Ride on you Crazy Diamonds
Eamonn Sweeney saddles up to unearth the appeal behind the rapid rise of the male cycling collective
Eamonn Sweeney takes a sidewards glance at the explosion in leisure cycling
“In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust, They strap in doubt--by hiding it, robust-And almost hear a meaning in their noise. Exact conclusion of their hardiness Has no shape yet, but from known whereabouts They ride, directions where the tires press. They scare a flight of birds across the field: Much that is natural, to the will must yield.” ‘On The Move’ Thom Gunn
GUNN wrote those words back in 1957 about a gang of proto Hells Angels on motorbikes suddenly shattering the quiet of the English countryside. Sixty years on, they function as a pretty good description of something happening every weekend, and the odd weekday as well, near you.
These days most of the riders are mounted on what Luka Bloom memorably dubbed, ‘The Acoustic Motorbike.’ Their pelotons swoop out of the silence and criss-cross the roads of the nation. It seems like there’s never been so many cyclists. You can’t deny that something new and exciting is going on.
But why cycling and why now? The short answer would be that I don’t have a clue. The last time I was on a bike it had stabilisers on it. I can see that, like homosexuality and set dancing, cycling is something which gives great pleasure to the participant. But it also seems like one of those things you need to experience at first hand. From the outside there is a slight air of mystery concerning the essence of its appeal.
Nevertheless I have been tasked with making a few observations on the phenomenon, so here goes.
Cyclists aren’t the only fitness fanatics suddenly taking to the highways and byways in great numbers. Anyone who’s been walking a dog in the countryside lately will have noticed that we also appear to have hit Peak Jogger. But there’s a significant difference between those who run and those who cycle. The majority of the former are women and tend to be on their own, the latter category is composed almost entirely of men in large groups. There are exceptions, men who jog, women who jog in a small group, a very occasional lone cyclist, but the most common sights are solitary female runners and a phalanx of men cycling.
The collective nature of cycling seems to appeal to something specific in the male soul. That may be because there are few things men like more than being in a gang. I can remember from my youth, and so I suspect can a lot of the nation’s cyclists, the mystique which once attached to the bike gang, hardy outlaws who traversed the nation’s roads and sometimes didn’t even bother to pay at the petrol pumps. You could view today’s cyclists as a kind of Hells Angels without the violence and grooming issues. Heavens Angels if you like. Or Limbos Angels maybe. You hear them before you see them because the peloton tends to be a pretty noisy affair with manly shouts echoing up and
down the line. A bit like a mobile stag party in fact.
Male bonding is one factor contributing to the cycling boom. But there are also less macho elements at work. Lance Armstrong’s autobiography was entitled, semi-truthfully, ‘It’s not about the bike’. A group biography of the Sunday cyclist could be called, ‘It’s not all about the bike . . . just look at these lovely outfits’.
When I saw a photo of several of my colleagues in the sports department looking a bit like lads dressed up to play strawberry bon-bons in a musical remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as they prepared to ascend a monstrous chunk of French limestone called something like the Blanc de Mange, two thoughts struck me: 1. Mon Dieu, it isn’t the same way middle age hits us all. 2. Haven’t Modern Romance kept themselves in very good nick? Ay ay ay ay moosey.
It will always be a source of disappointment to a man reared in the era of such style icons as Kajagoogoo, Sonny Crockett and Duran Duran in that video where Le Bon is poncing around on the front of a yacht that the modern world provides so few opportunities for dressing up in really brightly coloured clothes. Did Spandau Ballet die in vain?
Yet though they are condemned by convention to don the sombre shades required for office work and business lunch, within most men lies the desire for technicolor rebellion, a desire which can best be fulfilled by taking up cycling. After all, the Village People aren’t hiring right now.
There are other motivations I’m sure. But mention cycling to the civilian and the luminosity and contour-hugging nature of the cyclist’s uniform will be mentioned within five seconds. Meaner spirits may even suggest that, when off the bike, certain members of the peloton stand around in their gear for a little bit longer than is strictly necessary.
Clothing isn’t the only gear involved in cycling. There is the bike itself and various accoutrements which provide for the indulgence of another essentially male hobby, the display of expertise in the field of gadgets and the use of the phrase, “You get what you pay for.”
When I were a lad, cycling seemed to be a largely working class sport. The biggest cycling fan I knew was an uncle of mine who was involved in a club in Dublin, lived in Finglas and worked in the Semperit tyre factory in Ballyfermot. A gent to his fingertips, he supplied gratefully received programmes for the Tour of Ireland and the Ras Tailteann and once brought me to see a stage finish of the former race in Kilkenny. Cycling seemed a sport devoid of bourgeois pretentiousness, one which for example would have had very little overlap in terms of participants with rugby.
Perhaps this is still the case. But there are times when I think that a running friend of mine who describes Triathlons as ‘10k for yuppies’ might have a point. Though maybe it’s not just cycling. Maybe everything’s got a little bit more middle class these days and Irish sport is like one of those neighbourhoods which is being gentrified bit by bit.
Anyway, yuppies have to live too. And perhaps the mystique of the open road has a special appeal for someone who spends the week locked within a corporate straitjacket. Out on the road you don’t have to pretend you’re ‘passionate about customer service,’ anymore.
Really I’m joshing. I’ve nothing against cyclists, cross my heart. The guys you see on the road going west along from Skibbereen to Ballydehob seem a very different crew from that old bugbear, the Self-Righteous Cyclist who thought he was saving western civilisation by taking to the bike and would write letters to The Irish Times complaining that yesterday he’d nearly been knocked down in Donnybrook and that he was a member of Ireland’s most persecuted minority.
Perhaps there’s even a bit of jealousy on my part. The greatest sports movie of all, hands down without any rivals, is a cycling movie, Breaking Away, made in 1979, which hymns the joys of life on the bike to such moving effect that by the end you’re doing wheelies in the living room. Watch that and you know what brings them on to the road.
The best character in the movie is a young American lad named Dave who idolises Italian cyclists to such an extent that he begins speaking Italian, subsisting on pasta, singing opera and pretending to his new girlfriend that he actually is Italian.
It’s very funny but it also captures something essential about the way we love sport because of the scope it gives us for fantasy. I’d imagine that for a lot of guys that peloton on the road feels a bit like one in the Tour de France. When I ran on the road, no matter how slowly, it was seldom without at some stage slipping into the fantasy that within a mile we’d be hitting the Olympic stadium with the medals up for grabs. Cycling seems an ideal sport for the dreamer. And the fact that the dream can be a collective one must make it even better still. It would be a dull life without a bit of fantasy in it.
So ride on you crazy diamonds. Get out on the highway, get your motor running, looking for adventure and forgetting about your mortgage. As Thom Gunn wrote at the end of On The Move, “One is always nearer by not keeping still.”
I’ll finish with the words of another great English poet, Syd Barrett who, writing 10 years after Thom Gunn probably did an even better job of capturing the essential appeal of cycling. “I’ve got a bike, you can ride it if you like. It’s got a basket, a bell that rings, And things to make it look good.”