Cyclopedia (41 page)

SERCU, Patrick
(b. Belgium, 1944)

The greatest SIX-DAY rider ever, Sercu was born into a family that epitomized the cycling tradition of FLANDERS. His father Albert came close to winning CLASSICS such as the Tour of Flanders and Paris–Tours in the 1940s and was a world-championship silver medalist. To give his son the best possible start in cycling, he restored the velodrome in the little town of Rumbeke so that he could train on it.

Patrick was an amateur and professional world sprint champion, and set world records over one kilometer, but he also had sufficient stamina to race well in the longest stage races. His sprint gave him 14 stage wins in the GIRO D'ITALIA and the green points jersey in the 1974 TOUR DE FRANCE, where he had a fair bit of help from EDDY MERCKX, with whom he formed a
winning team in several sixes.

His high cheekbones meant he looked a little like the Cannibal and on the winter velodromes between 1966 and 1983 he was as dominant as Merckx was on the road, winning 88 six-days out of the 224 he contested. How did he do it? To start with, Sercu had the perfect blend of speed and stamina for the Madison relay races that are at the heart of sixes: few could outsprint him for points, not many were stronger when it came to making lap gains. And his status meant that promoters would almost always give Sercu the strongest partners: he would sometimes be given a local hero—for example, he won the London six with Tony Gowland in 1972—but often he teamed up with another record winner, the Dutchman Peter Post (see RALEIGH for information on Post's career as a team manager). He continued winning when Post retired in 1972. He is now director of the Ghent Six-Day race.

 

(SEE ALSO
TRACK RACING
)

SEX
Medical opinion is divided over whether cycling is good for sexual health. Studies that indicate that pressure in the genital area from bicycle saddles can lead to male impotence and female genital soreness tend to be countered by evidence of the physical and mental well-being that comes from cycling. Early on, there was speculation that cycling after intercourse might be damaging for men and that the very act of cycling might turn women into nymphomaniacs. No research exists to support either theory.

There are claims that the invention of the bicycle in the 19th century resulted in an expansion of the human gene pool because the mating range of adult humans expanded among all social classes, simply because
people could travel further and faster to find partners.

The issue of sex and racing is a vexed one: testosterone is rampant in the sport (and not merely the injected drug) while popular wisdom held for many years that professionals should be celibate. A chick-lit novel based on the Tour,
Cat
by Freya North (see BOOKS—FICTION), implies that there is plenty of bedhopping on the race, and LAURENT FIGNON recalled inventing an alibi for a teammate who wanted a rendezvous with “an unofficial Miss France.” Teams have varying policies on wives and girlfriends attending races. “Nobody has the wife with them when they are working,” said one manager in the 1990s.

At a lecture in the 1980s, however, the great all-rounder SEAN KELLY was asked whether he had a personal policy when it came to the bedroom; he replied that he would abstain for a week before a one-day CLASSIC and three weeks before a stage race; one onlooker speculated whether Kelly's wife Linda was still a virgin. ALFREDO BINDA, manager of the Italian team in the 1940s and 1950s, said that in his racing days he permitted himself sex once a year.

In the 1930s, the SOIGNEUR Biagio Cavanna felt that the issue was not having sex but the time cyclists might spend going out to pick up girls, so he recommended his riders visit a brothel instead. His protégé FAUSTO COPPI was found in his hotel room in bed with his mistress, the White Lady Giulia Occhini, before a pursuit match in 1953: he told the soigneur that he could make love and then win and was proved right.

Prolific sprint winner Mario Cipollini made much of his macho reputation, cycling with a picture of Pamela Anderson on his handlebars and commenting that “ejaculating costs only as many calories as a bar of chocolate so it's not a worry for me. I've won plenty of races after having sex.” Cipollini once broke away in a race with a fellow sprinter, and then disappeared off the road
for a rendezvous with two girls, and marketed himself as a sex god: his shoe sponsor distributed postcards that showed him being fed grapes by a harem of topless beauties.

