border in Northern Ireland.

The Ras rapidly established itself as the centerpiece of Ireland's cycling calendar, the one event all amateur cyclists aspired to finish. To be a "Man of the Ras" meant braving bad weather, ill fortune, and poor roads. "Let's hear it for the Men of the Ras," booms the race public address half a century on.

The Ras created its own cycling culture, populated by heroes barely known outside Ireland such as the 1955 winner Gene Mangan and, half a century later, the "G.o.dfather" of the event, Philip Ca.s.sidy, who figured prominently from 1980 to 2001. There were legendary episodes such as the "Cookstown incident" of 1956 (see IRELAND) and the Italian affair of 1992, when Irish cyclists ganged up to intimidate the Italian national team and there were scuffles on the bike, and there were legendary families such as the MacQuaids, four of whom won a dozen stages between 1974 and 1988, and one of whom, Pat, is the president of the UCI. The spirit is typified by the greatest Man of the Ras, Shay O'Hanlon, a multiple stage winner between 1960 and 1975, who is still working as a volunteer on the race 30 years later.

The weather is always unpredictable and so too the racing. The term "Ras break" refers to a move that looks insignificant but ends up expanding in numbers and is decisive. If the night stages are legendary, so too is the camaraderie among the caravan, where the men who run the broom wagon consider it an affront if a rider climbs in who is not utterly spent. Incredibly, thanks to long-term sponsors.h.i.+p from FBD insurance and the Irish National Dairy Council, plus a sympathetic organizer in Dermot Dignam, the race retained its unique character into the 21st century.

Further reading: The Ras: The Story of Ireland's Unique Stage Race, Tom Daly, Collins Press, 2004 (SEE IRELAND FOR OTHER MAJOR IRISH RACES AND STARS; POLITICS FOR OTHER CYCLING EVENTS THAT HAD MORE THAN A PURELY SPORTING IMPACT).

RECORDS When humans first put their legs over bikes in the mid-19th century, the question was obvious: how far can I get under my own steam on this thing, and how long will it take me? That Victorian spirit of self-discovery lives on in the sport's various records: place to place, speed records, and distance records-the longest distance in a set time-of which the HOUR RECORD has carried the greatest prestige since its inception in 1895.

In GREAT BRITAIN, the Road Records a.s.sociation (founded 1888) administers place to place and distance record attempts such as the END TO END, and in British TIME TRIALLING there are "compet.i.tion records" set in official races over their standard distances.

Some famous records: * CHARLES MURPHY's breaking of the 60 mph barrier behind a train in 1899.

* Dutchman Fred Rompelberg reached 166.9 mph on Bonneville Salt Flats paced by an adapted dragster in 1995.

* The British paced record of 98.21 mph was set by Dave le Grys behind a Rover car on an unopened stretch of the M42 motorway near Birmingham, England, in 1985.

* For the around-the-world record, land circ.u.mnavigations have to be at least 18,000 miles and include 8,000 miles by sea or air, and pa.s.s through two antipodal points. A 25-year-old Scotsman, Mark Beaumont, managed to do the distance in 195 days in July 2008, averaging around 100 miles a day through 20 countries for more than six months.

* The most demanding track record after the Hour is the standing start kilometer, set in La Paz, Bolivia, by the Frenchman Arnaud Tournant, at 58.875 seconds. La Paz is the venue of choice because it has the highest velodrome in the world, at 3,408 m above sea level. That alt.i.tude means that with 33 percent less oxygen in the air, air resistance is as low as it can be for a cyclist.

* The world endurance record for spinning on a stationary bike was set in 2009 by Mehrzad s.h.i.+rvani, who rode for 192 hours at Kortrijk in Belgium, napping for between 45 seconds and 3 minutes each hour. Not surprisingly, he entered a state he describes as "supraconsciousness," akin to a coma.

* Today's fastest men on two wheels are the tiny number who compete in extreme MOUNTAIN-BIKE downhill speed trials, in which the riders race on ski slopes. The current production bike record is held by Markus Stoeckl of Austria with 210 kph, while the prototype bike record is held by Frenchman Eric Barone with 222 kph.

REc.u.mBENTS Bicycles or tricycles where the rider sits in a bucket seat close to the ground, with the pedals in front of him and a long chain connecting to the rear wheel. They come in two kinds: long wheelbase, in which the front wheel is in front of the pedals, and short, in which the chainset and pedals are at the front. Drive is usually to the rear wheel.

