This whole delivery business is fraught with danger. As the swannies’ arms, along with their smiles, begin to tire, the bag drops from its early enthusiastic height to what can be a challenging altitude for the rapidly approaching rider. If the top of the sack handles drop from being held proud in the air to around the chest height of the holder, there will be trouble.
Grabbing a knapsack too high up the long handles causes ‘bag swing’. This is a problem. The ideal place to catch a bag at, say, 25km/h (15mph) is close to the bag itself. The higher you are up the handles on collection, the further away you are from a perfect take. The bag becomes a pendulum, sometimes weighing a couple of kilos or more. This then swings violently behind the back of the rider, who then veers off line, losing control. A bag-swinging rider can easily collect others around him – and often does. No wonder, then, that feed zones are, at best, places of argumentative finger pointing and, at worst, crashes and injury. So, in more ways than one, riders need to take their feeding seriously, approaching the matter with both focus and skill.
Treats!
The inquisitive and sharp-eyed among you will, I’m sure, have noticed that some of the items emerging from riders’ knapsacks are far from the standard fare you might be tempted to buy off the shelves in the bike store. Forget hi-tech gels and bars; in the peloton, some extras inside the bags can be a bit freestyle, to say the least.
These occasional non-standard items might be there to satisfy the peculiar tastes of a star rider, or a treat designed to cheer up a flagging athlete – a candy bar, say, or a Coke. Other items are sometimes included simply to make riders laugh.
One former Dutch Champion tells of a rider in the gruppetto bursting out laughing on a particularly miserable day in Belgium after opening a sandwich that had been lovingly wrapped in a page from a porn magazine. Apparently this was started by an American team. The mirth spread as the page was handed around. It raised the spirits of a damp and grumpy band of brothers whose job of driving the peloton in the opening hours had been done. The porn habit soon spread to other teams and became a real diversion on long hard days, so to speak. Sadly, when this became an obsession for the riders, who would look forward to the rude stuff being handed out, the team managers stamped on it. The sight of riders zigzagging to get a look at the latest piece of filth was being caught by TV cameras. Not good for the sponsors.
Jelly, Spam and Figs – A Recipe for Disaster
The whole sedentary lifestyle of commentating, coupled with plenty of rich French, Italian or Spanish food, tends to have a swelling effect on my body. And having the top-heavy physique of a rower doesn’t exactly give me the classic svelte figure of a cyclist. To be frank, after a few weeks on a Grand Tour, any interview I might do with Chris Froome should carry a graphic tag: The Stick and Ball Show.
Rather than try to hide my mass, I tend just to badge it up. The Americans help out in this department significantly. Firstly, ads for cycle gear stateside sometimes offer the tempting headline: ‘Look Like a Pro right up to XXXXXL’. That’s five Xs, by the way. Pity the guy who needs six! I slip gently into just two. OK, three.
Couple this with some rather self-deprecating team names that look good on any end of the balloon scale right up to Goodyear Blimp. Indeed, Goodyear has just re-entered the cycling market after a break of 120 years. Surely this is just for me! Where’s my complimentary kit?
Conveniently, there are a number of cycling teams whose name brings an acceptable irony to a tubby rider: I did consider the JellyBelly team, who have kindly graced the sport for some time. However, their kit, although great, lacked a certain uniqueness. Then I came across a SPAM jersey . . . in XXXL. Featuring a picture of a SPAM fritter burger front and back, with a mere suggestion of salad, the logo read: SPAM . . . CRAZY TASTY! This I had to have.
The enormous yellow and blue jersey was forced through my regular-sized letterbox by a huffing and puffing postman just before I departed for the Tour of Turkey.
My mate Brian Smith and I took our well-packed Vitus bikes to the airport, and hoped they would survive the journey to Istanbul. These had been kindly loaned us by Sean Kelly’s An Post–Chain Reaction team. They didn’t provide any clothing kit, so naturally I took my new pride and joy.
Turkey has some spectacular scenery. Its people are among the most welcoming in the world. Their food is amazing and the cycling is superb. Strange, then, that I managed to mash up all these wonderful elements into a near-unholy disaster.
On the day of a team time trial, we finished early, giving Brian and me a chance to get on the bikes and head inland away from the coast. Brian is a former professional rider who has competed in Grand Tours, not to mention the Olympic and Commonwealth Games, and he’s clearly a much better and fitter cyclist than I could ever be.
