It's All About the Bike (22 page)

In 1897, Charlie Miller rode 3,369 km (2,093 miles) in a Six at the Garden, winning the cash prize of $3,550 and a kiss from a music hall beauty. He told reporters he'd eaten three pounds of boiled rice and a pound of oatmeal and drunk several gallons of coffee and twenty quarts of milk. In six days, he pedalled for all but a total of ten hours.

In response to protests, a New York State law was introduced in 1898 prohibiting cyclists from riding more than twelve hours a day: two-man teams were introduced. Speeds rose and distances grew. Sponsorship from manufacturers continued to pour in. The top riders, the ‘Stars of the Saucer', earned in six days what their fathers had earned in six years. The great Australian cyclist Alf Goullet and his partner rode a staggering 4,442 km (2,759 miles) in the six-day event at Madison Square Garden in 1914. That's near enough the width of the USA, from ‘sea to shining sea'. It's 600 miles (966 km) further than the modern Tour de France, which takes three weeks. It remains the record today. Goullet wrote after the event, ‘My knees were sore, I was suffering from stomach trouble, my hands were so numb I couldn't open them wide enough to button my collar for a month, and my eyes were so irritated I couldn't, for a long time, stand smoke in a room.' Note no buttaching. Goullet won fifteen six-day races including eight at Madison Square Garden. He lived to be 103.

The list of historical sporting events that I wish I had attended is long. Along with the bicycle, history and sport are my passions. Give me the keys to Doctor Who's TARDIS and I'd take in Iffley Road athletics track in 1954 to watch Roger Bannister break the four-minute barrier for the mile. Next I'd go to Cardiff Arms Park for the Barbarians v. New Zealand in 1973. Then to West London in December 1810 to catch perhaps the greatest prizefight ever — Cribb v. Molyneaux. After that, one of the epic, annual six-day events at the Garden in either the mid-1890s or the early 1920s would be my next stop.

By the 1920s, with Prohibition in force, the glamorous
demimonde
of the Jazz Age mingled with celebrities such as Bing Crosby at the Garden. Over 125,000 attended the 1922 event. ‘Coal-heavers, mechanics, cab drivers and clerks' caroused with ‘white shirt-fronts and low-cut gowns,' a journalist reported. The ‘Races to Nowhere' made headline news. Damon Runyon reported on Sixes for the
New York Times
and Ring Lardner wove them into the temper of the times via his sporting columns. The visceral intensity attracted Hemingway. He attended many six-day races in Paris in the 1920s, and edited the proof of
A Farewell to Arms
in a box at the Vélodrome d'Hiver in 1929:

‘I have started many stories about bicycle racing but have never written one that is as good as the races are,' he wrote in
A Moveable Feast.

In
The Great Bicycle Expedition,
the author William Anderson met a 70-year-old former six-day racer, who recalled: ‘Six days of chafing your inner thighs on a pie-shaped piece of leather. You'd be amazed at the things bike riders have used to reduce the friction. I personally have tried axle grease, Vaseline, coconut oil, you name it. Fellow I knew even tried a preliminary heat with his shorts stuffed with Jell-o . . . Ah, those were the days.'

Sixes in America faded in popularity during the Great Depression. Automobile-mania and televised sport had killed them off completely by the 1940s. By the time Horst Schütz was creating his undulating saddles in the 1980s, the vestiges of the six-day racing calendar were back in Europe. Today, the races are nothing like the extreme endurance events loved by the Victorians. Nevertheless, in Amsterdam, Berlin, Bremen and Stuttgart, and at the legendary ‘Six-Days of Ghent', pro cyclists do still put their rears where it hurts, and put their saddles to the ultimate test.

I've tried many saddles. None have been what I'd call comfortable in the same way as a pair of old slippers. I've noticed, though, that I do become inured to the pain of different saddles at different speeds. This suggests some saddles are better, or at least suit me better, than others. It does not suggest, as one of the characters asserts in
Three Men on the Bummel
by Jerome K. Jerome, ‘that the right saddle is to be found'. Jerome is rightly sceptical:

I said: ‘You give up that idea; this is an imperfect world of joy and sorrow mingled. There may be a better land where bicycle saddles are made out of rainbow, stuffed with cloud; in this world the simplest thing is to get used to something hard. There was the saddle you bought
in Birmingham; it was divided in the middle and looked like a pair of kidneys.'

[Harris] said: ‘You mean that one constructed on anatomical principles?'

‘Very likely,' I replied. ‘The box you bought it in had a picture on the cover, representing a sitting skeleton . . . I only know that I tried it myself, and that to a man who wore flesh it was agony. Every time you went over a stone or a rut it nipped you; it was like riding on an irritable lobster.'

Three Men on the Bummel,
about a cycling tour through the Black Forest, was first published in 1900. Jerome was a gimlet-eyed social observer and witness to the unseemly rush to make a fortune from bicycles during the 1890s. Once pedals, a chain drive, brakes and pneumatic tyres had been added to the diamond-shaped frame, the inventors' attentions turned, finally, to making the saddle comfortable.