They first appeared in the late 19th century amid fevered experimentation with bike position; the first one is said to have been the Normal Bicyclette built in Ghent in the early 1890s. Racing rec.u.mbents known as Velocars were commercially available in France in the 1930s and were used to win pursuit matches and set RECORDS. In 1934, Francois Faure used one to set a new HOUR RECORD.

The UCI reacted by banning rec.u.mbents from organized events. Restrictions on cycle length and AERODYNAMIC aids had been brought in in 1914, while UCI Article 49 of 1934 effectively limited bike design to safety-type machines. Further development was delayed for 40 years, until the inception of HUMAN POWERED VEHICLE champions.h.i.+ps in California.

The principle benefit is aerodynamic; by being lower down, the overall profile of the bike is reduced. Their adherents also maintain that they are more comfortable and safer because having a low center of gravity, they are more stable. However, rec.u.mbents have never caught on. Opponents would claim this is because they are less safe to ride, because the low profile means the rider is less visible to traffic and also because less power can be put out from a relatively upright sitting position; enthusiasts claim the aerodynamic benefits outweigh any inefficiencies.

Particularly when a smoothed-out fairing is fitted, in some cases completely enclosing the rider, a rec.u.mbent can travel considerably faster than a road bike, although enclosed machines create a new problem; the rider is not cooled down by air flow. The most popular version is MIKE BURROWS' Windcheetah. To prove its road-going potential, one version was used by long-distance specialist Andy Wilkinson to set an END TO END record; the time was almost four hours faster than a normal cycle and speeds close to 80 mph were reached on descents.

RELIABILITY TRIALS Cycling club events in which the partic.i.p.ants have to complete a set course within a certain time. There may also be a set minimum time to discourage racing. Unlike CYCLOSPORTIVES, which operate on the same principle, reliability trials do not usually have direction arrows as part of the challenge is finding your own way.

(SEE PARISBRESTPARIS, RAID PYRENEAN, AND eTAPE DU TOUR FOR OTHER LONG-DISTANCE CHALLENGES) REPACK Celebrated downhill MOUNTAIN-BIKING course on Pine Mountain, near Fairfax in California's Marin county,just north of San Francisco, where the fat-tired sport was born thanks to a series of informal events using customized bikes run between 1976 and 1979. The events were not organized, but "spontaneously called together when the sun and moon a.s.sumed appropriate aspects." Early racers on the course included GARY FISHER, the "father of mountain-biking"; no more than 200 ever joined him.

Two miles long and dropping 1,300 feet, the course earned its name because the series of tortuous turns meant that the primitive hub brakes of the time would burn out and had to be repacked with grease after each run. "In addition to its incredible steepness it features off-camber blind corners, deep erosion ruts and a liberal sprinkling of fist-sized rocks," wrote the race organizer Charlie Kelly in an article for Bicycling magazine in 1979. Kelly's website contains all the results from his original notebooks, apart from the first race, which was held on October 21, 1976.

Fisher set the course record of 4 minutes 22 seconds in the seventh race on November 20, 1976. By 1977 prizes were being awarded courtesy of local bike shops, timing was on digital watches, and an endurance event was run that was a precursor of today's cross-country races. The events ended in 1979 after a racer sued a television company when he broke his wrist; the course was resurrected in 1983 and 1984 for officially sanctioned races.

RIVALRIES Cycling's great conflicts can run deep. In 1992 a journalist visited FRANCESCO MOSER and happened to mention his great rival Giuseppe Saronni; Cecco's tirade against "il Beppe" lasted almost half an hour. Ask BERNARD HINAULT about GREG LEMOND and the response is terse, and whatever you do, don't ask LeMond about Hinault, and in particular, don't ask about the way the Frenchman behaved during the 1986 TOUR DE FRANCE. LeMond is still not happy, even though he won.

There are two definitive rivalries in cycling, against which all others have to be judged: GINO BARTALI and FAUSTO COPPI in the 1940s and JACQUES ANQUETIL and RAYMOND POULIDOR in the 1960s. Both relations.h.i.+ps remain permanently etched on the national consciousness in Italy and France.

Bartali and Coppi started out as teammates in the 1940 GIRO D'ITALIA, where the younger Coppi upstaged his older boss to win the event. Their rivalry was at its most intense after the war and reached its nadir at the 1948 world champions.h.i.+p in Holland, where the pair watched each other like hawks, eventually getting fed up with it and heading to the changing rooms. It took elaborate negotiation by the Italian national team manager ALFREDO BINDA merely to get them to start the Tour de France in 1949 in the national team; on the road there were constant accusations of double-dealing from both men and their backers. Time and again, Binda had to bang their heads together; by the 1952 Tour, Bartali had finally accepted Coppi's superiority.

