Happy Birthday to my Mum who is celebrating her 70th birthday with other family members in what is probably a very rainy Yorkshire.
I am really sorry I’m not there, but I hope everyone has a good time. Now I just have to come to your 75th, no tours to be planned.
To my blog followers – indulge me – its nice to say something about your Mum on line! Novelty silly cycling hat supplied by Velo-city organisers just for the occasion.
Last two days in Vancouver before I move into holiday mode.
Rounding up some incidental photos from across the week, wanderings on Saturday and then off to watch the European Championships finals in the Italian area of Vancouver – which was achieved by way of a few discoveries on the way.
So this is a messy post, but one that closes the week nicely.
Mood – chilled out. Everywhere should have a cycle route called Chilco, but it sums up the weekend mood in Vancouver just nicely.
And Saturday’s ride was a gentle meander after the rain which took me to Inukshuk.
T
he symbol of the stones is actually seen all over BC as a welcome, but this one on the Seaside was oddly accompanied by pillars of stones set on the rocks by the sea. I am sure I could look up why, but they seemed oddly apt beside the larger piece.
Nearby I also saw the most over-ambitious roof garden I have ever seen. It’s a bit grainy, but yes there is a tree on that roof facing the sea winds. “More money than sense” as your granny would say.
Sunday
And to today’s ride. Out from the city centre to Commercial Road which is lined with Italian cafes and restaurants, so the obvious spot to see Italy play Spain in the Euros.
And handily marked a quiet streets cycle route out to my destination and back.
Diverting slightly off route via Chinatown on the way out I found this amazing mural.
The Chinatown is not as ornate as those in London or Manchester with such defined entrances, it seems to be a more authentic Chinese living and trading area than a tourist trap.
Chinatown then gives on to some lovely residential streets with what I would call “colonial” style houses, although that is probably not the politically correct term in the 21st Century.
To Commercial Road where throngs are gathered on the pavements outside every cafe, although it appears the Spanish are almost as populous as Italians, and even more so when they won – resulting in a street parade of honking horns and flags.
So finally I drift back towards the railway and bus station for my bus to Whistler.
And I am rewarded by excellent views back over the city, some great cycling themed murals and then finally the outstanding modernist 1920s interior of the Vancouver main railway station – a building lost well out from the city centre. A shame because the interior is a treat.
I have been trying to get my head round watching the Tour de France from British Columbia. Particularly this year because of the British interest with Wiggins and Cavendish. So I just sat down with the official Tour web site and the trusty time zone calculator to discover that Wiggo should be donning the yellow jersey for the first time around 8.30 am tomorrow.*
And after that the stage finishes should all be around the same time each day. Amazing – able to watch the sport without the slightest guilt that I am wasting the day, not sold out because I am watching not riding, not having to do the ironing to justify watching sport all afternoon. And then I can go ride my bike afterwards.
Yippee!
*Over-optimism may be creeping in with the joy of this discovery.
Tour de France at the Halfway Inn, Kent, England
One person bringing smiles to the faces of the delegates at Velo-city 2012 is Karly Coleman, bike advocate and promoter from Edmonton, Alberta. Great to meet her and her colleagues this evening. Here is one lady who is just passionate about what she does for cycling – and to make sure everybody knows! With people like Karly around how can we despair for the future of the cycling race?
Karly’s web site www.bikeology.ca
Bixi hire bike Vancouver
Back in 2007 I wrote an article for the CTC web site which arose from a shorter magazine article of the same name. “On holiday without my bike” was an encouragement to CTC members to attempt cycle hire and see where it might lead them. However was initially conceived as a full on rant about the sort of cyclist who is incapable of enjoying cycling without their own bike, moaning and groaning either about the difficulties of transporting their handcrafted steed to the ends of the globe or equally complaining about whatever bike they do end up using. I rather toned it down in the end to avoid offending some friends and family.
Now I am the custodian of a blog can I go there again? It is the cycling that counts. When we experience scenery, the people, the transport of delight, flying without wings. Anything with two wheels please.
I got myself in a right mess over the last few weeks trying to sort out how I would complete a cycle tour from Vancouver via a bus trip to Whistler and a ride from Whistler to Kelowna. All the hassle just dropped away when I decided not to worry.
