It's All About the Bike (10 page)

Oregon is home of the timber industry. Fifteen years ago, I cycled across the state. The battle between environmentalists and loggers was in full swing at the time. One day, I was riding down the Pacific Coast Highway, heading to California. From sea level the road rises and falls over a series of steep bluffs. It was raining hard. On one of the descents, wind was buffeting the bike and the spray off the road was blinding. I was tearing downhill when
a pick-up truck came past me and braked. When I caught it up on the inside, the truck came menacingly close: a flick of the driver's wrist and I was dead. The passenger window wound down. Through the curtain of water, I could see the brim of a baseball hat, a beard and then teeth. When our eyes met, the man bellowed: ‘Ya fuckin' bunny hugger!'

It's quite a turn-around for Portland, the most populous city in Oregon, a city covered in a lattice of eight-lane freeways with no cycling heritage, whose traditional industries are canning and freezing, to become the pedalling capital of America.

‘If you make it safe, people will ride,' the Mayor, Sam Adams, told me. We'd met the day before my visit to Chris King, during an annual Portland event called the ‘Bridge Pedal': many of the city's streets and the main bridges over the Willamette River were closed for the day, and 17,000 people had taken to two wheels.

‘Much of what we've done would be easy for any other city to copy,' Sam said. ‘And really, we've just started. Our goal is 25 per cent of all trips in the city to be taken by bike. That's a do-able goal.' An initiative at municipal level has attracted bicycle businesses and bike-minded people from all over the USA to Portland. Chris King relocated here from California.

‘You could say Portland has taken ownership of the energy around the bicycle,' Slate Olson told me. Slate moved here from San Francisco and runs the US office of British cycle clothing manufacturer Rapha. We met for coffee on Mississippi Avenue, a bohemian street in north Portland that teems with bicycles all day.

Yes, tens of thousands commute to work by bicycle every day, but also every weekend, 1,200 people ride in cyclo-cross races; there's a gang who make and ride mutant bikes; there's bike polo and bike jousting; every week a bunch of guys go ‘zoo-bombing' — that's racing kids' bikes
down the hill from Washington Park. We're saturated with cycling sub-cultures. Oh, and we have the largest naked bike ride in America. They say there's a bike event in Portland every twenty-seven minutes. As a politician, you can't get elected without a bike platform. There are at least twenty-five custom frame-builders in business, making Portland the centre of the renaissance in hand-built bicycles. And it's aspirational. A lot of American cities are looking at Portland's cycling scene and wondering: how can we achieve that?

I visited the workshop of Sacha White, a renowned Portland frame-builder. He talked about the re-establishment of small communities within Portland, based around the bicycle:

Fifty per cent of the kids at my children's school cycle there each day. If you live and work and shop locally, then you have a strong community. The big house in the suburbs with a fence around it, then driving ten miles to school and twenty miles to work every day — this destroys communities. I think there's a whole generation re-evaluating that notion of the American dream. Cycling is becoming socially acceptable again. We're trying to assist that by building good bicycles for transportation, bicycles that are truly useful and not just toys.

He was a softly spoken man with a strong vision of what he was doing, and why. He was making bicycles for a brave new world. Needless to say, all his bicycles were fitted with Chris King headsets.

After lunch, Chris DiStefano led me back downstairs to the component assembly area. Sitting on the corner of a workbench
was my headset. He clasped my shoulder with one hand and between the forefinger and thumb of the other, he held up the headset above us, to the light: 1⅛ “NoThreadSet” with
sotto voce
logo in silver. I guarantee it'll go with whatever colour you paint the bike,' he said. ‘It comes with a ten-year warranty — that's how good we think our bearings are. It's a dream headset, for a dream bike.'

The name Cino Cinelli (pronounced ‘Chino Chinelli') resonates through the history of modern racing bicycles. Today, you need a degree in chemistry and a Ph.D. in polymeric composite systems to work on R&D in the bicycle industry. Cino Cinelli quit school at 14, in 1930, and acquired an education on the road, racing bicycles. In a professional career that lasted over a decade, he won the Giro di Lombardia, Giro di Piemonte and Giro di Campania. His crowning achievement in the saddle was victory in the gruelling 185 mile, one-day classic race, Milan—San Remo, in 1943.

Convinced that the bicycle was ripe for innovation, Cinelli moved to Milan and set up in business with his brother in 1948. One arm of the company marketed the high-end components of other manufacturers, making Cino a sort of godfather of the industry in Italy: such was the quality of their inventory that simply being included became a mark of distinction. The other arm, developing and selling Cinelli's own innovative products, brought an eminence to the brand that remains today.

With little regard for fashion, Cinelli invested his unconventional ideas in bespoke frame production, making everything from Olympic medal-winning track frames to the ‘Supercorsa' road model — an enduring icon of the late twentieth century and the E-type Jaguar of bike frames. In partnership with Unicanitor, Cinelli designed the first plastic-bodied saddle. He invented the first integral sloping fork crown in the 1950s and the M—71, the
first clipless pedal, in the 1970s; he founded the Italian Association of Professional Cyclists and wrote a canonical text on training. Cino Cinelli and the company he fronted for three decades are, however, most famous for handlebars and stems.

