Cyclopedia (42 page)

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Authors: William Fotheringham

BOOK: Cyclopedia
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SLANG
•
Abdu':
any sprinter who crashes because they won't look where they're going or who throws his bike from side to side in an exaggerated way. (See ABDUZHAPAROV to learn the origin of this term.)
•
Baked:
over-trained.
•
Ben Hur:
a crash caused, unintentionally or otherwise, by a part of one riders bike jamming the spokes of another rider's wheel.
•
Big meat:
large gear, large chainring.
•
Bonk:
running out of energy and fuel during a race or ride, which causes a severe reductions in one's ability to produce power. Also known as
knock
or
hungerknock
.
•
Broomwagon:
vehicle that travels last in a race convoy to gather up riders who drop out.
•
Bunny-hop:
jumping the bike over an obstacle by lifting the front wheel and using upward force in the pedals to pull up the rear wheel. Road racers do it to avoid potholes and (in Belgium) to switch between pavement and asphalt; mountain bikers do it over most obstacles.
•
Cat. 5 tattoo:
a grease mark left on a rider's leg by a chainring or chain. Also known as a
rookie mark
.
•
Convoy:
the cavalcade of team vehicles behind a major race (“use the convoy”).
•
Diesel:
a racing cyclist who rides mainly at a steady pace and finds sudden sprints hard to handle.
•
Feathering:
braking technique where rapid, frequent application of the brakes avoids skidding.
•
Flick:
make a sudden movement to one side to discourage opponent in a sprint. Also used as a general term for deceiving, tricking an opponent or teammate, or being ripped off by a sponsor (he flicked me, I got flicked).
•
Fred:
a disparaging term used by racers for a cyclist who they regard as being beneath them in status or ability. A Fred can be a novice rider with no obvious skill but costly clothing and equipment. More commonly it is someone with profoundly unfashionable or dated gear, often a bicycle commuter. May well have a
Cat. 5 tattoo
.
•
Granny gear:
derogatory term for a very low gear, often
attained by the use of a…
•
Granny Ring:
the smallest chainring of a triple chainset.
•
Hairnet:
crash hat made of leather strips used before shell helmets became vogue.
•
Hammerhead:
a rider who maintains a relentlessly high pace.
•
Hand-sling:
maneuver in TRACK RACING where one rider “throws” the other into the action.
•
Honk:
to ride out of the saddle on a climb.
•
Juice:
dope (juicer: a rider who dopes).
•
Lead-out, lead-out man:
in a sprint, two cyclists from the team will organize themselves so the slower man sets the pace in the final kilometer until the sprinter can make his effort. In major races, a team will all work to keep the pace high until the last lead-out man can launch the sprinter.
•
Lunched:
an irreparably broken component, particularly an expensive one.
•
Mafia:
When riders from several different teams combine their efforts in order to control a race, then share the prize money.
•
Meet the man with the hammer:
blow up, or get the
bonk
.
•
Pretzeled:
severe damage to a frame or wheel.
•
Retrogrouch:
a rider who eschews the latest in equipment.
•
Ride on mineral water:
to race without using drugs.
•
Road rash:
skin abrasions caused by a fall (also known as
gravel rash
).
•
Sandbag:
Not giving as much effort as you are capable of when you are supposed to be pulling on the front for your team in order to save energy and seek individual glory in the final stage of the race.
•
Shelled, spat out, shat out:
all terms used for getting left behind by the pack, usually due to
bonk
or
meeting the man with the hammer
.
•
Sitting in:
getting shelter in the pack or behind the break as a
wheelsucker
might.
•
Snake bite:
a flat usually caused by an underinflated tire.
•
Squirrel:
an erratic bike handler
whose twitchy riding can cause crashes.
•
Swag or schwag:
merchandise offered as prizes, items given to riders by sponsors free of charge. Pro and sometimes even amateur riders get swag bags from sponsors at the start of each season.
•
Swanny:
English variant on SOIGNEUR, French, team helper or carer.
•
Switch:
a sideways move like a flick but more sustained, preventing opponent from coming past.
•
Tacoed:
see
pretzeled
.
•
Time bonus:
used in stage racing, when seconds may be deducted from the overall time of riders who place in the first three in the stage, or at intermediate sprints.
•
Track stand:
holding the bike motionless by balancing the force of the pedals against gravity or the brakes. Most often seen in track sprinting, where one rider may stand still to force the other to take the lead. Skilled road cyclists can do this at traffic lights.
•
Unobtanium:
what any obscenely expensive bike part is made of.
•
Water-carrier:
team rider (French
domestique
).
•
Weight weenie:
cyclist who is obsessed with getting his bike as light as possible without sparing his cash.
•
Wheelsucker:
a rider who doesn't contribute to a break or who “sits in” in the pack all day, only emerging for the final sprint.
(FOR A GLOSSARY OF RACING-SPECIFIC TERMS, SEE
FRENCH
, THE LINGUA FRANCA OF EUROPEAN RACING)
SOIGNEUR
For a century, these men were the
éminences grises
of professional cycling, providing massage, magic remedies, and advice to the riders. There were no qualifications other than who a soigneur had worked with. They began working life as gravediggers, fishmongers, and bus drivers. Knowledge was handed down through the generations.
The breed was declared extinct early in the 21st century after the most notorious, Willy Voet, published his scandalous
Massacre à la Chaîne
in 1999 (
Breaking the Chain
, Yellow Jersey, 2000), detailing the various nefarious practices these dastards got up to in order to enhance the performance of professional cyclists, some of whom had no idea what was going on. The term “carers” is now used.
The first was “Choppy” Warburton, the only Briton to figure in their ranks. It almost doesn't matter what Warburton did, his nickname alone means he qualifies, but he was also banned and had a client or two (famously the Briton Arthur Linton) who died. He was immortalized, rifling through his drugs bag, by the artist TOULOUSE-LAUTREC.
Early soigneurs had multi-sport backgrounds; FAUSTO COPPI's mentor Biagio Cavanna came through soccer, boxing, and six-day racing and had underworld connections. Cavanna was blind, which helped when it came to cultivating mystique. It was Cavanna who gave Coppi much of his reputation for being unpredictable and fussy: massaging in the dark, using white not red wine vinegar, having total silence in the hotel. It all added to the reputation of the blind man—his hands worked better when it was quiet—who was not popular with the team management, partly because of Coppi's dependence, partly because of the percentage of Coppi's winnings that he took.
Cavanna is one of the founding fathers of the profession, because of the breadth of his brief: masseur, talent scout, confessor, moral adviser, trainer, provider of early DRUGS and drinks made of orange juice, fruit pulp, and grain. He was known variously as
maestro
—which also means teacher—the “Miracle Worker” and the “Muscle Wizard.”
Magic Remedies
=
 