A Bixi city bike (above and right) for the Velo-city conference.
Conference bikes ready to go
A hired full suspension for the two days in Whistler.And for the tour I have just been to Ride On Again Bikes in West Broadway Vancouver to get a recycled bike that I will happily dispose of at the other end, not having to brave the carriage conditions of a single airline.
Ride On Again, Vancouver
Superb service, relaxed about letting me ride a bike or two and just 20 minutes to change the saddle and stick on a rack and bottle cage. Added bonus of meeting Sue Knaup from One Street in the shop buying her own bargain for the trip. And the really nice people at the hotel have let me bring it up to the bedroom. Somewhat defeats the object of a bike that nobody wants to steal – but Canadians are just so nice, they can’t help it.
Even better I frightened the life out of a couple of drivers who had never seen one man riding two bikes before, let alone down a main steet.
So here’s a photo tribute to some hired and borrowed bike experiences. If one day in Vancouver matches these it will be worth it.
Ben – Oreti Beach – Invercargill – New Zealand
Christiania, Copenhagen, Denmark, early morning ride
The promise – promotion for National Bike Week in Dublin
I feel really sorry for my hosts for the last few days.
To be fair they did put on an excellent cycling conference. But to invite an international cycling group to your city and have every possible weather cliché come true is really sad, there is really no reason why a storm should wreck everything in June.
To give it some science. Those outside northern Europe may not know that the Atlantic Jetstream is bringing storms across the Atlantic hundreds of kilometres further south than is normal at this time of year which brings record rainfall since April.
And global warming means these storms are wetter and windier than we really should expect. When I got back to the UK last night the country was covered in flood warnings and Brussels has been awful for weeks too.
So sadly the Dublin cycling tour to look at what the city has done on cycling just became a mess, unprepared riders in difficult gloomy conditions. By the time we set off to ride to the conference on Friday I had every sympathy with people from Slovenia or Romania who had run out of dry clothes.
So this trip’s photo record reflects the experience. All I can promise is that I will go back.
“Do not despair” message of the day?
Despite the rain being on a bike was just so much better than being in the congested car traffic. And credit to the hardy Dublin cyclists who replicated Copenhagen’s Green Wave – but as a small wave of high viz bowling in to town.
I hope Vancouver gives me some respite next week. And as a Brit I really hope the weather doesn’t do to the Olympics what it just did to Dublin Cycling Campaign. Fingers crossed.
Any port in a storm
Plan B – the only viable alternative
With just a week to go until I leave with the rest of the ECF team to attend Velo-city Global 2012 in Vancouver it has just hit me what amazing four weeks I have coming up.
This week it is off to Dublin for the Dublin Cycling Campaign conference which is focussing on participation and equality, especially cycling for women. Muireann O’Dea, Dublin Cycling Campaign’s new Chairperson talks about it here.
The day before the conference I am running a workshop in Dublin with the participants in VOCA The “Volunteers of Cycling” Academy (VOCA) Project. The two year project brings together small cycling advocacy groups from 11 European cities. Dublin, Seville (Spain), Nicosia (Cyprus), Vienna (Austria), Copenhagen (Denmark), Maribor (Slovenia), Prague (Czech Republic), Budapest (Hungary), Warsaw (Poland), Lisbon (Portugal) and Bucharest (Romania).
They are the great group I met on tour in Austria and I’ll be working with them to look at how we can improve the up and coming cyclists groups across Europe. Excitingly I’m running the same workshop in Vancouver where I’ll be joined by Jeff Miller from the Alliance for Bicycling and Walking who do amazing stuff with community cycling groups all across the US.
After the conference I’m spending about two weeks in British Columbia. Couple of days around Vancouver and the “lads” of ECF will meet to watch the European Cup Final (soccer to US and Canadian followers). Then off to Whistler – just booked two days guided mountain bke riding on the legendary trails. Three days touring across the mountains, then staying with an old school friend for a week before I have to get back to the UK to see Bruce Springsteen in Hyde Park, London, my wife’s Christmas present.