The stresses of their profession mean that cyclists often have tangled private lives: the 1920s French great HENRI PELISSIER was shot dead by his mistress, while Coppi's messy divorce provoked anger among fans and the Catholic church. The domestic arrangements of JACQUES ANQUETIL verged on the incestuous: he set up a
ménage à trois
with his wife Janine and her daughter from her first marriage, Annie, with whom he had a daughter, Sophie, then became involved with Janine's daughter-in law, Dominique, with whom he had a son. It was, says Sophie in her memoirs,
For the Love of Jacques
, partly due to his desperate need to produce an heir, partly also because he was the undisputed ruler of their Norman household.

SHIMANO
Together with Italians CAMPAGNOLO, the Japanese company is one of two world leaders in cycle-component manufacture, although recently their dominance has been shaken by newcomer SRAM. Unlike Campag', however, Shimano is a diverse enterprise and a world leader in fishing tackle and also makes snowboarding equipment, although bike bits account for about 75 percent of its income (2005 figure). Shimano also has far greater market reach, covering mountain-biking and leisure cycling. Shimano is a public company in Japan and also manufactures in Czechoslovakia, China, Malaysia, and Singapore; the American arm is privately owned.

Established in the 1920s, the company emerged as a serious contender in cycling during the 1970s, when it rode the surge
in the industry in the US to become, so it claimed, the world's largest DERAILLEUR makers. Next they moved into Europe, where top cyclists who raced on Shimano gear included Freddy Maertens; their first attempt to take on Campagnolo was the Dura-Ace groupset in 1974.

The key innovation came in 1984, with the introduction of Shimano Index System, in which the gear lever “clicked” into preset positions to provide quicker and more accurate gear shifting; crucially, the levers, cable, cable housing, derailleur, chain, and sprockets were all considered to be parts of a unit dedicated to producing the best possible gear shift.

Another landmark was the introduction of the Freehub system, in which separate sprockets slid directly onto a hub that incorporated the freewheel, rather than hub and freewheel being separate. Critically, that meant that gear ratios could be rapidly changed by switching individual sprockets, something pro-team mechanics rapidly appreciated.

The improvements to Dura-Ace meant the company was beginning to threaten Campagnolo's hegemony in pro cycling component making, and the breakthrough came in 1989, when the American 7-Eleven team started using a prototype gear shifter, incorporated into the brake lever—STI, or Shimano Total Integration. It took Campagnolo several years to catch up, and by then Shimano had moved to the top of the market.

Thanks to early innovations such as thumbshifting gear levers, and SPD clipless off-road pedals—double sided, with small, sturdy plates that did not clog up with mud, brought out in 1991—Shimano was already dominant in the burgeoning mountain-bike market, with the road-oriented Campagnolo never producing anything that challenged their inventive Deore and XTR groupsets.

Shimano did not win a major Tour until 1988, when Andy Hampsten won the GIRO D'ITALIA, and their first TOUR DE
FRANCE win came in 1999 with LANCE ARMSTRONG, whose seven successive Tour wins cemented their position in the road market. In 2002, Shimano-equipped bikes won all three Grand Tours. By 2009, their range included electric gears on the range-topping Dura3Ace group, using a battery about the size of a mobile phone power unit, and biodynamic chain rings, reshaped so they were not exactly oval, but almost diamond-shaped with rounded corners.

(b. England, 1937, d. 1967)

 

Dapper, daring, and charismatic, Simpson was the first cyclist from GREAT BRITAIN to make a major impact on European professional racing. A coal miner's son whose early hero was FAUSTO COPPI he won a bronze medal in the Melbourne Olympics of 1956 then moved from his home in Nottinghamshire in 1959 to the town of Saint-Brieuc in Brittany to avoid national service.

He rapidly became one of the stars of the pro circuit thanks to victories in CLASSICS such as the Tour of FLANDERS in 1961, Bordeaux–Paris in 1963, MILAN–SAN REMO in 1964, and the GIRO DI LOMBARDIA in 1965, the year he became the first—and to date the only—Briton to win the world road-race championship. Simpson was also the first Briton to wear the yellow jersey of the TOUR DE FRANCE, for a single day in the 1962 race. Those wins earned him the BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 1965.

