You could be forgiven for thinking that cycling has a rather squeaky-clean image: early mornings rather than late nights; virtuous, healthy outdoor activity, not sinful, fleshly pursuits; improvement before indulgence … more temperance hall than public bar.
All true, but if that’s all you know, then you have never met cycling’s nocturnal alter ego: the beer-and-fag-in-hand, noisy, gaudy circus of its scruffy showbiz side. Cycling can do loud, live popular entertainment as vulgarly and vivaciously as the best of them. You just have to know where to find it.
This weekend, the place to go would be Ghent in Belgium. Tuesday saw the opening of Ghent’s Six Day. This tradition dates from the earliest days of cycle-racing, when riders really did race for days on end in extraordinary feats of endurance, no doubt aided by liberal doses of toxic stimulants, and attracting hordes of fans, bookies and gamblers.
Today, the tradition continues in Holland, Germany, France and Belgium, if in more seemly fashion – but only slightly: the crowds are not confined to the seating of the velodrome, but mill about the central void of the track, filling the air with cheers, catcalls and a fug of beer fumes and cigarette smoke.
The mainstay of the “Sixes” is no longer a single endless race, but an event called the Madison – named after Madison Square Gardens in New York, where a temporary wooden track would be installed and Manhattanites thrilled with the hair-raising spectacle of multiple pairs duelling on the boards.
Only one rider from each team of two is racing at any one time, their mate circling above on the banking waiting to swap after a few laps. Then the riders have to “tag” each other, which they do by the faster one catching the hand of the other and transferring his momentum with a hand-sling. This alone takes considerable skill, but in the middle of a melee of racers all travelling at different rates, it demands utter nervelessness. What you get is a Vorticist choreography of speed, chaos, fear, fury and beauty.
But you don’t have to go to Ghent for a taste of something similar, if a little less balletic. Last Saturday night, I took part in a roller-race in London. This pits pairs of riders racing against each other on stationary bikes that sit on rollers linked to a large, stopwatch-style dial with an arrow for each rider. You race over a nominal 500m, so it’s like a track sprint, lasting just over 20 seconds at an absolutely killing cadence.
It has a gladiatorial quality, in this case underlined by the staging (courtesy of Rapha and Rollapaluza) inside a boxing ring, surrounded by a baying crowd. On a previous occasion, the journalists’ team – staffed by the honed athletes of Cycling Weekly – were winners. This time, with me guesting, they were roundly trounced by a messengers’ squad. A popular result, as you might guess.
In the 1960s, roller-racing was a popular winter event, somewhere between a sport and a fairground attraction, with all-comers pitting themselves against a professional, Eddie Wingrave (whom I came to know as a gloriously cantankerous race commissaire in latter years), who toured along with a big band and chorus girls. With its decline, the tradition was barely kept alive in the obscure premises of cycling clubs. Now, it has been reinvented by the courier community, which has brought roller-racing to a paying audience of fixie-riding hip urbanites, complete with bottled beer, band and DJ. A scene is definitely happening: coming to you soon, the new rock’n’rollers.
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