This year’s Étape Caledonia did not go as planned. What should have been an idyllic day’s cycling for more than 3,000 riders, through a breathtaking Perthshire landscape, almost ended prematurely for everyone. In a bizarre throwback to the very earliest days of professional cycling and the Tour de France - when partisan fans, during 1904’s second edition of the famous race, bombarded the peleton with rocks and bottles; and sabotaged the stage route with nails, after their favoured rider had passed - some person or persons scattered thousands of carpet tacks along an estimated 20-mile stretch of the route, causing the temporary suspension of the UK’s only closed-road, mass-participation cycling event. The organisers feared for participants’ safety especially with the prospect of riders suffering punctures during high speed descents. The event was stopped while efforts were made to clear away the tacks and this was done for all but the last nine miles. Inevitably many riders did get fla...

I don’t remember much from my physics lessons at school but one concept did take root in my imagination: the idea that energy input equals energy output. According to the First Law of Thermodynamics , energy cannot be created or destroyed, simply transformed from one type …to another“. So far, so Einstein. Every movement and sound that we make, is generated by energy which has to go somewhere. So the kinetic energy from cycling downhill for instance, translates itself into heat and sound energy - through friction - when the brakes are applied to the wheel rims to slow the bike down. When you look at the world in terms of energy being all around us, all the time, it’s quickly apparent that our society, which would grind to an apocalyptic halt without electricity, is wasting this supply of abundant everyday power. The Government has signed up to a binding EU commitment which pledges that 20% of Europe’s energy by 2020 will come from renewable sources. The Department for Business Enterpr...

If you’ve ever tried a cycling computer game, you will understand why most games’ reviewers give bike sims very low scores. There’s fun to be had up to a very limited point, from sending pixellated domestiques back to the team car for bidons but not much. Your cyber characters may bear the names and attributes of real life professional roadies and sport the squad colours; but the similarity to what really happens doesn’t go much further than a name and a dominant riding style, such as climber, sprinter or rouleur. ‘Sterile’ is probably a good way of describing the experience. There’s no meat or intrigue, or edge of the seat excitement. In short, there’s no cheating and there are definitely no dope tests or dopers. For the management game geek that’s not a problem. There’s still plenty to get stuck into here for them, with team selection, scouting out new riders and figuring out the best in-race strategy to follow. For the rest of us, casual gamers after a bit of a thrill, maybe the Obs...

The bike messenger community is a tightly knit group which is fiercely proud and protective of its identity. I base this conclusion purely on a detailed reading of the online forum of ‘Moving Target - the world’s most useless messenger zine’ (their description, not mine). The posts on the MT forum are from bona fide cycle couriers (I’ve probably misused some vocabulary here - messenger terminology I’m guessing is probably guarded with a vengeance too); and they are by turns, wise, witty, self-deprecating, frivolous, serious and it has to be said, very funny. Chapeau to the Zine’s founder, Buffalo Bill , for an informative and entertaining ‘product‘ (not sure about that bon mot either, by the way). His moderating presence never feels far away on the website and he writes the news stories on the main page with a light touch. The familiar forum banter is frequently hilarious and gives you a clear sense of a real vibrant community as you read through the threads. I also get the feeling ...

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...

Lycra is an insidious fabric. It attracts ridicule to those who wear it - and most of us are cyclists. After one strenuous commute into work, it advertises its presence forcefully to the nostrils of passing colleagues. When I first started cycling to the office, I swore I wouldn’t be seen dead in the unseemly, skin-tight black shorts, with their spongy inner nappy, so beloved of the two-wheeled fraternity. I was happy to wear football shorts, trainers and cotton tee-shirts which would double in weight and be wringing with clammy sweat by the time I reached my destination. But if only I’d known it, I was at the top of a slippery slope. Cycling magazines and a growing interest in the Tour de France were my downfall. Replica team jerseys crept into my wardrobe as I admired their garish colours and improbable names. The most unglamorous firms put sponsorship money behind cycling, in the hope that a rider wearing their brand will make it to the end of a Tour de France or Vuelta a Espana sta...

