Cyclopedia (25 page)

Accidents on the open road were frequent, particularly when the riders had to race at night on poorly maintained roads. The following report from
L'Auto
on the 1909 Bordeaux–Paris, sums up the spirit of the time: the race was “extremely hard: rain, snow and glacial cold. We watched a bitter battle in the middle of the night, and an accident. At La Couronne, five kilometers from Angouleme, Leon Georget hit a stone ... performed a superb somersault, and as at that moment a [cycle] tourist was on his heels, he was brutally thrown several meters through the air. He lay stretched out, unconscious, and was taken to the nearest checkpoint in a piteous state ... a broken collarbone and a deep wound in his head. As it froze fit to crack stone on the Poitiers road, Trousselier escaped. There was a crazy chase from the peloton and ‘Trou-Trou' paid the price. The countryside was covered in a white blanket.”

With cyclists trailing all over the countryside in most major races, rather than passing quickly in one compact bunch, they had more interaction with the public, who might watch a cyclist in the Tour eat a quick meal in a bar, or thaw out a hypothermic competitor in Milan–San Remo. There were numerous episodes of tacks being spread on the roads, while in the 1911 Tour it was alleged that one of the favorites, Paul Duboc, had been poisoned; so angry were the fans in his home town of Rouen that the race leader Gustave Garrigou had to be escorted through the town in disguise to avoid being lynched.

 

(SEE ALSO
ALFREDO BINDA
,
MAURICE GARIN
,
HUBERT OPPERMAN
,
HENRI PÉLISSIER
)

HERRERA, Luis
(b. Colombia, 1961)

The “little gardener” was the most successful of the wave of Colombian cyclists who came to Europe after the TOUR DE FRANCE was declared “open” to amateurs in 1983. He became synonymous with their main sponsor, Café de Colombia. He earned his nickname because he spent his youth picking flowers in the fields near his birthplace, Fusagasugá.

In Herrera's first Tour, 1984, he won the prestigious mountaintop finish at l‘Alpe d'Huez, riding away from BERNARD HINAULT and LAURENT FIGNON with a smooth, metronomic pedaling style, while in 1985 he won two more stages and took the mountains jersey, after reaching an agreement to help Hinault on the first mountain stage. Two years later he added the Tour of Spain to his
palmarès
.

Together with FEDERICO BAHAMONTES, Herrera is the only climber to be crowned King of the Mountains in all three major Tours. This was in spite of the fact that, like all Colombians, he had trouble adapting to European racing; he could not descend well and had trouble time-trialling and sprinting.

When he stopped racing he set up a cattle-breeding business, which was estimated to have made him $5 million, but his wealth made him a target for kidnappers. He was seized from his home in 2000 and held for 20 hours before being released; the amount paid for his ransom has never been disclosed.

 

(SEE ALSO
COLOMBIA
,
ALPS
)

HIBELL, Ian
(b. England, 1934, d. 2008)

Enjoyed perhaps the longest and most strenuous sabbatical in cycling history. Given a year's leave of absence from his job in Brixham, Devon, in 1963, Hibell became one of the world's most prolific cycle-tourists until his untimely death 45 years
later. He recounted his earlier exploits in his memoirs
Into the Remote Places
(Sphere, 1984). The image from that book that most perfectly sums up Hibell shows him paddling his bike across the Manurique river in South America, precariously balanced on a native-style canoe handmade of trees.

Hibell estimated he had used over 800 puncture-repair kits while touring the world, and he had ridden over 250,000 miles on conventional British touring cycles with handbuilt steel frames and drop handlebars: a Freddie Grubb carried him for over 100,000 miles, and he also used a pair of bikes made at Argos in Bristol. All were fitted with customized pannier racks, one with a brazed-on scraper to stop the frame clogging with mud.

His voyages included: Norway to the Cape of Good Hope; crossing the Sahara desert; Zeebrugge to Vladivostok; and north to south through China, this last when he was in his early 70s. Between 1971 and 1973 he became the first man to travel on land up the entire length of the American continent from Cape Horn to northwest Alaska. That tour involved crossing the Darien Gap, where the Atrato Swamp caused a supposedly impassable hiatus in the Pan-American highway. The uncharted space between the last village on either side is about 30 kilometers; for just under a month Hibell and his two companions slashed their way through the jungle, carrying their bikes over a surface of grass floating on the mud, at a rate of about one kilometer per day. In the process they ran out of food, fell out terminally with each other, and he came close to losing a foot after a misjudged blow with the machete.

