Bikes have got better in the last decade or so. Better, that is, in the fairly objective senses that they weigh less, they go faster, and they cost miles more than they used to. Whether you really needed your bike to be better in these ways is, of course, completely up to you.
Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week
They’ve got better in another sense, which is that, because for most of us they’ve come to represent such a horrifying level of investment, they’re better looked after. They get cleaned. They get serviced. If your bike makes a weird clunking noise, you don’t just ignore it until you reach the stage where, when a friend asks what the terrible noise is, you literally can’t hear it any more even if you try. This makes me a little sad. One of my favourite memories from my early cycling career was riding home from a club run with a few friends when my rear mech exploded. The jockey wheels flew off, their cage fell onto the road, and the remains of the component just dangled limply from the frame like a malformed metal testicle.
This was a much-anticipated surprise. For several weeks the bottom run of the chain had drooped into a crescent shape. Any attempt to backpedal produced a noise like a spoon dropped into a garbage disposal. Every group ride began with speculation as to how long it would last. I didn’t do anything about it because it wasn’t much of a bike to begin with, and as my friends joined me in fishing all the bits out of drains and helped me put them in the pocket of my (white) jersey, we all agreed it could have happened to any of us. It was a bonding experience.
My friend Bernard was there. He had a wheel so buckled (side to side and up and down) that he had to open the quick release on the brake so the wheel would go round, then close it again if he needed to use it. He used to ride descents with one hand on the bars and one on the brake calliper. If we hadn’t been riding in the second flattest county in the UK he’d have died twice on every club run.
Another mate had a bike that had suffered a broken top tube when it fell off a boot rack. His father had repaired it by twisting the frame sufficiently to put a wooden broom handle into the tube as an internal splint, glassing it in place and finally, as the pièce de résistance, finishing the job with half a roll of gaffer tape in a thoughtfully contrasting colour. I never, ever rode behind him if I could avoid it.
This sort of thing was standard. A lot of club run bikes were barely hanging together. We could live like that because, compared to now, you could buy a bike relatively cheaply, especially secondhand, and you could probably run a training bike and a race bike. If you balanced the time required to clean and maintain the training bike after each ride against the cost of buying a new rear mech every three seasons, it almost felt like a break-even.
It was still vanishingly rare to have a terminal breakdown and end up stranded. Nothing really worked, but nothing really broke definitively either. Even my rear mech problem was rendered rideable by just shortening the chain and making the bike a singlespeed, and the broomstick bike was retired out of old age long before it became the first steel bike to get woodworm.
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No one treats a modern bike like that. I wouldn’t quite say, “That’s a pity,” as I know we shouldn’t really have done it even then. But even today, when I see someone out for a proper ride on a total shed of a bike, it puts a smile on my face.