Cycling is a collection of habits and muscle memories learnt in childhood - usually with the help of stabilisers - which are never wholly forgotten. Hence we encourage people to revisit a long-neglected activity with the expression, “It’s just like riding a bike.” For me, the particular habit of freewheeling, has been second nature for as long as I‘ve been riding. I have also always favoured a conventional multi-geared bicycle. It makes sense on down-hills to click onto the smallest rear cog and blast along like Germany’s troubled big-gear grinder, Jan Ullrich. Choosing a low gear going up and even stooping to the last ditch ‘granny’ option like cadence king, Lance Armstrong , is the other ‘no-brainer‘. Integral to this is the ability to glide along without pedalling. Why would anyone give up their gears and revert to the kind of primitive, ‘one-speed-fits-all’ machine, used more than a century ago when the Tour de France wasn’t even a gleam in the eye of its first director, Henri Des...