Tim Henman may have bowed out of the lawn tennis limelight, passing on the jinxed mantle of Britain’s best player, to Andy Murray. But Tim remains one of the most recognisable sporting personalities in this country. And he never even won Wimbledon. For all his years of tantalising failure, he enjoyed extensive TV coverage and media exposure. There’s nothing our sporting public warms to more, it seems, than a plucky underdog with a tendency always to fall at the last hurdle. As 1966 slips deeper into the collective memory, similar points could be made about the home nations’ football teams in successive World Cup and international competitions. This year’s Euro 2008 tournament in Austria and Switzerland is a stark case in point. It’s a Brit-free zone. You’d be wrong to take your lead from what’s on the TV and conclude that Britons are no good at sport. There’s one discipline in which our national squad stands head and shoulders above the competition - and that’s track cycling. But gener...

Etape Jitters... Lance was wrong. It’s ALL about the bike. Or that’s how it feels, having recently joined Kingston Wheelers cycling club and signed up for a hellish day of pedalling in the Alps. Never have I spent so much time orbiting the indifferent deer in Richmond Park, or rubbing manically at oily marks on my once pristine bike frame. What possessed me? Not only am I attempting a real 187km stage of this year’s Tour de France, it ends on one of the most infamous and daunting climbs in that strength-sapping race, L’Alpe d’Huez . Do four revolutions round the park at top speed do this task any justice by way of training? I doubt it. Not even repeated ascents of Box Hill’s three mini switchbacks are much good as preparation - and you can’t stop for coffee and a sticky chocolate bun on the Alpe’s Hairpin 15. There’s a word which looms larger as I strain to increase my cadence up Sawyers Hill, ‘hell-for-leathering’ it as best I can, towards the horizon. This multi-syllabled term warns...

The 2006 Etape is less than a week away and - in the Apollo 13 sense - I have a problem. The concept of tapering your training is logical. You ease off in the last days before your event to ensure you're as rested as possible, without stopping practice altogether. With this in mind, I duly 'tapered' from a 120 mile Audax run in Kent and a 60 mile club run the next day, down to a very gentle 30 mile spin round Richmond Park . But this last session was the camel's back-breaker. Within 12 hours I could feel a familiar twinge in my right foot. Two hours into my night shift at work, the foot was throbbing and on fire and my walking was becoming increasingly laboured. It got so bad that I signed off sick for the second shift and sat watching tennis and World Cup football on the TV with a large block of ice wrapped around my foot with a dish towel. I've had tendonitis before and it has kept me out of circulation for a week at a time. I put it down to age (sadly) and over u...

Slick paving stones and torrential rain should have been enough of a warning. But no, I chose the shortcut anyway - and now have a bent brake lever and a bruised hip to show for it. My tumble was nothing compared to that of Discovery Channel's George Hincapie in the Paris Roubaix race this afternoon. One minute he was riding along, tucked in near the nose of the peleton, the next his hands were loose and his bike veered off the pave, as if possessed, into the grass verge and George hit the deck heavily. The slow motion replay on TV showed that his handle bar stem had snapped somehow leaving him completely at the mercy of momentum and gravity. He looked in bad shape - possibly a broken collar bone. Tough chips for the classics specialist hoping to shine at the end of his career, now that he doesn't have to slave away for his old boss, Lance Armstrong. My own 'crash' came not in a race, but during the self-imposed, time trial-like spin, I try to put in on the way home fro...

First time blogger here. The title may suggest I'm going to write about cycling - which I am - but as there's no bike to be seen in the uploaded photo (& I'm afraid that is me), I may be posting on everything else under the sun, or then again I may confine my comments to bike-related issues only. In my defence, I can say this snap ( right ) was taken at the 2008 Tour de France, on a rainy day in Brittany. I think it was an uneventful early stage of the Tour. We spent four hours camped under a small umbrella, hogging our vantage point on a street corner. Of course, the race whizzed past us in seconds when the army of Lycra-wearing warriors finally pedalled up the hill towards us. Luckily we then found two seats in a nearby bar and watched the race finish a 100km or so up the road. It seems a ludicrous waste of time and effort when the riders slog away for hours, cycling huge distances, only for the race to be decided in a photo-finish, mass sprint at the end. Why not h...