 
Xooee v ochkax
Transliteration of Russian for “penis in the eyes”: this is what an ex-Soviet masseur at the Italian Carrera team used to say when his charges got on the massage table, reflecting their relative positions. It's called cultural exchange.
 
 
The blind man's hands
The notion that blind men give better massage goes back to Fausto Coppi's guru Biagio Cavanna, who used the mystique to great effect. His charges still swore his touch was superior 60 years later. To enhance his mystique, “Biasu” himself made a point of knowing precisely where they had been and what they had been doing, in spite of his being sightless. The Spanish team ONCE, sponsored by a blind charity, had a sightless masseur on their staff.
 
 
Get thee to a brothel
The Cavanna special: sex per se is not harmful, but going out in the evening and looking for partners detracts from cyclists' rest periods and exposes them to stuff like colds, at best (something team officials have noted in more modern times). His answer (not theirs): pay for it.
 
 
Gus Naessens's porridge
Naessens was the miracle worker who looked after TOM SIMPSON. One of his specials was boiling up cattle feed into porridge and putting it into the cyclists' feed bottles. The theory was it would sit in the stomach and prevent the muscles from using energy better directed to the legs. These days, he'd be selling crystals as a mental health aid.
 
 
Condom up the bum
Willy Voet's proudest moment was when he was initiated into this old Belgian method of getting clean urine into a dope-control bottle: clean urine in the condom, which is concealed up the anus, small rubber tube to the penis, bit of hair on the tube so it is camouflaged (a “refinement” of which our Willy was particularly proud). It's fine as long as the urine provider hasn't been on the gear on the quiet, as happened on one famous occasion.
 
 
Tail of newt and eye of frog
GINO BARTALI didn't have a legendary healer, but he had plenty of his own wacky peasant ideas: vinegar compresses, tobacco from cigarette butts applied locally, grape juice rubs. He was a firm believer in the power of magnetic fields and aligned his hotel room bed north–south. Other potions of the time included extracts of bee and toad venom, ether, pure cola, egg yolks in port, and cigarettes.
 
 
It's all for me, honest
JACQUES ANQUETIL's soigneur Julien Schramm and Voet both came up with the same answer when caught with large amounts of dodgy substances. It was not for the cyclists, they said, but for their “own consumption.” Schramm changed his mind when asked to inject himself with the amphetamines he was carrying, while Voet realised he was going to carry the can on his own and squealed to the police.
 
 
Not positive but pregnant
No one knows whether this really happened: it's the old tale in which the rider swaps urine with that of his wife with unforeseen results. But urine substitution is an old one, with soigneurs pissing in pots while the dope-testers backs are turned, tubes hidden in funny places, and even catheters being used to flush out the bladder with clean wee. Ouch.
The TOUR DE FRANCE doctor Pierre Dumas described the soigneurs as witchdoctors, whose “value was in their valise”—in other words, in the remedies they carried. Sometimes their maxims were simply perverse, such as the long-standing belief that cyclists shouldn't drink much in hot weather and that they should eat salt fish when training to harden them up. They would buy patent medicines, scratch the labels off, and sell them at 100 times the price.
Their clients were often credulous characters who would pay through the nose for magic potions such as Cavanna's
la bomba—
a mix of cola and mild amphetamine—and the go-faster mixes known in France as
la topette.
The effect was in large part psychological, because placebos worked as well: Voet describes one rival soigneur who had a “time trial special,” which one rider in his charge simply had to have; Voet switched it for glucose solution, and the cyclist still flew.

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