Most of the time the pair had a good relations.h.i.+p off their bikes, but the rivalry was ma.s.sively important to the press. Every time either said anything about the other man, it was headline news; as for their fans, they would argue bitterly in bars and still do so today. On the road it only needed one to have the slightest problem-a puncture, an uns.h.i.+pped chain-for the other to attack. They devised elaborate strategies against each other: Bartali detailed a teammate to watch Coppi's legs and warn him the moment the vein behind his knee began pulsating, as that was a sign he was weakening. Coppi asked his teammates to take Bartali out on the town before the 1948 MILANSAN REMO, in the hope that they would have a long night out and the "old man" would be tired the next day. They sent spies to spread disinformation, Bartali would get a teammate to search his rival's hotel room for drugs.

ANQUETIL and POULIDOR had a different relations.h.i.+p: there was no bitterness, at least on Poulidor's side, and the rivalry clearly served as an extra form of motivation for "Master Jacques." In 1967, the night before the Criterium National one-day race, he was quaffing whisky at 3 AM with his manager Raphael Geminiani when "Gem" suggested they drink to Poulidor's win the next day-Anquetil was not planning to ride-but the joke backfired. Anquetil told his wife Janine to set his alarm clock for 7 AM, and duly won the race.

Poulidor and Anquetil's rivalry did not last as long as the 15-year conflict between Bartali and Coppi, but made as big an impression: 30 years later, French politicians were still being asked who they supported. Anquetil could never quite understand why, for all his success, the French public always preferred the underdog, Poulidor. "Of course I would like to see Poulidor win the Tour in my absence. I have beaten him so often that his victory would merely add to my reputation."

While Moser's rivalry with Saronni was essentially a parody of the Coppi/Bartali conflict, largely the product of the Italian press, REG HARRIS and the Dutch sprinter Arie van Vliet were bitter enemies for a short while. They were initially friends, but fell out after Harris told his fellow Englishman Cyril Bardsley to appeal to the judges after Van Vliet put a pedal in his wheel in the 1958 world champions.h.i.+p. To fan the flames, Harris accused Van Vliet of being soft, saying "he's never been out in a cape and sou'wester and ridden in the rain for eight hours." After that, Van Vliet would recruit other riders to help him against Harris and the pair had occasional shoving matches in races. "An enormous b.l.o.o.d.y war," Harris termed it. "Every time Arie said 'Look isn't it time this was over?' I'd say 'It'll never be over as far as I'm concerned.'"

Some of the bitterest episodes have involved cyclists on the same team. The Coppi/Bartali dispute had its origins when the pair raced together at the start of Coppi's career. Hinault and LeMond fell out because they both wanted to win the 1986 Tour, in which the Frenchman had promised to help LeMond but appeared to go back on the deal. The 1987 GIRO D'ITALIA saw an epic conflict between STEPHEN ROCHE and his nominal leader Roberto Visentini.

There were echoes of the Roche/Visentini battle in the 2009 Tour, when LANCE ARMSTRONG contested team leaders.h.i.+p with the Spaniard Alberto Contador, who was isolated within the Astana team. Armstrong briefed against the Spaniard, attacked him early in the race, and in the final week Contador was to be seen hitching lifts with rival teams and his brother to get to his hotel after stage finishes.

In track racing GREAT BRITAIN and AUSTRALIA were bitter rivals in the early 21st century. In racing component manufacture, s.h.i.+MANO and CAMPAGNOLO compete intensely and had a stranglehold on the sport that has only recently been threatened. But the last word on rivalries should go to Anquetil, who had a thought for Poulidor even on his deathbed, where he said a final goodbye to him with the words: "Sorry, Raymond, you're going to finish second again."

ROAD RACING Began on November 7, 1869, with the running of ParisRouen, organized by the magazine Le Velocipede Ill.u.s.tre, which published the rules on October 20. The course was 135 km beginning at the Arc de Triomphe with five checkpoints en route. The race was open to "all velocipedes, all mechanical devices powered by the force of a man, by weight, foot and hand action, monocycles, bicycles, tricycles, quadricycles or polycycles. They may only convey one person, who will drive and direct the machine, which he may not change during the race." Walking by the machine was permitted, as were repairs en route. The riders were banned, however, from taking dogs with them or entering under false names. They were permitted to eat and drink, to wear what they wanted, but they were banned from giving each other any a.s.sistance such as "pulling each other by cords or chains." Entry was free, and a time limit of 24 hours was set. First prize was 1,000 francs, second prize a "double suspension" velocipede.