Simpson won hearts for his “all or nothing” racing style and his showmanship, be it posing in silly hats or performing stunts for the crowds on his bike. He was celebrated for posing for photographs wearing a sharp suit and bowler hat and carrying an umbrella in the style of Major Thompson, an “Englishman abroad” created by French writer Pierre Daninos.

He was also a dreamer whose ambitions included owning a train and who was determined to create the best living he could for his wife, Helen, and their two children. He died on July 13, 1967, in the Tour de France after collapsing on Mont Ventoux (see ALPS) in baking heat while under the influence of amphetamines and alcohol. His MEMORIAL still stands near the top of the mountain, bearing the words “Olympic medallist, world champion and British sporting ambassador.”

SIX-DAY RACING
Born of the 19th-century vogue for marathon events, and once hugely popular in America, these track races now exist on the margins.

The first six-day cycling race was held at the Islington Agricultural Hall in November 1878: the riders simply rode for as long as they could within the six days and the fastest of the dozen men in the field was one Bill Cann from Sheffield, who covered 1,060 miles, losing seven pounds in the process.

The concept was exported to America where the crowds took ghoulish pleasure in watching the riders' suffering: the final sessions, when the riders were
in a zombielike state, would often sell out. The events were exercises in sleep deprivation, with SOIGNEURS providing stimulants to keep their charges awake for as long as possible.

The
New York Times
of December 10, 1897, described the winner of a Madison Square Garden Six, Charles W. Miller, as “drawn and haggard, his eyes sunk and inflamed ... the cruel chafing of the saddle had sunk deep into his flesh.” Major TAYLOR, the legendary African American sprinter, scheduled one hour's sleep in eight in his first six. The helpers would cook food for the riders in a small enclosure in the track center; their charges would eat from the pot as they rode and throw it back when it was empty. At one point at the end of the race, a hallucinating Taylor was convinced he was being chased by a man with a knife.

By the end of the 1890s, rules were put in place to limit the riders to 12–18 hours a day on the track; to get round this, organizers brought in two-man teams. The result was the invention of the “Madison”—named after the arena at Madison Square Garden, purpose-built for cycle racing—in which one rider would circle the track resting while the other raced for a short while before grabbing his partner's hand and “throwing” him up to racing speed. The introduction of points for intermediate sprints counting toward the final standings made the races more lively and resulted in the typical team composition being a sprinter and a stayer. That remains the case today, typified by the GREAT BRITAIN world championship winners in 2008, MARK CAVENDISH and BRADLEY WIGGINS (see their separate entries and GREAT BRITAIN and OLYMPIC GAMES for more on both of them).

In the early years of the 20th century, six-day racing was a lucrative business in the US and Europe, with fees of up to $1,000 a day going to top performers such as the Canadian William “Torchy” Peden
and Reggie “the Iron-Man” MacNamara of Australia, famed for having cut off his own finger with a hatchet when he was bitten by a poisonous snake in the bush.

The events attracted celebrities such as Bing Crosby, who was rumored to pay the hospital bills of cyclists who crashed, actors like Douglas Fairbanks, the opera singer Enrico Caruso, and the actress Peggy Joyce. Al Capone might turn up to offer $100 primes.

Six-day racing in the US began to die off in the Depression of the 1930s; in Europe sixes continue, mainly in Germany. They consist of a series of evening sessions over six days, usually lasting into the wee hours, with an overall classification based on the Madison sessions and a variety of other events (see TRACK RACING) that keep the crowds happy and count for points toward the overall standings.

The biggest winner in six-day racing is the Belgian PATRICK SERCU, who formed a dominant team together with Holland's Peter Post through the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Only one British cyclist has been a consistent six-day winner in recent years: the pursuiter Tony Doyle, who made up a strong team with Australia's Danny Clark for 19 of his 23 wins. The events now exist on the margins, as the UCI prefers to see World Cup meets that act as buildup toward the WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS and Olympic Games, and it's uncertain how long they will survive now that the Madison has lost its status as an Olympic event in 2012.