No idea how all that is going to hang together, not least because the cycle tour in Canada depends on me buying a recycled bike in Vancouver!
But to make it all come to life I have gone over to the dark side, star man Julian at ECF got me fired up to the potential for twitter. So now you can hopefully follow the tour by tweet too, although I feel like a bit of a numpty at the moment. @maynekevin for what its worth.
A couple of enquiries from followers about my trip to the Campagnolo factory last month which I never reported.
It was rather overtaken by the earthquake in Bologna, and also because it was actually somewhat underwhelming.
I don’t know what I expected exactly. In my mind’s eye the same engineers that built gears for Coppi, Bartali and Merckx are handcrafting bike parts like Swiss watches in a factory that has carries the heritage of Italy. I conceived that at least the boardroom would be a shrine to one of the greatest cycling brands. And I might have put a small dab of chewing gum on my shoe in case just a single ball bearing stuck as a souvenir.
The reality was very different, but perhaps in its own way a reflection of 21st century cycle engineering. In a pelting rainstorm we drove out to an industrial area on the edge of Vicenza where an anonymous road was the site of a large unmarked grey factory. I had no idea we had arrived until we passed a relatively discrete sign and passing through security to a modern, minimalist reception area. At least in the reception area there was a picture of Tullio Campagnolo and a group set, but up in the board room ……. Nothing. Niente, Nichts, Rien.
Except outside the door one of the original carts that the family used to deliver parts to local shops in the 1930s. My one souvenir photo of a visit to a legend.
There were some very substantial cabinets closed behind wood panels which could easily have hidden some glories, but overall the impression was discrete, sleek, wood, leather and stone. Actually the boardroom of a company that prides itself on being modern, discrete and efficient. Heritage, what heritage?
And as we drove away I remembered where I had seen that image before. SPECTRE. The boardrooms in which Ernst Stavro Blofeld plotted to rule the world, only to be foiled time and again by James Bond. Perhaps our gears are programmed to rise up against us one day. And now they are electronic. Isn’t that how it starts. Tullio Campagnolo – Blofeld – who knew?
Last week’s trip to Amsterdam prompts me to revisit one of my pet rants.
The surface of cycle lanes in Brussels.
Typical state of Brussels cobbles
There was lots of cycling on cobbled streets in Amsterdam and in Brussels. I like a nice cobbled street, even if it does play havoc on a small wheeled folding bike. Cobbles are part of Belgian cycling folklore, you can’t be a Flandrian icon without that background as a hard man of the pavé. So I’ll forgive the truly diabolical state of repair of the cobbles in what is supposed to be the capital of Europe.But why, oh why do so many Brussels cycle lanes have to be made of tiled surfaces? It’s an awful surface, effectively a pavement for bikes. And mostly built beside smooth, welcoming tarmac.
Avenue de Tervuren cycle path
Harder to ride on, difficult and expensive to maintain, really unwelcoming.The most frustrating stretch I have found was on Avenue de Tervuren, the Tervurenlaan. Direct cycle route all the way to Brussels, nicely segregated from the main road. But every bone in my body wants me to move to the welcoming tarmac beside me rather than stay on the tiles.
This looks really inviting, doesn’t it?
I am house hunting out here at the moment but the idea of this being the first 5km of my daily commute is a bit depressing.It’s not as if there is a design standard that stops them.
There are much better examples – to the north of Brussels a new section around an industrial estate and to the south in Walloon Brabant a lovely smooth descent through the rhododendrons near Chateau de La Hulpe which is more common out in this province. Critics will say that it is deficient because it isn’t properly segregated, but frankly this is supposed to be the transport of delight, you shouldn’t need to be hard man of Flanders to bike to work.
A welcoming cycle lane on road to La Hulpe
Proper tarmac cycle lane!
You are visiting possibly the safest and most cycle friendly city in the world. You can hire bikes all over the place. And you tour the city like this.
Words fail me, but perhaps someone else could come up with a caption for one of these photos?
I have now had 24 hours to reflect on yesterday’s trip to Amsterdam.
In particular I have been trying to think about the elements I noticed that made it stand out so much. I cannot help but make comparisons with Copenhagen too, a city where I have spent more time and perhaps been given more formal introductions to Danish cycling culture. It isn’t enough to say “there were just so many”, it is more.