The start list was published on October 20, with 203 names, including six women, three Belgians, and a German-and six Britons, including the eventual winner, JAMES MOORE, who took 10 hours 40 minutes for a course later worked out to be 123 kilometers. Le Velocipede's editor Richard Lesclide wrote: "the att.i.tude of the people in the villages along the way was excellent. The velocipedists were greeted with bravos, congratulations and encouragements. Guns were fired as they went through to add to the jollity."

Initially, however, it was in ITALY that racing on the open road gained popularity most rapidly, with a proliferation of events in the early 1870s, including Milan-Turin, first run in 1876 and the oldest major road race still in existence. In Britain, meanwhile, track events were popular, and so too long-distance road events such as the North Road 24-hour TIME TRIAL won by G. P. Mills in the early 1880s, with a distance of 365 km on a HIGH-WHEELER. The fas.h.i.+on for marathon events went back across the Channel to France, where the circulation war between a host of French cycling magazines led to the creation of BordeauxParis by Veloce-Sport magazine in 1891. Mills won that event, thanks to a cunning attack at the main feed station in Angouleme, where his best pacemaker was waiting; he covered the distance in 26 hours 34 minutes, stopping only to "satisfy natural needs."

Later that year, the first ParisBrestParis was run by a rival publication, Le Pet.i.t Journal-and the HEROIC ERA had begun, with newspapers competing to run longer and harder events; the creation of the TOUR DE FRANCE in 1903 was the logical outcome.

Early on there was little structure: pacing in the great events was common, be it with tricycles, cars, or just bicyclists carefully selected for their speed, meaning that the best pacemakers were in great demand; without them, it was impossible to win. There were arcane registration procedures to ensure that cyclists started and finished the race on the same bike; for example, early Tour machines were marked in secret by the organizers so the riders couldn't change them. But by the First World War, the main elements of today's road racing season were in place: the five one-day MONUMENTS, the GIRO D'ITALIA and Tour, and a wealth of other CLa.s.sICS and lesser stage races.

The 1930s saw a gradual increase in race speeds as road surfaces improved while team tactics and equipment improved gradually as well, but HENRI DESGRANGE's conservatism held back development in areas such as GEARS.

The years after the Second World War saw rapid changes. The introduction in 1948 of the season-long DesgrangeColombo prize, awarded for performances across the great races, led to a rapid internationalization of road racing, with the great champions coming out of their home countries more readily, and public support booming. Agents became powerful figures, creaming off percentages from the appearance fees they charged for stars in circuit races and track meetings.

At the same time, with his Bianchi team, FAUSTO COPPI refined team tactics; his squad was highly structured and well equipped, with the star at the center, serviced by domestiques-gregari in Italian-who catered to his every need, pus.h.i.+ng him early on to save his strength and making the pace to set up the race-winning attack. Finally, Fiorenzo Magni and Raphael Geminiani were the prime movers behind the arrival of extra-sportif sponsors to back up the constructors in the 1950s (see TEAMS).

The 1960s saw the system refined with the demise of the independent category, which had provided a stepping stone between the amateur and professional ranks; the beginning of proper drug testing, and the last Tours run under the national team system. The next 30 years were stable, almost backward: professional road racing was largely dominated by riders from the European heartland, sponsors were mainly interested in their own domestic markets, the calendar changed little, and a small number of major stars raced most of the big events taking their teams with them.

That all began to change in the 1980s, as first the English-speaking nations arrived led by the FOREIGN LEGION, followed after the fall of the Berlin Wall by waves of former "amateurs" from EASTERN EUROPE. At the same time, the Tour de France began to dominate the calendar thanks to a ma.s.sive expansion in television rights and coverage. Sponsors with world interests such as T-Mobile and Panasonic appeared, and the last constructors' teams, RALEIGH and PEUGEOT, went under. Prize money and salaries mushroomed: in 1983 LAURENT FIGNON received 20,000 from his first Tour win, while 16 years later LANCE ARMSTRONG made over $7 million from his first Tour win.1 The sport remains in a state of flux. Since 1998, a series of DRUG scandals have created permanent instability and made a true hierarchy hard to establish as stars are unmasked as cheats. The governing body, the UCI, has tinkered continually with the professional side of the sport since the inception of the world rankings.

