Cyclopedia (17 page)

EASTERN EUROPE
Sports were an important way in which the communist nations of Eastern Europe asserted themselves during the Cold War, and cycling was one of the key disciplines. The value of international victories as propaganda—at home as evidence of the system's power, abroad to show it could compete on equal terms—had been rapidly appreciated, and entire sports infrastructures were built, with the finest talent creamed off into academies based in the biggest cities: most legendary was the Russian pursuit school in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) run by the hyper-tough Alexandr Kuznetsov.

Training regimes were draconian, the demands on personal life and health were considerable, but the rewards were tangible: privileges, apartments, cars, and, above all, foreign travel and the chance to earn hard currency. Cycles produced in Eastern Europe were often crude and poorly made, however, so the Soviet team rode Italian bikes made by Ernesto Colnago. The clubs tended to get the hand-me-downs. Western gear of any kind had high black-market value into the early 1990s, as did Western cycling magazines and posters.

By the 1970s Poland, the Soviet Union, and East Germany all boasted “amateur” cycling teams that were not far off the standard of pro squads in Western Europe, with full-time cyclists whose “jobs” were often military. The East Europeans were almost unbeatable in their own events. The biggest of these was the Berlin–Warsaw–Prague Peace Race, founded in 1948
and sponsored by newspapers in East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. A blue jersey with a white dove on the front was worn by the leading team, and in its heyday the route covered 2,000 km in front of crowds numbering in the millions.

East-bloc racers were just as fearsome abroad, dominating major amateur events and walking off with many of the medals in world track and road championships. “We were like amateurs against pros,” said Bob Downs, a British cyclist who was one of the elite few who had the legs to put up a decent fight against the Russians and Poles in the MILK RACE in the 1970s. “The whole Russian team used to get on the front and not let anyone else in. The only way you could stand a chance was to ride as near as possible to them and wait for them to make a mistake.”

“Every time an East German climbed on to the rostrum, win or lose, there was the same unsmiling solemn glare. There is no getting away from it, [they] are consistently phenomenal, technically brilliant athletes,” wrote Les Woodland in the 1981
International Cycling Guide
. The East Europeans were often impenetrable for the media but had a love of shopping, selling anything they could—most often tubular tires—to get currency.

The system was comprehensive and sophisticated, recalls the former East German trainer Heiko Salzwedel. At the bottom of the pyramid was a network of sports clubs attached to major enterprises such as the police or railways. At the top were the half-dozen national cycling centers across East Germany, each with about 10 trainers, dealing with up to 100 athletes. Children were selected from an early age, partly through biometric tests that assessed their capacity for various sports, partly through their parents' background, partly through selection races.

There were official guidelines, but coaches had a fair degree of flexibility in setting their own criteria; riders' Stasi
files would be checked—to see whether a potential athlete had West German connections, for example—but coaches might push better athletes with undesirable backgrounds higher up selection lists to ensure they got in the team anyway. The screening systems were later adapted for use by the cycling teams of Australia and GREAT BRITAIN.

The sudden collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 left the sports centers across Eastern Europe short of money, and a vast number of talented amateurs came on the market: they flooded into cycling. The sprinter DJAMOLIDIN ABDUZHAPAROV made the biggest impact alongside Olaf Ludwig, Andrei Tchmil, and Zenon Jaskuta, who in 1993 was the first Pole to make it to the Tour podium. Jan Ullrich was the first product of the Eastern system to win the Tour in 1997.

The legacy of the old Eastern Europe is obvious now. Individual nations from the former Soviet Union such as Ukraine and Belarus punch above their weight on the international stage, while almost every professional cycling team in the world has at least one “Goombah.”

This term was coined by LANCE ARMSTRONG's biographer Dan Coyle, who wrote that Viatcheslav Ekimov, Alexandr Vinokourov, and Jens Voigt “had been selected as children, their growth plates and femurs measured against that of a ‘superior child' and [had been] whisked away to ... sports schools throughout the former Soviet empire. Once there their life became an endless series of training exercises, the governing philosophy of which was summed up by a former coach: ‘you throw a carton of eggs against the wall, then keep the ones that do not break.'”

END TO END
The 850-plus miles from Land's End to John O'Groats—from one end of Great Britain to the other—is one of the most evocative long-distance rides, tackled for charity or simply for the sense of achievement it engenders. It is also the most prestigious British long-distance record. Most End-to-Enders start in Cornwall, to take advantage of the prevailing southwesterly winds. The toughest sections are early on, over the constantly climbing roads of Cornwall and Devon, and in the final quarter through the Scotttish highlands.

The first End-to-Enders were H. Blackwell and C. A. Harmon of the Canonbury Bicycle Club who did it on old ordinaries in 1880, taking 13 days. The first name on the Road Record Association record sheets is G. P. Mills—also a winner of the Bordeaux–Paris Classic—with a time of 5 days, 1 hour, 45 minutes, on a penny farthing with a 52-inch front wheel. Mills was paced by other cyclists, as was customary in those days; the first unpaced record was set in 1903 by C. J. Mather, in 5 days, 5 hours, 12 minutes.

The first man to achieve the distance inside two days was Dick Poole, in 1965. Poole then went on to attempt the 1,000-mile record; frustratingly, he covered 1,010 miles (enough to allow for error, so his timekeeper thought) but was still found to be a few yards short so the record was not ratified. Attempts on the record have led to extreme feats of endurance, partly because the only way to break it is to go without sleep as far as possible, but also because the wind can change over the 48 hours from a helpful southerly to a northerly headwind. In 1980 the Viking Cycles professional Paul Carbutt benefited from the opening of the Forth Bridge which cut 13 miles off the distance to break Poole's record but collapsed due to heatstroke southwest of Edinburgh. He was unconscious for about 25 minutes but was put back on his bike to continue with a damp facecloth under his racing hat.

The record set by Andy Wilkinson using the highly aerodynamic Windcheetah RECUMBENT was unofficial but was as extreme as any of the others. Because of the temperatures building up inside the enclosed bike, Wilkinson needed about two liters of fluid an hour to avoid dehydration, so it took a 20-strong support team to give him a bottle every half-hour, collect discarded bottles, and then overtake him to hand up new ones. His fluid output was also high: “We rigged up a special condom connected to a metre-long tube to provide relief without having to stop. The tube exited the Windcheetah at the back of the fairing,” says the Windcheetah website. Wilkinson reached close to 80 mph on long descents, and covered the distance in 41 hours, 4 minutes, 22 seconds including a stop of almostan hour to replace a rear axle.

ENVIRONMENT
Cycling is now a recognized means of lowering one's carbon footprint. The figures speak for themselves—100 calories takes a cyclist 3 miles, a car all of 280 feet. In 2009 research indicated that if cycling use in cities doubles from 4 percent of journeys to 8 percent, there would be a total drop of 1.1 percent in carbon emissions. If those journeys are intermodal (public transport + bike), the figure can go up to 1.8 percent because greater distances can be covered.

On the other hand, cycling as a pastime rather than a means of transport is by no means carbon friendly. Driving from London to the south of France with a bike on the roofrack creates 360 kgm of CO
₂
; taking the train and hiring a bike creates 100 kgm; flying with the bike in the hold creates 850 kgm, more than heating the average house for a year.

Few studies exist into the carbon footprint of bike races but the number of vehicle miles involved suggest that it is horrendous. That is borne out by a study from the International Institute for Sport Science and Technology, which calculated that the Tour of Romandie, a six-day stage race for pros, produced 138 tons of CO
₂
, which is just under the amount of CO
₂
emissions produced by Nauru, an island state in the South Pacific.