It's All About the Bike (11 page)

I tell you straight, one of the problems for me as a worker, and I started working in my father's factory when I was 22, was noise — steel tubes being drawn, steel tubes being cut and moved and banged together . . . when we made two million tubes a year, when there were 150 frame-builders in Italy, noise, noise, noise, all day. And then five years ago, my problem was silence. Everybody wanted carbon. Today, steel is coming back a little, slowly, particularly in the US. I'm happy to say, even some Italian frame-builders start to make again in steel. A steel
frame, it lasts for life. OK, carbon is there for competition, but if you want a frame every day for your life, steel . . . we used to make 20,000 tubes at a time. Now we make 20. But we do make again, and look, our workers are happy.

Antonio shouted across a workbench to Emilvano who was bending a cromoly seat stay by hand in a jig. He raised a gloved hand.

‘You cannot build a good bicycle with unhappy workers.'

Angelo Luigi Colombo is famous for pioneering steel fork blades with an elliptical (rather than oval) section: these ‘Italian section' forks improved the handling characteristics of the bicycle, while making the ride more comfortable. They were enormously popular. Today, Columbus have capitalized on over half a century of experience in fork innovation to produce a range of superb carbon forks — one of the items on my shopping list in Milan.

Antonio led me across the factory to an area where steel tubes, a handlebar and some carbon forks were being tested. Fatigue, shock, static, frontal and side strength — every type of test seemed to be going on, creating an unearthly cacophony: tchik-a-tchik-a-tchik-a . . . dug-dug-dug . . . dink-puhh-dink-puhh. I knew the forks were made in Taiwan. I'd have to make do with watching them being tested for fatigue.

On Brian Rourke's recommendation, I was after a Columbus ‘Carve' model. This fork is made with monocoque technology — a construction technique that uses the external skin of a structure, rather than an internal frame, to support loads. Its use in the production of carbon fibre bicycle frames was pioneered in the 1980s and is now widespread. The steering column tube, which is inserted through the head tube, and the fork blades are one piece, made from overlaid layers of carbon. The Carve model
has a traditional shape (‘Aw, it looks magic,' Brian had said), aluminium forged drop-outs and a rake of 45 mm.

How a bike steers and handles is largely determined by something called ‘trail'. If you draw an imaginary line — known as the ‘steering axis' — down through the centre of a bicycle head tube, it meets the ground in front of the point where the wheel makes contact with the ground: the horizontal distance between these two points is called the trail (so named because the wheel ‘trails' behind the steering axis). A large or long trail makes a bike stable, but relatively slow to turn. A short trail decreases inherent stability but increases agility. The same principles apply to motorbikes. Bicycles made specifically for racing in ‘criteriums' — road races around city centres — have a short trail, to aid manoeuvrability. Comfort is not a factor.

Fork rake, sometimes known as ‘offset', is the perpendicular distance between the steering axis and the centre of the wheel — so it's a measurement of the forward bend in a fork blade. Along with the angle of the head tube and the radius of the wheel, it is a variable that determines trail. With a given head tube angle and wheel radius, more fork rake gives less trail and vice versa. Fork rake also affects comfort: touring bikes commonly have a longer fork rake as, combined with a longer wheelbase — the distance between the wheel hubs — it dampens road shock.

Fork rake and the angle of the head tube serve one other design function on a bicycle — to ensure the front wheel clears the feet at
the front of the pedal swing. In the early days of the safety bicycle there was very little angling of the head tube and forks. And though history sadly doesn't credit the man who first thought of tilting a bicycle's steering axis, it is more likely to be because of feet striking the wheel than an understanding of stability.

Like hemlines, fork rake has gone up and down in the last century. From the 1930s to the 1950s, bicycles typically had as much as 90 mm of fork rake (and often zero trail): largely because roads were so poor, cyclists demanded bikes with plenty of fork rake and a long wheelbase to absorb the shocks. As roads improved, bikes were built with shorter wheelbases and tyres became narrower, making it necessary to increase trail to ensure the bikes handled safely. Today forks have less rake — 45 mm is average — and generally, the bicycles handle better.

Antonio has rigorously kept innovation within Columbus and Cinelli alive. The bicycle is an ‘infinite project', he has written. In fact, he personifies the spirit of ingenuity that, in the middle of the twentieth century, placed Italy instead of Britain at the forefront of the bicycle industry. Cinelli, Campagnolo, Bianchi, Pinarello, De Rosa, Columbus, Selle Italia, TTT, Ambrosio, Colnago, Magistroni, Wilier Triestina — these are the marques that, driven by people's passion for the machine as well as by the commercial boom after World War II, helped the bicycle evolve from a utilitarian machine into an aesthetic object of desire.

The cycle industry in Italy focused obsessively on sport and speed. During the late 1940s, the nation was enthralled by the great rivalry between two Italian giants of cycle racing, Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi. In 1948, road cycling even spilled over into politics; when the shooting of a prominent Communist politician threatened to cause civil unrest, the Italian Prime Minister rang Bartali during the Tour de France and begged
him to win. It was thought a Bartali victory might divert the minds of his countrymen from revolution. He duly won and the threat of unrest passed.