The World Cup was created in 1988 and died a lingering death, Cla.s.sics were created and died, others lost their value, the calendar was restructured in 1995, while 2005 saw the foundation of the ProTour, splitting pro racing into an elite of ProTeams with feeder systems in each continent to provide a coherent structure. The UCI's three-year feud with ASO led to speculation that the sport might split to form two rival pro calendars. There is still debate over the use of helmet RADIOS.

Thanks primarily to the worldwide impact of LANCE ARMSTRONG, the sport has become globalized. Although the WORLD CHAMPIONs.h.i.+PS have been devalued by their end-of-season date, and major races in FRANCE, Italy, and SPAIN have disappeared, a wave of new events has emerged, led by the Tour of California and the Tour DownUnder.

Further reading: A Century of Cycling, the Cla.s.sic Races and Legendary Champions, William Fotheringham, Mitch.e.l.l-Beazley, 2003 ROCHE, Stephen (b. Ireland, 1959) Together with SEAN KELLY, the cherubic Dubliner took Irish cycling to a brief position of world dominance in the 1980s. Roche has a place in cycling history shared only by EDDY MERCKX as a winner of the GIRO D'ITALIA, TOUR DE FRANCE, and world t.i.tle in a single year. He managed the feat in 1987, taking the Giro after a dramatic attack en route to the Sappada ski station. The victim was his teammate Roberto Visentini-who was wearing the pink jersey-and Roche's "treachery" made him, briefly, a hate figure among the Italian tifosi.

The Carrera Jeans team was split, with one domestique allocated to Roche, the Belgian Eddy Schepers, and the rest working for Visentini. Visentini accused Roche, Schepers, and one of the mechanics, Patrick Valcke, of "holding seances" in their hotel room and said he had bought up all the foreigners in the race to work against him. At one stage finish, Schepers had to threaten Visentini's fans to keep them away from Roche; as the Irishman rode up the mountains the livid tifosi spat at him, threw rolled-up newspapers at him, and waved slabs of raw meat under his nose. Roche had the last laugh as he won the race-with some help from ROBERT MILLAR-and took the Giro and world champions.h.i.+p that year.

The Tour followed, after a race-long battle with Pedro Delgado that included an episode at La Plagne in the ALPS where he blacked out briefly after the finish. Roche eventually took the yellow jersey from Delgado on the penultimate day to win by just 40 seconds. That year's world t.i.tle in Villach, Austria, looked destined for Kelly, but it was Roche who attacked a late break to win.

However, his career went downhill from there, in a cla.s.sic case of the CURSE of the rainbow jersey. He barely raced as world champion following a serious knee injury and operation, pulled out of the 1989 Tour, and was bizarrely eliminated from the 1991 race after his team started without him in a team time trial stage. He achieved one more major win, a stage in the 1992 Tour, before retirement in 1993. He now runs a hotel in the south of France. Both his son Nicolas and his nephew Daniel Martin are successful professional cyclists.

ROUGH STUFF Cycling off-road using road bikes that are often adapted with fatter tires and cyclo-cross brakes. In Britain rough-stuff routes include green lanes, old Roman roads, and roughly surfaced bridleways, while in Scotland the network of military roads built by General Wade is used. Rough Stuff predates the invention of the MOUNTAIN BIKE by many years, dating back to the late 19th century.

The Rough Stuff Fellows.h.i.+p publishes ride details and a newsletter.

(SEE CYCLO-CROSS AND MOUNTAIN-BIKING FOR OTHER WAYS OF GETTING AWAY FROM ASPHALT).

S.

SADDLES From the late 19th century until the 1970s, most saddles were made the same way: from a teardrop-shaped leather strip strung on a metal frame. Now, however, the princ.i.p.al volume producer of leather saddles is the British firm Brooks, and most models are a hybrid of plastic or carbon-fiber base, foam or gel padding, with a slim covering of either fine leather or synthetic fiber. The center of the cycle saddle industry is in the Veneto region of Northern Italy, home to Selle Royal, Selle Italia, and Selle San Marco.