I cannot compete with the Dutch Cycling Embassy for technical knowledge, Fietsersbond for advocacy or Amsterdamize for cool, but for what it’s worth here are five first reactions to Amsterdam cycling that support my own thesis “When I see Amsterdam cyclists I do not despair for the future of the human race”.
1. Bikes belong
It starts immediately at the station with the brilliant multi-deck parking which has been a feature of many city cycling presentations but you really do have to see it to believe it. 
But to my eyes it is the bikes in the streets that blow me away, just extraordinary volumes. There is just not a section of street in Amsterdam that doesn’t have its collection of bikes. In many cities there would be refuse trucks cruising the streets taking them away, but not here. They are not an addition to the fabric of the city, they are part of it. But now I do know why the Dutch are fixated by cycle parking.
2. Backgrounds.
Bikes and canals. Just beautiful settings for cycling, enhanced by the rattle of bikes on the cobbles and not the engines of the cars. Cycling belongs here.
3. Attitude
Even in the most successful cycling cities I think cycling carries a certain tension. Cyclists in Copenhagen always seem to be in a hurry to me and the cycle lanes feel like race tracks at times.
I am sure this is true in the Amsterdam rush hour. But generally cyclists here are so totally relaxed they routinely switch off all the defensive worries, even on the roads. Texting, phoning, headphones, one hand, luggage swinging, riding in pairs, chatting, passengers on racks. Everything your mother told you not to do.
It is another world where cyclists really don’t have to worry about the environment around them. (And almost helmet free!!!!!!)
4. Practicality
I know carrying loads on bikes is easier than most people think. I know there are loads of brands of cargo bikes and luggage carriers. But I would have to bore you with dozens of photos to show all the ways I saw things being carried, and how. The plastic crate seems almost ubiquitous as a carrying tool so that a wooden box stood out. And day clothes.
5. Diversity
As you can see from the photos above even a randon selection shows a higher proportion of the riders were women than men. And if the Dutch have got a general problem encouraging their new immigrant communities to ride I didn’t see it here, they must have done a great job with their promotional campaigns, or the message is really spreading. A Muslim woman in a headscarf with her bike is still pretty much a rarity in most cultures, but I saw several here.
That is really encouraging, it shows that this is not DNA, it is cultural and can be learned.
I was browsing yesterday when I found this video on the Charlie Bucket Cycles blog. It caught my eye because it features the Stelvio – the key climb in the Giro d’Italia which has just finished. It just made me smile.
And then with the magic of Youtube you are prompted by another link about going downhill. It is the most amazing sequence. Not just the extraordinary skill of perhaps the finest descender we have ever seen. But give credit to the motorcycle team who had to do this with a pillion rider on the bike and to the producer who at some moment decided just to let the sequence run – for almost the whole seven minutes.
If you regard yourself as disinterested in cycle racing – perhaps a pure cycle commuter – I suggest you watch this and imagine. At some time this chap is going to retire from racing. Can you see him riding to work in a traffic jam near you?
As I mentioned in posts at the time two of the greatest cycling names in history crossed my path recently. I was given a new biography of Merckx as a “going to Belgium gift” by Brian and Marjike and I heard about a possible play about the life of Beryl Burton in the same week.
There was something in the insatiable desire of Merckx that reminded me of Burton’s appetite for racing so I decided to re-read of Beryl’s autobiography “Personal Best”, both as a comparison and a reflection of two riders from the same period.
Without a shadow of doubt William Fotheringham’s “Half Man, Half Bike” is the better read. He is a professional journalist with a good eye for a story but also the variety and competitiveness of international pro bike racing means there is so much more in the content. It is also much more accessible to a wider audience because pro bike racing gets much more media coverage these days. Beryl was above all else a specialist in the very British branch of time trialling. It has a character all of its own, but it is not exactly a thrill a minute sport and Beryl was so dominant far too much of the book reads like a catalogue.
