As children, none of us were given an allowance. Instead, we were taught from a young age that if we wanted to buy something, we had to earn the money in order to do so. To facilitate the model, and possibly to avoid child-labor law infringement, we were paid to do chores around the house in exchange for a cash payment directly proportional but not necessarily related to the amount of time it took us to execute the task. The hourly wage, at it turned out, was at the discretion of the one doing the overseeing and commissioning of the task at hand.
In my view, it worked out very well for us. Coming from a family that was neither wealthy nor poor, it taught us a number of important lessons about life, money, and the important ways the two are separated. It’s one of the fundamental things I’m very glad about regarding my upbringing.
My grandmother, by choice or otherwise, was in on this scheme of leveraging our desire to earn money as a means to achieve her end of having her dog tended to regularly. As grandmothers are wont to do, however, she found ways to be knowingly complicit in circumventing the intended lesson by overpaying us for our labor; she was perhaps too fond of her dog, and I was perhaps too willing to walk it repeatedly and unnecessarily in order to earn my wage.
I don’t remember how old I was, but I was still riding my old Raleigh made of Reynolds 531 tubing and clad in a Weinmann grouppo which I now wish I’d kept; I could have been no more than 10 years old. Nevertheless, I had already made the determination, by studying the pros in the races I watched on scratchy old VHS cassettes, that if I was going to amount to any kind of cyclist, I would require proper cycling kit.
I needed cycling shorts and I needed a cycling jersey; t-shirts and an old pair of lederhosen simply wouldn’t fit the bill. And cycling shorts and cycling jerseys would cost serious money. So off I was, walking my grandmother’s dog fourteen times a day – collecting payment every time – and before very long, I had saved up the money I needed.
I don’t remember the name of the shop, but I do remember on which rack and in which corner of the store it hung. It resembled Laurent Fignon’s System U kit, though I felt a tinge of guilt that it wasn’t as fluorescent as LeMond’s ADR strip. It was nothing compared, however, to the unexpressed guilt I’d felt all year at secretly having hoped Fignon would win the Tour against my countryman.
Riding my trusty Raleigh, I spent the summer of 1989 riding with my left hand on the tops of my handlebars and my right hand on the hoods. I’d spotted a photo in Winning Magazine wherein Laurent Fignon was leading the Giro d’Italia riding in just this position; I summarily emulated him in this regard.
The fact that this was just a moment captured in time as Fignon changed hand position was lost on me; the fact held neither relevance nor value to my view of the world. Fignon rode like this, and so would I. This single photo fueled my desire to ride a bicycle for an entire summer. Up and down the streets I went, imagining myself making history as I left both Fignon and LeMond in my dust and I took off up the road – one hand on the tops, one on the hoods – with Phil Liggett’s voice in my ears as he commended the ferocity of my attacks.
I found daily motivation in riding like Fignon. In rain, in shine; I rode the way the photo I saw showed him riding. Every time I climbed aboard my bike, I wanted to be a better cyclist; I wanted to be more like Fignon. I was nevertheless bound to eventually discover that Fignon didn’t really ride like that; it had been a trick of the camera. By the time I discovered the truth of that photo, I had ridden like that for so long that it felt lop-sided to go back to riding sensibly, with both hands level.
I felt awkward then, riding with both hands in the drops, as I chased my sister down a mountain during a family vacation in New York State. She was in front on her Raleigh with pink handlebars, and I was frantic at the notion that she was ahead of me. There was no alternative but to beat her through the series of sharp corners coming up ahead on the road we had dubbed “Alpe d’Huez” for its steepness and numerous twists and turns.
There was, of course, a very real alternative to beating her through those corners.
As I laid in the emergency room with the doctor scrubbing furiously at my wounds, he posed several theories that might explain the flawed decision tree that placed me in his care. The prominent thought suffocating my mind was that my cherished kit had been torn apart firstly by the crash and secondly by the doctor – and that neither seemed to hold the garments in the same esteem I did. It was destroyed; a summer of over-paid dog-walking lost.
As a matter of comparison, this commercial, aired during this year’s Tour de France, is exactly how I rode as a kid. In fact, I still do today.
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@the Engine
We need photos of the PDM kit, matey. Immediately. This kit that I crashed in was also accompanied by white tennis shoes; it wasn't until several years later that I bought a pair of lace-up Duegi's which I sewed a leather flap onto to cover the laces and an extra strap sideways to make them look more like LeMond's shoes.
Winter kit was the great challenge as a youth. I had shorts. That I could get help with because I could justify chamois. T-shirt, true shorts, sneakers strapped down so tight with the toe straps that my pedals cut a line in them. But winter kit was out of the question monetarily.
Hell. Kit is still expensive.
@Gary J Boulanger
Are you allowed to call a kit that young a twat?
@minion
Deal, you twisted fuck, no one wants you to come here anyway. I'll also kindly ask you, should I be so lucky as to visit New Zealand, not to take me to one of your strip clubs, OK?
@Skinnyphat Awesome!
@Bianchi Denti Gonna have to re-upload that, mate. The description is tantalizing but the photo has gone the way of the whippoorwill.
@pistard
Sounds like Francis had it going on. Nice, firm opinions planted firmly in the irrational is all anyone can expect from a Sensei.
@pistard
Hold your tongue. Those Briko Stingers are the tits!! Perhaps slighly off-period (a pair of Oakley Factory Pilots would have been more apros pos), but those are some of the coolest shades ever made.
@G'phant
+1
@Giles
And the cycle continues. Awesomeness. Pure, unbridled awesomeness.
My Raleigh had centerpulls too; fuck they were hard to adjust. Needed a special tool just to get them tight enough. Converted the levers to aeros at some point, and the pull was way off.
Ah, no bother, brakes and instruction manuals are strictly for sissies anyway, and I'm no sissy.
@Souleur
Ah, the moment when it dawns on the Velominatus that the kit must, above all, be right and that the sale bin never contains the right kit - not the size, not the color, not the anything.
This also reminds me that I need to register Velominati with the USCF so we can legally race under the colors in sanctioned events. If I'd have had time to race this year, I'd have found the time to do it, I'm sure...but alas life got in the way this time round.
@Erik
Truedat. Re-experienced that recently after we started Velominati and had the first kit made, it quickly dawned on me that winter would be an injustice as we had not yet had the LS Jersey made.
As for the sneakers - indeed. I remember the same effect. I had tennis shoes which happened to have a ridge in the right spot. That combined with tightening the toe strap so much that my foot went numb, I could pull on those puppies like nobodies business.
Three years ago, only dimly aware of, and not much caring the concept of Rules, I rode around in cheesy Cannondale shorts and whatever mountain biking jersey struck my fancy - including my favorite Grateful Dead Bertha jersey.
I bought my current Campy equipped BMC from what I now understand to be a very Rule compliant BMC employee neighbor. Danish born to Sardinian parents, this gentelman eats, lives, and breaths euro cycling. As we concluded the transaction, I was sternly admonished in a crisp Italian accent: "On this bicycle, you must NEVER wear that skeleton jersey!" With that, he tossed me a new Campagnolo jersey.
... and so began my journey to Rule compliance. Soren, you would be proud of me now, (although I still don't climb well even for my weight). I do still wear that Bertha jersey in the dirt though.