Leather saddles such as the iconic Brooks B17 look distinguished but are heavier than composite ones and sag if they get wet; they also have to be "broken-in," a process in which they are ridden for several hundred miles until their shape matches that of the rider's behind. While this is going on they have to be dressed with some kind of oil such as neatsfoot, seal oil, or in extreme cases motor oil. Some aficionados go so far as to soak them in oil. Not everyone goes as far as TOM SIMPSON, who made his own saddle using a plastic sports saddle, some foam, and his wife's handbag; mostly, cyclists find a ready-made one which suits and stick with it.

SADDLE SORES A perennial issue, but less common today. Professional cyclists of the HEROIC ERA suffered almost constantly from saddle boils, when the skin of the crotch becomes abraded, enabling dirt from the road to get in and infection to develop. In the 1950s and 1960s, the TOUR DE FRANCE doctor Pierre Dumas describes seeing riders with a ma.s.sive swelling in the perineum nicknamed the "third t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e." LOUISON BOBET's career was cut short after he heroically rode on with a saddle boil to win the 1955 Tour, and an uncomfortable sore probably contributed to LAURENT FIGNON's narrow defeat in the 1989 Tour.

Geoffrey Nicholson, in The Great Bike Race, recalled the 1976 Tour runner-up Joop Zoetemelk pulling down his shorts to show journalists a boil "the size of an egg" on his inner thigh to explain why he wasn't able to challenge the winner Lucien Van Impe. LANCE ARMSTRONG's teammate Frankie Andreu finished one Tour with a vast hole cut in his saddle to accommodate a sore.

Some cyclists swear by the use of cream on the insert in their shorts, others prefer to pedal dry; none now resort to the 1930s remedy of putting a raw steak down below. All are agreed, however, that nothing apart from a little cream should come between a cyclist and his insert, once made of soft chamois leather (which would harden uncomfortably with was.h.i.+ng and had to be treated before use), now more likely to be an artificial padded fabric. Repeated cycling seems to harden the skin in the crotch for male cyclists, who should not have to resort to the remedies recommended by TOM SIMPSON: ice water baths or cocaine lotions to deaden the nerves.

SAFETY BICYCLES A type of bike born of a spate of inventions in the 1870s and 1880s as designers attempted to improve on the HIGH-WHEELER by making the bike more stable and introducing rear-wheel drive. The definitive safety bicycle was produced in 1885 with the launch of the Rover designed by JAMES STARLEY.

Starley's third model for the Rover had the diamond frame, rear chain drive-the bush-roller chain as we know it today had been invented in 1880-and direct front-wheel steering that now define most bikes. The size of the Rover could be altered for cyclists of various heights; the gears were also changeable by varying the size of chain rings and sprockets. An 1869 machine made by Frenchmen Meyer and Guilmet had included similar features but had never been marketed due to the Franco-Prussian war.

The only issue with safety-type bicycles was that the smaller wheels were less forgiving than the larger ones used on the high-wheeler, but that was solved in 1888 when John Boyd Dunlop, a vet in Belfast, patented the pneumatic tire (see TIRES for the development of this vital item). Initially the tires were glued and bound to the wheel-rim but later in the decade Michelin of France patented a wired-on tire.

Fundamentally, the modern bicycle was born. What remained was perfecting the various areas: the development of gearing, lighter and stronger components, ma.s.s production to drive down prices and make the machines ever more popular. Key developments in WHEELS, FRAMES (materials and design), BRAKES, tires, and GEARS are covered in their individual sections.

SCHUERMANN, Clemens (b. 1888, d. 1957), Herbert (b. 1925, d. 1994), and Ralph (b. 1953) The German family of architects who between them have built many of the world's velodromes: 122 at the last count, including the Olympic tracks in Beijing, Barcelona, Seoul, Mexico City, and Rome; the Hamar track in Norway; the Meadowbank velodrome in Edinburgh; the UCI's World Cycling Center track in l'Aigle, Switzerland; and the Vigorelli velodrome in Milan.

Clemens Schuermann was a track cyclist who invented an early cycling helmet and later became an architect who began constructing velodromes in 1926. He experimented with velodrome construction with a temporary track in his home town of Muenster, which he built and rebuilt each year, continually altering the transitions-the point where the rider exits the banking and enters the straight. He discovered that at this point, centrifugal forces mean a properly designed track can guide the rider around the curve so that he or she does not have to turn the handlebars.

The Vigorelli was Clemens's masterpiece; his son Herbert continued the tradition, working around the globe on 55 tracks and helping the UCI with track design, reducing standard length to 250 m. He handed the business down in turn to his son Ralph, who designed the velodrome at Hamar, Norway, in a radically shaped building resembling a Viking longs.h.i.+p, and, most recently, the futuristic track used at the Beijing OLYMPIC GAMES.