Unlike the frame of the bicycle, the geometry of which varies only a little according to its intended use, handle-bars come in wildly different and multifarious shapes according to the type of bicycle they are attached to. Mountain bikes have flat or ‘riser' bars which, as the name suggests, rise from the centre to the tips. BMX handlebars are U-shaped and reinforced. Most hybrid or utility bikes have either a straight bar or a handlebar that curves back towards the rider, ending with grips parallel to the bike. Similarly, some touring bikes have these swept-back handlebars, known as ‘North Road' bars. The handlebars on track bikes are characterized by ramps that sweep down from the centre, straight into the drops or ‘D's: they're designed for use without brake levers and provide more arm clearance for sprinting out of the saddle. This type of bar has surged in popularity recently on urban fixed-wheel or single-speed bikes. Triathlon bikes have ‘aero bars', which bring the riders' arms together and thrust them forward over the front wheel, reducing the steering capability but increasing aerodynamic efficiency.

The most recognized type of handlebar, though, the bar most of us would draw on a doodle of a bicycle, is the conventional drop bar, which you find on all road racing bikes. The significant advantages of this type of bar lie in the way it promotes even distribution of weight across the bike, and in the variety of places
you can comfortably put your hands. If you've ever ridden 100 miles in a day, you'll know how prized this variety is. You can sit up with your hands on the flat ‘tops' and admire the view; you can rest your hands on the ‘ramps' and slipstream the rider in front; hook your hands around the ends and wrench up the steepest inclines out of the saddle; or shove your fists into the Ds and sprint for the line or hare down a mountainside.

When Cino joined his brother Giotto's business in 1948, handlebars were made of steel and fashioned on jigs, by hand. Road racing handlebars were generally a standard shape. From the centre, the bar went straight out then bent forward in a gradual curve; when the bars were parallel with the frame, they turned downwards, bending in a smooth-radius curve through approximately 160°, and straightened at the end. It's a classic and elegant shape.

In the 1950s, Cinelli began to offer subtle differences in the drop, curve-radius, ramp-length and the degree of bend. Models were named after great races, famous climbs and the legends of the age. In the 1950s, Cinelli marketed bar models called ‘San Remo', ‘Gran Fondo' and ‘Giro d'Italia'. In the 1960s, another Italian component manufacturer called TTT, set up by a former engineer at the Ambrosio factory, manufactured ‘Bobet', ‘Anquetil', ‘DeFilippis' and ‘Coppi' bars. Drops varied from 145 mm to 210 mm; the length of the ramps, a vertical measurement from the top of the bar to the apex of the bend, ranged from 90 mm to 125 mm.

Giuseppe and Giovani Ambrosio, from Turin, pioneered the use of aluminium in bicycles. They were the first, and for a while only, Italian firm making aluminium bars and stems. More flexible than steel, aluminium was thought to dampen the vibrations from the road. The first aluminium bike was made as early as 1935, but the perception, especially among professional racers, was that this metal wasn't strong enough for handlebars. Today, a similar
perception of carbon composites lingers in the peloton: even though the use of carbon fibre in bicycle components has exploded in recent years, some pro riders still insist on having an aluminium bar on their race bike.

Catastrophic handlebar failure, caused by anything from metal fatigue in aluminium to an unnoticed crack in carbon fibre, is something that keeps racers awake at night. If you're going slowly when a handlebar shears without warning, you impale yourself on the stem; if you're tanking down a mountainside in the Alps at 50 mph, you die. Imagine being thrown from a car at the equivalent speed and you get the idea.

When Cinelli switched to manufacturing aluminium handle-bars in 1963, opinion among the racing elite changed. Steel handlebars quickly became obsolete, while Cinelli bars became ubiquitous. The model 1A handlebar stem was introduced in 1964: it became the industry standard. Not only was it inventive in design and strong, it looked fabulous too. For a decade, you rarely saw a professional road cyclist wrap his sinewy fingers round anything else. The company sold 7,500 bars and stems annually in the mid-1960s. By the time Cino retired in 1978, it was 150,000 a year. Despite the growth in production, the standards remained high; the bar and stems were about as coveted as any bicycle components then made. The list of exalted champions — LeMond, Fignon, Hinault, Chiapucci, Cipollini and Armstrong — who have chosen Cinelli bars continues into the present day.

Antonio Colombo, scion of the famous Columbus tubing dynasty, bought Cinelli in 1978. He has continued to drive both companies through design and innovation. Just looking at the contemporary Cinelli catalogue on the company website, I sensed Antonio was eccentric. The impression was confirmed when I
walked into his factory on the outskirts of Milan. He came gliding down the aisle towards me on a scooter, wearing a Paul Smith suit and hiking shoes.

‘Yes, yes, the scooter,' he said after we'd exchanged our ‘ciaos', ‘the scooter is the best. It has CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machined components. But it costs more than a bicycle. Of course, nobody bought it. Except me . . . hah! Shall we have a tour?'

Antonio's father, Angelo Luigi, established Columbus in 1919 with these words: ‘I want to do business in iron and steel and make a fair and honest profit.' Along with Reynolds, Columbus dominated the high-end steel bicycle frame market for most of the twentieth century. At times, they diversified into motorcycles, ski sticks, car chassis and even tubular steel furniture, but the racing bicycle was always at the heart of the business. Perhaps the most significant Columbus innovation was Nivachrome steel tubing. It was the first alloy developed specifically for building bicycle frames. Because it loses so little of its strength when welded, the tubes were thinner and lighter than anything that had gone before. The bicycle I rode around the world was made from Nivachrome steel. I told Antonio this when we halted beside a row of machines where steel tubes were being drawn. He flashed me a wild look.