In “Personal Best” only editor Colin Kirby really speculates on what made Beryl special. William Fotheringham spends more of his time trying to understand why Merckx just had to win every week, but without ever really getting to the bottom of this driven personality.. And what neither book can tell is what made them the athletes they became. Is there a link to illness as a child, especially in Beryl’s case? One can’t help but recall that Lance Armstrong was good but not great before his recovery from cancer. Today sports science would intervene and give us some juicy titbits, like the lung capacity and low pulse rate of Miguel Indurain or the power output of Mark Cavendish.
Also what I hadn’t realised until I read both books side by side is just how many injuries both were dealing with. If the ability to push yourself to the athletic limit is linked to an ability to overcome pain thresholds then perhaps we have found the common thread that binds them? For now we largely have the results of both careers, and a hint that winning was as much mental as physical with these greats.
I enjoyed re-reading “Personal Best” much more than I expected. In 1986 I did find it a bit boring and I am not sure I really can recommend it as a great read to anyone outside time trialling, other than as a curiosity. But reading it this time I felt both nostalgia for a lost time and a deeper recognition of just how great this athlete really was. I hope the radio play about her life comes off and really manages to capture the essence of the BB story, I for one shall be watching out for it eagerly.
Personal Best – reflections
(Eddie Merckx “Half man, half bike” review to follow in a few days.)
On opening my copy of “Personal Best” there is a handwritten message: “Sept ’86 – she’s an inspiration to us all. – Dad.” On the occasion of my 25th birthday this book was important enough for my father to make this my present, knowing I would understand the message.
Only in the closed world of British time trialling could the legendary status of Beryl Burton truly be understood. Forget the time trials you see on the television for the world champs or at the grand tours. This was a sport that grew up with a very different heritage, a sort of parallel evolution to all other forms of cycling. In the early part of the twentieth century a group of wise men decided that continental style mass start racing was too much for the British public to bare and it had to be killed off. The only way racing on the highway could be considered was to have secret meeting points early in the morning where discrete cyclists carefully dressed in black would ride off at one minute intervals to compete on time over fixed distances. There was also thinly disguised snobbery for the fancy tactics of the continentals, this pure art of time trialling was about speed only.
In the narrow confines of time-trialling world there is no “hand to hand” combat where cyclists could use skill and tactics to ride against each other, it is power in its most pure form. While the sport had moved away from its secret identity by Beryl’s time it was still a relatively narrow world, but it commands a significant cycling community in the UK. Even today there is hardly a racing cyclist who hasn’t at least tried the shortest of all the time trialling distances – 10 miles – and knows their own PB, hence the title of the book “Personal Best”, a shared code.
This makes time trialling very inclusive. Everybody here understands the search for those elusive seconds that could give a new PB or set the fastest time for your club, district or country this year. They can also measure exactly in seconds, minutes or miles exactly just how good the champions of the sport really are. I know the time and place of all my personals, and just how slow I really was! And up to the 1970s the races were also a shared experience. Up to 120 riders of all abilities could set off and have the same experience of the course and the conditions. The champions are scattered through the field so the mere mortals will see them whizz by at regular intervals. Later greater use of cars enabled the faster riders to travel the country seeking fast times and keep the lesser performers off many of the fast courses, but in the 1960s it was still a real melting pot. In preparing this post I was looking at some recently scanned photos from our family album and I suddenly realised that this grainy shot from the Isle of Man Cycling festival in 1966 just sums it up. 
My Mum is on the start line ready to ride a festival time trial in what must have been her first ever season of racing. And I think waiting to start just one minute behind her is none other than Beryl Burton.
Beryl belonged to this community, she was their icon, their champion – and all the more accessible for being a Yorkshire housewife who worked on a rhubarb farm and was largely untouched by celebrity. She had come into this closed world as a young Yorkshire woman who won her first race in 1956. By the time her autobiography was written in 1986 we didn’t know she had just won her last solo national title but she had been at the top of the sport for nearly 30 years. She not only won women’s races by enormous margins but then started beating the men. There was not a time trialist in the country who couldn’t measure just how good she was against their own times. Some of the earliest times I can recall are being carried out of the house in the dark to a waiting car because Daddy or Mummy had a race. Hours later we would wake up in some god-forsaken layby where the time trial had taken place. And whenever I might ask “who won?” the answer for the women’s race would always be Beryl, and indeed many of the men’s races.