(SEE ALSO HOUR RECORD, TRACK RACING).

SCHWINN America's best-known cycle maker, which was founded in Chicago by two German emigres, Ignaz Schwinn and Adolph Arnold, started production in 1895 and was responsible for two cla.s.sic designs. Under Ignaz's son Frank W. Schwinn, the Aerocycle was based on motorcycle design with 2.125-inch balloon tires-specially produced by the American Rubber Company at Schwinn's request-vast mudguards, a chrome-plated headlight, and push-b.u.t.ton bell. It was later known as the cruiser. The Stingray of 1963, designed by Al Fritz, was another motorcycle-based design. Fritz was inspired by a Californian youth trend for fitting bikes with motorbike parts, and produced a machine that featured high-rise handlebars known as apehangers, a banana-shaped seat, and 20-inch wheels, which was adapted by RALEIGH and marketed successfully in the UK as the Chopper.

Schwinn's Paramount was its most successful road bike brand, introduced in 1938 under Frank W. Schwinn and made in low numbers in a small unit that was separate from the main factory, but after that the company never seemed truly at ease with road bike manufacturing, possibly because it never sponsored a team that raced in the European hotbed. The Paramount was updated in the 1950s with Reynolds tubing, and the multi-geared Varsity and Continental brands sold well in the 1960s. But Schwinn missed out on the surge in road racing interest in the US in the 1970s: the bikes they offered were not light or responsive enough compared to what was offered from Europe. Similarly the company failed to truly capitalize on the later BMX and MOUNTAIN-BIKE booms-although ironically enough the Schwinn cruisers were an inspiration for the earliest mountain bikes, and Schwinn briefly produced a mountain bike named the Klunker 5. Schwinn outsourced manufacturing to GIANT, which launched its own brands and overtook it in the late 1980s. The name has been bought, sold, and relaunched over the last 15 years. In 1993, during one difficult spell, Richard Schwinn, great-grandson of Ignaz Schwinn, founded Waterford Precision Cycles, an offshoot based in the former Paramount production plant in Waterford, Wisconsin, which makes lightweight machines in limited numbers.

SERCU, Patrick (b. Belgium, 1944) The greatest SIX-DAY rider ever, Sercu was born into a family that epitomized the cycling tradition of FLANDERS. His father Albert came close to winning CLa.s.sICS such as the Tour of Flanders and ParisTours in the 1940s and was a world-champions.h.i.+p silver medalist. To give his son the best possible start in cycling, he restored the velodrome in the little town of Rumbeke so that he could train on it.

Patrick was an amateur and professional world sprint champion, and set world records over one kilometer, but he also had sufficient stamina to race well in the longest stage races. His sprint gave him 14 stage wins in the GIRO D'ITALIA and the green points jersey in the 1974 TOUR DE FRANCE, where he had a fair bit of help from EDDY MERCKX, with whom he formed a winning team in several sixes.

His high cheekbones meant he looked a little like the Cannibal and on the winter velodromes between 1966 and 1983 he was as dominant as Merckx was on the road, winning 88 six-days out of the 224 he contested. How did he do it? To start with, Sercu had the perfect blend of speed and stamina for the Madison relay races that are at the heart of sixes: few could outsprint him for points, not many were stronger when it came to making lap gains. And his status meant that promoters would almost always give Sercu the strongest partners: he would sometimes be given a local hero-for example, he won the London six with Tony Gowland in 1972-but often he teamed up with another record winner, the Dutchman Peter Post (see RALEIGH for information on Post's career as a team manager). He continued winning when Post retired in 1972. He is now director of the Ghent Six-Day race.

(SEE ALSO TRACK RACING).

s.e.x Medical opinion is divided over whether cycling is good for s.e.xual health. Studies that indicate that pressure in the genital area from bicycle saddles can lead to male impotence and female genital soreness tend to be countered by evidence of the physical and mental well-being that comes from cycling. Early on, there was speculation that cycling after intercourse might be damaging for men and that the very act of cycling might turn women into nymphomaniacs. No research exists to support either theory.

There are claims that the invention of the bicycle in the 19th century resulted in an expansion of the human gene pool because the mating range of adult humans expanded among all social cla.s.ses, simply because people could travel further and faster to find partners.