Riding across Peru, he took with him a brown-haired girl from Manchester, Laura Nichols—referred to in
Into the Remote Places
as Jean—with whom he fell in love and had a son. In 1975, his escapades earned him an appearance on
Blue Peter
, where he cycled
alongside presenter Peter Purves around the studio on his touring bike.

A British adventurer in the great tradition, he was caught in landslides, contracted malaria, braved spear-throwing tribesmen in Africa and murderous mobs inflamed by witch doctors, and at one point lay down under a thorn tree in the desert thinking he was going to die of dehydration.

He also had encounters with Eskimo princesses and a Dayak headman in Borneo. After all this, Hibell was mown down by a hit-and-run motorist in Greece while training for a trip to Tibet by riding from England to Athens. A collected volume of his print articles,
The Legend of Ian Hibell
, has been published posthumously.

HIGH-WHEELER
Design of bike from the late 19th century with a large front wheel and small rear, with pedals driving direct to the front wheel. It is also referred to as an “ordinary” or “penny farthing.” It was developed from the front-wheel driven BONESHAKER—in which both wheels were the same size—and had a heyday that lasted a quarter of a century, in which cycling became almost universal. It was superseded by the SAFETY BICYCLE.

The high-wheeler had a major advantage: if handled well the huge front wheel could absorb the ruts and potholes of poorly made 19th century roads. But it had its limitations: braking was difficult, gearing was restricted by the inside leg of the rider, and more seriously, it was intimidating to use and dangerous to ride, with headfirst crashes all too frequent and fatalities not uncommon. The rider's position on top of the vast front wheel was inherently unstable—particularly in any kind of a wind—while steering was affected by the action of pedaling. It was recommended
that when riding downhill, the safest position was with the legs over the handlebars so that if a “header” occurred, the cyclist could simply vault onto his feet.

Even so, high-wheelers became astonishingly popular. By the mid-1870s there were estimated to be about 50,000 on British roads. Cycling clubs and cycle races sprung up rapidly, which led to a battle between manufacturers to reduce weight. By the 1880s, the Cyclists' Touring Club had over 20,000 members and had approved almost 800 hotels for their use. By 1897 most major towns had cycling schools, teaching the skill in the same way that driving is taught today.

In America, the 1880s saw massive expansion in high-wheeler use, with the entrepreneurial Colonel Albert A. Pope as the driving force: Pope bought up all the available cycle patents, set up cycle mass production for his Columbia machine in Hartford, Connecticut, founded
The Wheelman
magazine, and set up the League of American Wheelmen to campaign for better roads for bicyclists. At the peak of bike mania, Pope was making a quarter of a million bikes per year. The volume of innovation was such that by the 1890s, the US needed a separate patent office for bicycles, while a single office could cover everything else.

The basic limitations of the high-wheeler led to further invention: to counter the gearing issue, machines such as the Coventry-made “Kangaroo” used chain drive and geared sprockets to enable a smaller front wheel to be used, while numerous more stable variants on the penny farthing design were tried, including the “star,” which had the small wheel in front. The “xtraordinary” and
the “facile” used lever drives to reduce the size of the front wheel. The “dicycle” had two large wheels in parallel with the rider sitting in between. These were all dubbed “safety” bikes, and eventually the high-wheeler became obsolete. Pope, naturally, was at the forefront, making his first safety bike in 1888.

HILL CLIMBS
A mass-start event up a major mountain pass, with the riders timed. Classic climbs include the Mount Evans hill-climb in Colorado, which takes in the highest paved road in the US, with a summit of 14,264 feet.

It has been held since 1962. The course record for men is 1 hour 41 minutes 20 seconds by Tom Danielson (2004). JEANNIE LONGO holds the women's record with 1 hour 59 minutes 19 seconds. In New England, the Mount Washington Auto Road climb has been going for almost 40 years; the climb is 7.6 miles, the summit 6,288 feet, the steepest gradient 22 percent. The big attraction of the Mount Washington event is that apart from the three days when it is open for hill-climbs, the road is closed to cyclists.

The hill-climb in Great Britain is a time trial up a hill, from top to bottom, usually run at the end of the season as autumn sets in. The first hill-climb was run by the Catford CC in 1887, and their event on Yorks hill near Sevenoaks in Kent remains one of the classics, along with its near neighbor run by the Bec CC at Titsey in Surrey. Other classic British climbs include Monsal Head in Derbyshire, the Ramsbottom Rake in Lancashire, the Horseshoe Pass in North Wales, and Snake Pass in Derbyshire.