Number of words: 978

The introduction to Bella Bathurst’s book is very clear on what it is not: it’s not going to “tell the reader how to differentiate between brands of derailleur or explain why riding a bicycle is good for your heart”. It will explain neither the technicalities of zero emissions nor the finer points of track cycling, and it has nothing on folding bikes, Moultons, or recumbents, “because they look ridiculous and can’t corner”.
It is, writes Bathurst, a book for the sort of cyclist who likes cycling and reading and stories, and who has long ago given up any desire to experiment with “exogenous EPO”. This gives it a huge potential readership, because, as she also says, “the bicycle – old, and cheap, and slightly comic – has become the 21st century’s great transport success story.”

There is an element of protesting too much about Bathurst’s disavowals: she is enough of a geek to have made her own bicycle frame. In the first chapter she enrols as a student of the Lincolnshire bike- builder Dave Yates, leaving five days later with her own blood-red, hand-welded racer which is pictured leaned decorously against a tree in Richmond Park.

But for the organisation of her book, she takes a studiously amateur approach, in keeping with what she sees as the cycling world’s own organisational principle: there isn’t one. Chapters on social history are interspersed with Q&A-style interviews with subjects ranging from a family of downhill racing champions to a flat-full of Edinburgh cycle messengers.

If there is a message from this book it is that the world of cycling is as diverse and unpredictable as the world itself. In Delhi, she meets a rickshaw entrepreneur and offers herself for hire, risking life and limb in the city’s terrifying traffic only to forget to ask her passenger for the fare.
In Holland, the subject of one of her most satisfying chapters, she marvels at a cycling landscape that could have been reclaimed from the sea with the bicycle in mind, and discovers that, far from taking to two wheels like ducks to water, doughty Dutch velocipedists of the mid-19th century were bombarded with stones and coal by locals who accused them of traumatising the livestock. Modern Dutch cyclists have taken the land into their own hands. She examines a road system where, thanks partly to a parallel cycle network and partly to the “bizarre” notion that cyclists have a legal and moral right to exist, the accident rate per 100km cycled is 0.8 – a tenth of that in the UK. “Here,” she writes, “people cycle because they’re interested in reaching their destinations. Everyone spins along at roughly the same pace . . . everyone rides as upright as if they were sitting at the kitchen table back at home . . . no one shows off or rides anything flashy or bangs the bonnets of transgressing vans. It is all very strange.”

This ironic deployment of “bizarre” and “strange” is not so much a reflection on the Dutch as on the neurotics, speed-freaks and oddballs she encounters back in the UK. In London she hangs out in a Clerkenwell café with cabbies who complain about the red-light-busting, bonnet-banging impatience of cyclists. Several chapters later she returns to Clerkenwell, this time to a pub, to report a conversation which seems to prove the cabbies’ point. One of the capital’s oldest couriers, a 68-year-old called Pete, had been spotted, bruised from head to foot after being knocked off his bike. “‘I said Pete what’s happened to you’. He gone ‘you know Holborn Viaduct?’ I said, yeah. He said, ‘Me and a taxi were having a race to see who could be first.’ He said. ‘The taxi won, basically.'” For all their environmentalism, cyclists are no angels.

The frustration of the book’s pick-and-mix structure is that Bathurst tends to allude to subjects beyond her research – to the idea, for instance, that the bike has led to increases in the height of populations (she mentions this in passing, but you have to go to Graham Robb’s magisterial The Discovery of France to find how and why). But the virtue of its structure is that it reflects the variousness of an activity which is at least three things – a hobby, a sport and a form of transport. It enables Bathurst to dwell on the singularity of cyclists – of Charly Wegelius, for example, one of cycle-racing’s mystifying super-domestiques, whose only role is to pace-make a team’s star riders. He’s barely visible at a party to mark the end of the 2009 Tour de France, and yet there is something fascinating about the mindset of a sportsman who puts himself again and again through punishing challenges without any ambition to win, and Bathurst coaxes him rewardingly out of his anonymity. “If I were allowed to ride for myself, I would ride a really anonymous race and finish 20th or 25th or something,” he says. “Either you win things or you make yourself useful.”

The previous day’s racing has taken him up Provence’s legendary Mont Ventoux. It was on this “great bald moonscape of a mountain” that Tommy Simpson died in 1967. Yet it’s not pursuit of glory that spurs Wegelius on but something much more remorseless. “The tour,” he says, “is like a huge gigantic monster that can beat you up if you don’t pay attention. If I don’t do my job properly in a normal race, hardly anyone notices . . . but if I don’t do my job properly here, there’s thirty or forty journalists asking where I was at the end of the day and I’m not used to that.” Does he like it? “I hate it.” So why does he continue? “You have your own truth.” The following year, Bathurst quietly notes, Wegelius withdraws from the tour after the tenth stage. He cites ill-health.

Excerpted from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/17/bicycle-book-bella-bathurst-review