John Kemp Starley famously sat down hard on a heap of wet sand, pointed to the imprint of his buttocks and exclaimed to his employees, ‘Make that!' ‘New' saddles were advertised almost continuously in the 1890s. The ads often proclaimed ‘ground-breaking' medical evidence showing just how detrimental the ‘old' style of saddle was. Chaps like Harris couldn't help themselves as Jerome noted: ‘Can you think of any saddle ever advertised that you have
not
tried?'

One earlier, novel attempt to remove the threat of male impotence caused by cycling on cobblestone roads came from the Boston Athletic Club. A group of ‘bike jockeys', as cyclists were known in America during the 1870s, sought an undergarment that supported and protected the groin while in the saddle, without attracting accusations of corrupting public morals. At their bidding, Charles Bennett of the Chicago sporting goods company
Sharp & Smith invented the ‘Bike Jockey Strap', or jockstrap.

Saddles for women were a particular concern to the conservative elements of Victorian society. That bike riding might be sexually stimulating to women was a real worry. Of course, the threat of tens of thousands of permanently aroused nymphomaniacs cruising around the countryside on bicycles never materialized. The saddle manufacturers had a field day even so. In 1895, the first ‘Hygienic' saddle was produced. Marketed as ‘anatomically perfect', the saddle was divided in two, so the rider's weight rested on his or her ischial tuberosities solely. It is probably the very design that Jerome K. Jerome likened to ‘riding on an irritable lobster'.

Anatomical saddles are still patented and manufactured today. In fact, each generation since the Victorians has produced someone who thinks he's cracked the problem with some freakish adaptation of the saddle. And, like Harris, we keep on buying them. I've seen ‘wonder saddles' shaped like old-style tractor seats (two cheek scoops and no pommel), or like the snout of a great anteater, a new moon, the seat of a shooting stick, a circle of black pudding, a manta ray, oversized tuning forks set in an oven glove, and the upper section of a potty. In my opinion, they're all made by quacks. The websites selling them invariably claim to redefine comfort, and headline with the familiar question: ‘Impotence: are you at risk?'

The more enlightened version of a woman-specific saddle has a groove cut out along the centre, and a slightly shortened nose.
Manufacturers started producing these ‘cutaway' saddles a century ago and they remain popular. It's a simple modification to the standard saddle design with sound anatomical and medical reasoning behind it: taking a chunk out of the middle of a saddle reduces pressure on some highly sensitive parts of the body.

The most uncomfortable saddle I've ever ridden was the largest. It was on my first real bike, a Raleigh Tomahawk. It was black and spongy, with a backrest. It taught me the first rule of the bicycle saddle at an early age: less is more. I learnt rule two when, aged 12, I got my first drop handlebar bike: the width of the saddle depends on the position of the upper body on the bicycle. When you're crouched over the bike with your hands in the ‘Ds' of the handlebars and your spine curved, a narrow saddle is more functional. Sitting upright on a commuter bike, a wider saddle is preferable.

On my first mountain bike adventure to China and Pakistan, I bought a saddle cover in the bazaar in the city of Urumqi. It consisted of two inches of foam covered in purple velvet. Braids and sequins adorned the sides. It looked like a stray shoulder pad from a jacket Huggy Bear might have worn, working undercover at a pimp convention. It had no place on a mountain bike. Halfway along the Karakoram Highway between Kashgar and Gilgit, I was walking like John Wayne. Rule three: never adorn a saddle with
anything.
Excessive sponginess or layers of extra padding may initially seem more comfortable, but they make for more lateral movement, inefficient pedalling and, ultimately, suffering. I got away with it relatively lightly that time. My friend Bill bought the same saddle cover in green velvet. Deep in the Hindu Kush, he got haemorrhoids.

Different saddles adorn my current fleet of bikes. On my old Schwinn mountain bike, I have a Selle San Marco ‘Rolls'. San Marco has been making saddles in northern Italy since 1935. The
Rolls model is something of a classic. The saddle is made of high-density foam and covered with leather. It's really a saddle for a high-performance racing bike — Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond both won Tours de France in the 1980s on Rolls — but it looks grand on my old warhorse. However, if I don't ride this bike for a few months, the Rolls feels like a piece of granite. My newer mountain bike has a proprietary saddle: it's slim and comfortable but it's covered in vinyl and looks cheap. Both my racing bikes have saddles made by Selle Italia — in the business since 1897, one of the venerated marques of Italian bicycle componentry and manufacturer of the first genuinely minimalist saddle, in the 1980s. The old aluminium racer has a ‘cutaway' saddle that is fraying and curling at the edges. The newer carbon bike has an über-sleek, black convex saddle with a chunk missing out of the rear — the result of a high-speed encounter with Joe Tarmac. On my aged commuter bike, there is a nondescript, large foam saddle. I can't remember where it came from. It's easily the least comfortable.

Save for the latter, these saddles are all high quality and slightly different. Yet it seems that no matter which bike I jump on, some days my backside hurts and some days it doesn't.

There is one saddle I haven't mentioned: the saddle on which I rode round the world. I remember the conversation with the assistant in the workshop where the frame was to be built. After the fitting process, we were going through the checklist of components that would be
assembled on my bike. The assistant knew well what I needed but he was polite enough to humour me. He initiated a short debate about the best rims, spokes, racks, handlebars, brakes and so on, before leading me to his pre-formed conclusion. When it came to the saddle, though, there was no such courtesy. Without looking up from the page, he wrote down ‘B 17'.