Cyclopedia (10 page)

There are several Classics that were prestigious in their time but which are no longer run. The best example is
Bordeaux–Paris
, the Derby of the Road, which dated back to the origins of cycling in the 19th century. It lasted 14 hours and was unique in that the riders were paced by small motorbikes known as DERNYS for the second half; it survived until 1988.

The
Grand Prix des Nations
time trial was founded in 1932 by the journalists Gaston Benac and Albert Baker d'Isy and witnessed some of JACQUES ANQUETIL's greatest rides. It was upstaged by the inception of the world time trial championships in 1994 and was last run in 2005.

The
Championship of Zurich
enjoyed the longest uninterrupted run of any Classic (1917–2006) because it was kept going through both world wars thanks to Swiss neutrality, but it eventually
succumbed to a lack of sponsorship.

GREAT BRITAIN was awarded a round of the UCI's World Cup series, a race which always carried the suffix “Classic”—although it had no tradition and was a manufactured event—and this ran from 1989 to 1996 at Newcastle, Brighton, Leeds, and Rochester.

The greatest Classic cyclist of them all, by a huge margin, was EDDY MERCKX, who took 33 wins in major one-day races. The other great all-around specialists include: RIK VAN LOOY (17), ROGER DE VLAEMINCK (16), Jan Raas (14), and FAUSTO COPPI (12). During the 1980s and 1990s, one-day racing was dominated by SEAN KELLY (11) and Johan Museeuw (12); today, however, most cyclists specialize in either the hillier Classics or the flatter cobbled events. Some cyclists achieved particular dominance in a single event: JACQUES ANQUETIL, for example, won the GP des Nations nine times—but only took three other Classics, while Merckx managed seven victories in Milan–San Remo.

CLUBS
Cycling clubs were born as the world discovered the bicycle, and their history in the United States runs parallel with that of the sport: massive early growth, later decline following the development of the automobile, and a depression before a phase of rebirth later in the 20th century. The term “wheelmen” was commonly used, and the clubs' umbrella body, the League of American Wheelmen, was founded in 1880. Its membership peaked at 103,000 in 1898, but it folded in 1902 with under 9,000 members. After several attempts, it was reformed in 1955.

To take just one example of the height cycling clubs reached in the late 19th century, the Detroit Bicycle Club, formed in 1879 and renamed the Detroit Wheelmen in 1890, boasted 450 members by 1896 and had sufficient resources to build an elaborate, elegantly designed clubhouse costing $40,000 that contained an auditorium, card tables, bowling alley, baths, library, and kitchen. The building remained standing in the center of Detroit until the 1970s. Another more notable Detroit club was the Wolverine Wheelmen, founded in 1888 and eventually—after folding and being reformed in 1937—morphing into a club that also catered for cross-country skiers and speedskaters. Thanks to the cross-fertilization between skating and cycling, Wolverine members such as Sue Novara-Reber, Sheila Young, and Connie Paraskevin played a key role in the development of US cycling in the 1970s and 1980s. LANCE ARMSTRONG's teammate Frankie Andreu was also a member.

Perhaps the strongest club the US has produced to date is New York squad GS Mengoni, founded in 1981 by a former Italian racer Fred Mengoni. In the 1980s Mengoni's squad included racers such as Alexi Grewal, Steve Bauer, Matt Eaton, Leonard “Harvey” Nitz, and Doug Shapiro and was able to give the pros of 7-Eleven a run for their money. The stand-out result was Bauer's silver medal in the 1984 OLYMPIC GAMES as a Mengoni
amateur, followed a month later by bronze in his first World's as a pro. Mengoni tried, and failed, to get the young GREG LEMOND to race for him, but a later incarnation of the team included George Hincapie, an Olympian for Mengoni and later a Tour de France stage winner. Mengoni was a cofounder of USPRO, the first real governing body for professional racing in the US.

Some of the more curious cycling clubs are to be found in GREAT BRITAIN. The A5 Rangers were named after the road they used for their runs up Watling Street; the North Road and Bath Road followed the same principle. South London's San Fairy Ann, on the other hand, comes from a misliteration of the French
Ça ne fait rien
—“it doesn't matter at all.” In the Welsh capital Cardiff, the Jif club was set up as a rival to the Ajax and was named after a competing washing powder. The Comical Cycling Club of Penshurst (in Sussex) was founded solely so that they could wear jerseys bearing the cyrillic initials of the old Soviet Union.

The Pickwick Bicycle Club claims to be the oldest cycling club in the world; founded on June 22, 1870—and given the name because this date coincided with the death of Charles Dickens—it is now largely a dining club but keeps to the founding rule that members must display a knowledge of Dickens's Pickwick Papers. Equally arcane is the 300,000 Mile Club, founded in 1962, with entry restricted to the 70 or so cyclists who have covered more than that distance in their lifetime, with every mile officially logged. In the same vein, the Ordre des Cols Durs is a French club for “pass-bashers”—cyclists who record the heights of the mountain passes around they world they ride each season—while the Cape Wrath Fellowship is open to cyclists who have braved the ferry ride and dead-end road that lead to this remote headland in northern Scotland.

 

 

COBBLES
Synonymous with two of the sport's MONUMENTS (see FLANDERS, PARIS–ROUBAIX) and
other one-day CLASSICS such as Ghent–Wevelgem, stone-paved roads are now a throwback to cycling's earliest days. In French they are known as
pavé
, in Flemish
kinderkopje
(children's heads). Racing cyclists fear them because in the wet they can be virtually impossible to ride on safely.

The threat from any sort of cobble depends on the stone it is made of: blue slate is extra slippery, while granite is a greater puncture threat. Cobbled sections included in Paris–Roubaix are occasionally put in the TOUR DE FRANCE, most recently in the 1983 and 2004 races, as well as in 2010.

The three most notorious cobbled roads in cycling are:

The Trouée d'Arenberg
in Paris–Roubaix, a 2.5 km long dead-straight road laid in the time of Napoleon that undulates due to mining subsidence and has massive holes between the stones. The riders used to switch—at speeds of about 35 mph—between the grass verge and the
pavé
until the organizers erected barriers. It is often tackled in a downhill direction, hence the high speeds and horrendous crashes. The most celebrated victim of Arenberg was the Belgian champion Johan Museeuw, who nearly died after crashing there in 1999; in 2001 the French cyclist Philippe Gaumont suffered an open fracture of the femur, which cost him six weeks in bed.