The issue of s.e.x and racing is a vexed one: testosterone is rampant in the sport (and not merely the injected drug) while popular wisdom held for many years that professionals should be celibate. A chick-lit novel based on the Tour, Cat by Freya North (see BOOKS-FICTION), implies that there is plenty of bedhopping on the race, and LAURENT FIGNON recalled inventing an alibi for a teammate who wanted a rendezvous with "an unofficial Miss France." Teams have varying policies on wives and girlfriends attending races. "n.o.body has the wife with them when they are working," said one manager in the 1990s.

At a lecture in the 1980s, however, the great all-rounder SEAN KELLY was asked whether he had a personal policy when it came to the bedroom; he replied that he would abstain for a week before a one-day CLa.s.sIC and three weeks before a stage race; one onlooker speculated whether Kelly's wife Linda was still a virgin. ALFREDO BINDA, manager of the Italian team in the 1940s and 1950s, said that in his racing days he permitted himself s.e.x once a year.

In the 1930s, the SOIGNEUR Biagio Cavanna felt that the issue was not having s.e.x but the time cyclists might spend going out to pick up girls, so he recommended his riders visit a brothel instead. His protege FAUSTO COPPI was found in his hotel room in bed with his mistress, the White Lady Giulia Occhini, before a pursuit match in 1953: he told the soigneur that he could make love and then win and was proved right.

Prolific sprint winner Mario Cipollini made much of his macho reputation, cycling with a picture of Pamela Anderson on his handlebars and commenting that "e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. costs only as many calories as a bar of chocolate so it's not a worry for me. I've won plenty of races after having s.e.x." Cipollini once broke away in a race with a fellow sprinter, and then disappeared off the road for a rendezvous with two girls, and marketed himself as a s.e.x G.o.d: his shoe sponsor distributed postcards that showed him being fed grapes by a harem of topless beauties.

The stresses of their profession mean that cyclists often have tangled private lives: the 1920s French great HENRI PELISSIER was shot dead by his mistress, while Coppi's messy divorce provoked anger among fans and the Catholic church. The domestic arrangements of JACQUES ANQUETIL verged on the incestuous: he set up a menage a trois with his wife Janine and her daughter from her first marriage, Annie, with whom he had a daughter, Sophie, then became involved with Janine's daughter-in law, Dominique, with whom he had a son. It was, says Sophie in her memoirs, For the Love of Jacques, partly due to his desperate need to produce an heir, partly also because he was the undisputed ruler of their Norman household.

s.h.i.+MANO Together with Italians CAMPAGNOLO, the j.a.panese company is one of two world leaders in cycle-component manufacture, although recently their dominance has been shaken by newcomer SRAM. Unlike Campag', however, s.h.i.+mano is a diverse enterprise and a world leader in fis.h.i.+ng tackle and also makes s...o...b..arding equipment, although bike bits account for about 75 percent of its income (2005 figure). s.h.i.+mano also has far greater market reach, covering mountain-biking and leisure cycling. s.h.i.+mano is a public company in j.a.pan and also manufactures in Czechoslovakia, China, Malaysia, and Singapore; the American arm is privately owned.

Established in the 1920s, the company emerged as a serious contender in cycling during the 1970s, when it rode the surge in the industry in the US to become, so it claimed, the world's largest DERAILLEUR makers. Next they moved into Europe, where top cyclists who raced on s.h.i.+mano gear included Freddy Maertens; their first attempt to take on Campagnolo was the Dura-Ace groupset in 1974.

The key innovation came in 1984, with the introduction of s.h.i.+mano Index System, in which the gear lever "clicked" into preset positions to provide quicker and more accurate gear s.h.i.+fting; crucially, the levers, cable, cable housing, derailleur, chain, and sprockets were all considered to be parts of a unit dedicated to producing the best possible gear s.h.i.+ft.

Another landmark was the introduction of the Freehub system, in which separate sprockets slid directly onto a hub that incorporated the freewheel, rather than hub and freewheel being separate. Critically, that meant that gear ratios could be rapidly changed by switching individual sprockets, something pro-team mechanics rapidly appreciated.

The improvements to Dura-Ace meant the company was beginning to threaten Campagnolo's hegemony in pro cycling component making, and the breakthrough came in 1989, when the American 7-Eleven team started using a prototype gear s.h.i.+fter, incorporated into the brake lever-STI, or s.h.i.+mano Total Integration. It took Campagnolo several years to catch up, and by then s.h.i.+mano had moved to the top of the market.