To cap it all was the legendary 1967 Otley 12 hour. In time trialling the Brits race up to 12 and 24 hours each year to see who can cover the greatest mileage. In 1967 Beryl did what no other woman in athletic history has achieved in any sporting discipline. She not only beat the men’s winner on the day but she broke the national men’s record, completing 277 miles (449km) in 12 hours. I was only 6 years old at the time so I don’t have any recall of it as news but I somehow felt I was part of that time. Back to the family archive and I discovered the result sheet from the 100 mile championship of the year which has one of my favourite family cycling photos.
National Women’s 100 mile Time Trial Result Sheet 1967
Beryl dominant as ever, but 30 women finished the event, not least a novice riding her first ever 100 mile TT. I know I was being carted around such events at the time in the back of the support car so I guess I just absorbed the memories.
If the UK cyclists win medals at the Olympics this year it will be great, but it would be a much fairer test of their greatness if they were pitching against the five or six Gold Medals that should have been won by BB. “Personal Best” is a better book when it ventures off into the more exciting world of road racing and foreign trips such as world championships where she came up against the Belgians, Dutch and the machine that was Russian women’s sport in the 1960s and 70s. But Beryl’s frustrations with the lack of reward for pure effort show too, here was a world in which should couldn’t win every year with pure Yorkshire grit, but her haul of seven world championships is truly incredible. Sadly all women’s racing was excluded from the Olympics until the 1980s and even then a time trial was not included until much more recently. Had it been there is little doubt Beryl would have had far greater national prestige outside the cycling world.
The book quotes a French commentator in the opening line of the forward which sums it up. Maybe not the greatest book, but the greatest female cyclist we have ever seen:
“If Beryl Burton had been French Joan of Arc would have to take second place.”
After last year’s brilliant Tour de France I really thought the event had got its mojo back – best in years.
But I have to say for consistent excitement the Giro organisers seem to come up with the goods regularly and the riders respond with attacking riding almost every day. Can’t wait for tomorrow, the event going in to the final time trial genuinely in the balance.
I loved stages like the day into Assisi, those short sharp uphill finishes into the old cities and towns make the race. I just can’t imagine the Tour de France going into a place where the streets are so narrow there was room for just one rider, rewarding the bold, but creating narrow margins that change almost daily.
And today – just a brilliant ride by the new Belgian star De Gendt over an astonishing course. I wish I could read the Flemish papers when I get back to Brussels, but I guess I’ll be able to pick it up from the headlines and pictures. Shame Cav has lost the red jersey by a point – lost it all on the day that he was brought down in the bunch.
Bring it on………..
Absolulutely over the moon today.
I heard from the UK that two funding bids I worked on before I left CTC won the money, both of them submitted by the local Council in Wokingham. One was for the borough itself but the other was for my pet project the Chilterns Cycleway.
Cheering at my desk, not something I often get to do!
Wokingham would have been pretty high on a list of “cycling useless” as opposed to cycling friendly local authorities in past years, but their local bid to improve a main transport corridor features a lot of cycling where they will work with CTC so that is great. And they got me out of a hole last year when another authority (who shall remain nameless – “CB”) messed me about on the Chilterns Cycleway bid. So thanks again team, from cabinet member Keith down to Dave and Matt who supported the bid going in, it was a long shot that came up.
Hambleden Mill – Chilterns
The Chilterns Cycleway is quite a personal project. When I was a board member on the Chilterns Conservation Board I suggested it as a way of boosting tourism. Then we got it mapped, then a bit of funding for signs and guide books, a launch and all that good stuff working with some great local partners. I guess we all kind of thought it would go quiet there but I just thought it might fit the Local Sustainable Transport Fund after the Lake District National Park got some money in round 1. I did a load of work to submit the bid in February and now it came through. Wow – I feel a bit sad that I will be in Brussels when all this happens in Wokingham and the Chilterns, I have had to live with the place for 10 years when nothing cycling happened – now its all go.
Go and ride it – just 30 or 40 miles from London there is this stunning range of hills with a 200 mile signposted touring route. You won’t regret it.
I Do Not Despair 