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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@wiscot
The hairnet is a piece of kit I've never owned but hold in highest esteem.
Amazing, by the way, that for all the class Fignon had, he never could work out how to wear one of those.
@the Engine
I'll agree on Rooney. In fact, I have to say that the Olympics have been full of class acts and sportsmanship - something that is sorely lacking in professional fitba. Eg: Mears and Pendleton on the podium. Wiggins waiting until Faboo finished before celebrating. The athletes waiting for the Chinese hurdler to finish. The attitudes towards Oscar Pistorius. That's all I've got. Anyone else got some fave Olympic moments of class?
@frank
Wiggo and Paigey have the same physique. Wiggo wins on the sideburns though.
I don't have any pics of my first real cycling jersey, a purple and yellow woolen one reminiscent of Poulidor's Mercier one, but here's the first proper pro jersey I got my hands on. The shorts are NZ made woolen ones that I raced in for a couple of seasons - comfortable unless wet, when the weight of the trapped water would severely compromise the strength of the braces we used to have to wear...
Despite the Italian mystique of the above jersey, the first jersey I really loved was my Port Nicholson-Poneke club jersey, as shown here before racing the tough Palmerston North-Wellington Classic - note the abundance of bananas and other foods stuffed in my pockets! I think I'm still in wool shorts here too.
@the engine
"You may well have stumbled upon the reason behind length of Wiggo's stockings, they're a either a throw back from days when you needed the length to secure your trousers or they herald a new development in aerotweed skins suits being worked by Brailsford's secret squirrel department to ensure continued domination over the Aussies."
This might be a pisstake, but its on the right track. Pippi's long stockings and sleeves are discussed here http://inrng.com/2012/08/british-cycling-funding/
@Brian W
The early attempts at using an arran cable knit to produce a UCI compliant aero profile were doomed to failure and it was only with the introduction of Harris Tweed that progress began to be made.
@Bianchi Denti I've had 'I am the resurrection' in my head for a while now when I go on particularly hard rides (something about the rhythm seems to work with my cadence) and recently found myself wondering, as a Brit myself, whether Wiggins is a fan of the Stone Roses. Question answered! Wiggins has to be the first cyclist who is both truly gifted and cool.
@James Although Ullrich was also pretty cool...
heh. My first proper cycling jersey was a bright yellow kiwi express jersey that I bought when I was a cycle courier. YJA yellow, leather patches sewn into the shoulders to stop the straps from the bag wearing through the jersey, and a massive Kiwi on it. In winter we had goretex tramping jackets to wear, which were tolerable to wear for about 40 minutes on the coldest morning of the year and tits on a bull for the other bajillion work hours.
No pics cos a) that's not ghetto and b) they'd possibly be incriminating.
Photo from The Horton Collection: (first this grabbed me)
Excerpt from an article on James Joyce by John Madruga, Peloton 14 magazine: (then this article stuck - last paragraph)
Dubliners, Joyce's collection of 15 short stories, was published in 1914 and depicts the domestic, social and political life of middle-class life in Dublin. Joyce writes in a letter: "My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order."
The naturalistic conditions of the stories ("It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs around my stories")"”are offset with Joyce's notion of epiphany, a sudden moment of inner, felt awareness for something, and out of that moment of merging both the seer and the thing seen (or felt or thought) is changed. Joyce, again through the character of this way: "The radiance ... is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous, silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the hear."
After the 41.5-km time trial at this year's Tour de France, won by Bradley Wiggins, the Team Sky leader expressed a very clear sense of his clock had stopped timing his ride. "I had a great day today," Wiggins said. "I knew from the first pedal rev that I was on it. Everything felt fantastic." Of course Wiggins had to turn the cranks, pump the blood and use the oxygen necessary to win the TT, but his comment afterwards suggests that the efficiency of those physiological processes, at least during stage 9 of the Tour, may have been informed by that same "supreme quality felt by the artist" that Joyce speaks of. Is it too much to suggest that Wiggins may have been guided in his ride by his own sense of beauty, wholeness and "aesthetic pleasure" of the act of riding, and that this state of
awareness/feeling is what elevated him to win the stage? I don't believe so. "I love this race," Wiggins continued. "I love this sport and it's moments like today that make all the hard work worthwhile." Cycling offers such moments of clarity when we suddenly realize the meaning, the "whatness" of what we are doing (and it's not simply turning over the cranks) and those moments can change our lives.essence, what is a kind of elaborate parallax machine, something that propels us through space (as we sit still in one place) and offers us the thousands of spectators, there's a lot of road dividers, and the whole peloton was going fast ... it was already hectic a long way before the finish."
Peloton 14 issue
I love this whole notion of James Joyce!