In the 1950s, cycling in Britain was still pervaded by pragmatism and pastoralism. The road racing scene was hugely undeveloped, compared with that on the Continent, which helps explain why so few British cyclists have made a good showing in the Tour de France. The bicycle was for getting to work during the week, and for going youth hostelling with a flask of dandelion and burdock at the weekend. The sport of bicycle racing was still strangled by the conventions of Victorian rule-makers. It largely consisted of ‘time trials', codified in the 1890s by Frederick Thomas Bidlake, a man with a passion for time-keeping: competitors set off at intervals and ride alone, against the clock, up and down a wind-slapped A-road. It's duller than lawn bowling. In Europe, massed-start rides were much more popular. Races entailed breakaways and sprint finishes, chases and crashes, suffering and solidarity, tactics and alliances, co-operation and competition, vanity and honour. Massed-start road racing is underpinned by the unwritten etiquette of the peloton, something so complex that not even a Victorian Englishman could codify it into a booklet of rules. As the French say of cycle racing:
Courir c'est mourir unpeu
(‘To race is to die a little').

Bidlake, a racing cyclist himself and later an administrator at the heart of British cycling, described the Continental style of massed-start racing as a ‘superfluous excrescence'. He protested too much, perhaps. The truth is that cycling in Britain never had the backing of the establishment. Time-trialling was a way to use the roads for sport without attracting too much attention.

The glittering, lightweight and innovative componentry, the stylish attire and the cyclists with film-star good looks who came out of Italy were like rays of dazzling light in post-war Britain.
Even the colours the Italians painted their bicycles — pearlescent white, yellow, pink, the ‘heavenly blue' of Bianchi, said to be the colour of the queen of Italy's eyes — filled the minds of English yeomen with wonder.

The British thought they owned the bicycle. From the day that James Starley patented his Ariel bicycle in 1870 to the mid-1950s, they effectively did (UK output was 3.5 million bicycles in 1955). But you can't own the most popular form of transport in history for ever and the rapid rise in car ownership in the late 1950s meant British cultural perceptions of the bicycle were changing. It was no longer principally a form of transportation. There was now room for new meanings: it could be a toy, as it largely was in America, or an object of desire as it was among the racing-mad Continentals.

‘Why not both?' Antonio said, when I asked him about this. ‘You have some bicycles that you ride and you have some bicycles on the wall of your house as art, no? Eric Clapton does.'

We'd reached the far end of the factory. In a workshop, mechanics were building up Cinelli bikes, ready to be boxed and sent around the world. Antonio began plucking frames from hooks above his head and components off the workbenches: a
‘Vigorelli' track frame, ‘named after the great Milanese velodrome known as the “magical ellipse” . . . we sell a lot of these today,' Antonio said; a set of ‘Spinaci' bar extensions for racing bikes — ‘Spinach gives strength, yes? We were selling 500,000 of these a year when the UCI changed the rules and banned them'; a water bottle with a mint fragrance — ‘Smells better than plastic, yes?' There were frame models named after electric guitars and components named after rock bands. I could see Antonio's passion for the bicycle glittering in all these details.

He was most animated when talking about the urban fixed-wheel scene: ‘It began in the people's garages. That's important,' he said.

It's not a fashion. It's an attitude. Never has there been such a big crowd of young people studying the heritage of cycling in order to play with the bicycle. They know the history of a particular frame-builder or maybe development of a component. They recognize the car is tired and they've linked the bicycle to real life. They put their personality in it. And they are utilizing high-quality products. We are grateful to cycle messengers. They were the first to live on the bicycle and create a simple, effective, durable machine. This is forcing manufacturers to make better and better bicycles. It means there's more variety in bicycles. The fixed-wheel movement is connected to the rebirth of the bicycle, sure.

Antonio was off now. He began to leap through ideas. He managed to connect John Lennon, rationalist architecture, tattoos, the Provo anarchist movement in 1960s Amsterdam, bootleg music recordings and Le Corbusier with one thread. Come the revolution, he'd be on the barricades, I thought. ‘You know the word most people connect to “freedom” in word association or something like this?' he concluded. ‘Bicycle.'

We had wandered through the workshop to a table where a dozen bars and stems were laid out. There were simple aluminium bars, around which Eddy Merckx would have felt happy wrapping his powerful hands during his legendary ascent of Col du Tourmalet in the Pyrenees in 1969; and there were futuristic, integrated carbon handlebar and stem units that might have come from the cockpit of Luke Skywalker's X-wing fighter.

‘The integrated handlebar and stem is a Cinelli first. For three years, only we make this. Before carbon, all handlebars were round. With aluminium, you have to respect the radius and all the innovation was in the bend. Today the big innovation is in the flat part of the bar. So the ergonomic of the handlebar has changed, dramatically, because carbon can be moulded,' Antonio said. He was holding a non-integrated Ram bar in his hand. His rings clunked against the carbon as he moved his hands around the expansive flat tops of the bar. I suggested there was room to balance a gin and tonic there.

‘Why not?' he said. ‘Here a place for a cocktail, here your fingers fall naturally round . . . here a place for your thumb . . . when you stay on the hoods, there is space here for this finger, and here, a place where the palm of the hand fits. If you stay on the bicycle all day, it is very comfortable. Touch it, feel it.'

It was the weight of a fountain pen. It felt expensive. It also somehow felt instinctively comfortable. I've suffered from numb hands over the years. It's a common cyclists' complaint, often dubbed ‘cyclists' palsy'. It's at its worst off-road, on long descents. The first time I took a mountain bike to Pakistan, I rode off the Shandur Pass (2.5 miles) on a rough, gravel jeep track on a bicycle with rigid front forks. The initial descent off the plateau drops 5,000 ft over 7.5 miles. First my hands went numb — something I was used to — but the alarm bells really started ringing when I realized I couldn't feel anything beneath my elbows, nor could I
pull the brakes to stop the bike. When I raised a hand to shake some blood back into it, I fell off the bike. I was still picking grit out of my knees and elbows the next morning.