French Revolutions

shorts, whose gusset featured a
thick, ventilated pad like a sanitary towel from the pre-‘wings’ era. It did
not take my children long to establish that the rigidity of this structure
allowed the shorts to stand up by themselves when placed on a flat, firm
surface.
    Finally, with my departure three days
away, I opened the door to be greeted by a cardboard box the size of a
mattress. ZR3000 had landed. In a state of childish excitement I tore open the
packaging: inside was a very blue, very light machine with tyres as thin and
hard as Hula-Hoops. Counting the sprockets (as I have since learned to call the
cogs at either end of the chain) revealed that, with three sizes on the front
and nine at the back, I would have twenty-seven gears at my disposal. These, I
discovered after protracted panic and a phone call to Martin Warren that began
with aggrieved gabbling and ended in a painfully embarrassed whisper, were
selected by pressing the brake levers in and out.
    With barely less difficulty I fitted
Richard Hallett’s recommended sit-upon — a no-mercy buttock-cleaver that
recalled the old Yellow Pages ad where a young lad pedals off into a
Yorkshire dawn on his birthday present while dad, peering out of the net
curtains, mutters indulgently to himself, ‘I were right about that saddle.’
There had been much debate about the saddle. Some had advised me to go for a
podgy, gel-filled number; Hallett, his complicated psyche awash with infected
testicles and Stakhanovite toil, insisted that such a saddle would do me no
favours in the long run. You’ll be comfortable for three days, but then the sores
will start,’ he’d said, illustrating this theme with the parable of Holland’s
Joop Zoetemelk, who had silenced a press conference during the 1976 Tour by
rolling up his shorts to reveal an intimate boil the size of an egg.
    I’d been warned to expect trouble
with the pedals, or more particularly the ski-type binding mechanism that is
nowadays employed to attach them to the shoes. I’d never even ridden with toe
clips, which had lashed every Tour rider’s feet to his pedals from 1903 until
the mid-Eighties. As someone who never feels truly at ease on a bicycle unless
I can put both feet flat on the floor when waiting at traffic lights, the idea
of being strapped tightly to the pedals was unsettling to say the least. But at
least you could see toe clips, big stainless-steel bands round the top of the
shoe. And when you had seen them, all you had to do to free the foot was to
pull it back. The essential trouble with the newer system was that the cleat (a
word whose leg-iron, penal twang would come to haunt me) which slotted into the
pedal was on the sole of the shoe, utterly out of sight. And so utterly out of
mind.
    Having wobbled gingerly along the
pavement to Kew Bridge on my debut ride (in cleated shoes but not the jersey
and shorts, which I didn’t yet feel qualified to wear), I was deeply disturbed
by the head-down, humpbacked riding position, which as well as being instantly
uncomfortable was also dangerous: to look where you were going rather than
where you’d just been required an unnatural — and additionally uncomfortable —
craning of the neck. None of this was assisted by the drop handlebars: so
narrow and rigid that every slight hump or lump made my whole frame vibrate
like a tuning fork; so featherweight and fickle that riding off a kerb was like
barrelling out of some rodeo pen on an unbroken steer. Experimenting with the
surfeit of gears I clanked and clunked down into gear twenty-seven: my feet
spun manically, a dozen resistance-free rotations for a couple of car lengths’
progress. Monstrous as this seemed, a small part of my brain acknowledged that
there would be times when I’d be pressing down with the full weight of my
breaking body to get gear twenty-seven creaking agonisingly round, times when
twenty-seven wouldn’t be enough, not nearly enough.
    Seconds later, however, none of this
seemed to matter. Clicking back into gear fifteen or so I was astonished by
ZR3000’s effortless straight-line performance: on other bicycles I have owned,
the drawn-out, rising span of Kew Bridge has always been an out-of-the-saddle
lung-burster. I swept majestically past two schoolgirls on mountain bikes and
immediately began to feel rather successful.
    What is it pride comes before? Ah,
yes. Cresting the bridge at a canter, and speeding down the other side, I was
suddenly confronted with a long queue