the biscuit tin

Wiggo! Kelly! Jaja! Bob!

Bradley Wiggins wins the 2012 edition of Paris - Nice and the next thing you know, he’s on the short shortlist for the 2012 Tour de France. Maybe it’s the sight of him in an ASO organised race yellow jersey (it must be the same shade as the July yellow) that has provoked the excitement? But while we can enjoy the sight of a Brit on the top step of a stage race podium, we’ve been here before.

Robert Millar – still Britain’s best stage race rider – was capable of decent performances in the week long races, with a best Tour de France placing of fourth. And Chris Boardman also rode well in races of similar duration. But to extrapolate a win in Paris – Nice, the Dauphine Libere or Criterium International and project it onto the Tour de France is just cafe stop blather.

Christ, you can win Paris - Nice seven times on the bounce and you can throw in a Vuelta win too and still be nowhere near having the right make up for a Tour podium, far less a win. Ask Sean Kelly with a Tour GC best of fourth in 1985. Or maybe Laurent Jalabert. Three white jersey wins in Paris – Nice, one Vuelta a Espana and a career best Tour finish of...fourth.

This is not to be ‘down’ on Wiggins, this is merely an attempt to bring in a little perspective. Millar finished – yes, you’ve guessed - fourth overall in the 1984 Tour de France and the result went on to define his career. “When I finished fourth, people had me marked as a potential Tour winner – Peter Post at Panasonic Raleigh did – but the difference between finishing fourth at 10 minutes and winning is much bigger than it looks,” recalled Robert Millar later.

So, yes, let’s all enjoy the sight of Wiggins in yellow, but after the Paris – Nice celebrations fade, the fact is that he needs more pressure in the run up to the Tour de France like he needs a broken collarbone. In the end, the Tour de France is a race like no other and no number of wins in any other race are going to make much difference to anyone when July rolls around.

Dave's suprise Christmas bonus (cheers Gatorade)

The recent kerfuffle about the alleged buying* of Liege-Bastogne-Liege by sundry Eastern European baddies brought an old Dave Rayner story to mind. Rayner was riding for Bucker and in the team Liege-Bastogne-Liege. It was a typical L-B-L, snow flurries at Bastogne, early skirmishes, a dragged out war of attrition, massacre on the Haut Levee and final selection on La Redoute.

Dave played his part, but the Buckler team leader that day was Steven Rooks, riding as Dutch road champion. Rooks made the final selection, but, in the closing kilometers, the decidedly un-sylph-like figure of Gatorade's Dirk De Wolf attacked, diesel-style. He huffed and he puffed, gained a metre at a time and - oh happy day for a Belgian in a Belgian Classic - he won! Gatorade had won a Classic.

Who would have bet on Dirk winning the ultra hilly L-B-L? Well, it's funny you should say 'bet' because a long time after the race, Rayner received a bonus for his efforts in Liege-Bastogne-Liege which came as a surprise (although he had finished 67th, one place ahead of fellow Brit Harry Lodge).

What was it for, enquired Rayner. It turned out it was his cut of the buy-off money that Gatorade paid to Rooks. That slow-mo attack of De Wolf's? The one where Rooks looked at Banesto boy Jean-Francois Bernard and soft pedalled? Uh-huh. Gatorade had just come into the sport. At the time it was part of the massive US Quaker corporation and aiming to make inroads into the growing European energy drink market. Gatorade went into cycling and went in large, hiring Gianni Bugno and Laurent Fignon amongst others. Alas, so far in its first season the team had won nothing at all, not even a podium, so someone in the team car decided to get the chequebook out. And Dave got a surprise Christmas bonus.

I had to do a double take when I read that a British rider, Endura's Jon Tiernan-Locke had won the general classification of the Tour of the Mediteranean. And that he had won, essentially, after two stage wins, including a hill top finish. It all seems quite surreal or, to use that dread phrase, 'unbelievable.'

I say 'unbelievable' because the last time I covered that race as a journalist back in 1996, I watched Michele Coppolilo of MG Technogym sprint off the front of the bunch at the foot of Mont Faron and win the 40km stage by almost a minute. The hitherto unheralded Italian didn't even win overall. No, that honour went to Frank Vandenbroucke, already the enfant terrible not just of Belgian cycling but of the European peloton.

Race media knew that VdB was capable of all sorts of exploits, though not, if truth be told, the sort of exploits he was finally and fatally tangled up in. However, if you had suggested to me then that a British rider in a British team would win the Tour of the Med in 2012, I would have smiled at your patriotic delusion and wondered if you had been on the absinthe.

It's safe to say that in 1996, the Euro pro peloton wasn't quite as healthy or well policed as it is now. Flying the flag for the Brits in that same race was Chris Boardman in Gan colours, a rider, like many in the 1990s, whose career was hamstrung by the lab rat blood chemsitry of many around him.

The final gc of the race saw Boardman finish sixth, two minutes behind VdB and another four riders whose careers were all enhanced by chemicals. We know this now (Johan Museeuw and Jan Svorada anyone?) but could only guess then. Imagine, a race scene where there was no test for EPO, far less a haematocrit limit! I wonder what Boardman and his fellow travellers of that era think when they see Locke, riding up a hill that is somehow, more level...

Campaigners always talk about 'unacceptable' levels of fatalities on UK roads when it comes to bikes. So what would an 'acceptable' number of deaths be? As usual, the London-centric media loses perspective, pointing the finger at 'lorries' in the Capital wiping out cyclists. It might be an issue in London, but probably not in Linlithgow.

Relative fatality figures from Holland and Denmark are touted. Why can't we be like them? Because the culture is different, for one thing. But, more importantly – way more importantly – cycle paths in those countries aren't a line painted on the road, a token nod to 'integrating' bikes and other vehicles. 

So all our major cities need new road networks, layouts and lights which give cyclists a chance? OK, let's see it happening in the UK then. Oh, hang on...

"...coalition policies including cuts to road safety budgets... ...the Government abolished Cycling England, the body charged with enticing millions of motorists to take up cycling, along with its £60 million annual funding for cycle schemes."*

As is always the case, money talks and bullshit walks.

Copenhagen style! Lots of bikes and a proper cycle path running parallel to the main road.

I dug out this old trannie from the Dauphine Libere from, oh, let's say 1991 shall we? Charly Mottet leading Gilles Delion up some or other underpopulated Alpine climb. Mottet, reputedly one of the 'cleanest' riders of his generation was riding for a team whose directeur sportif was Bruno Roussel, who always seemed to me to be decent, passionate, forward-thinking. He went on to find real fame with Festina in 1998.

Delion, another denizen of the Savoie region, was a decent rider too - 15th in his first Tour de France ("et meilleur francais!" in 1990), managed by another interesting character, Paul Koechli, who had coped with Bernard Hinault and Greg Lemond in 1985 and 1986. Delion's best win was the 1990 Tour of Lombardy and then, as the 1990s wore on, the EPO flowed more freely in the peloton - in indirect proportion to riders' blood viscosity - and Delion and Mottet's stars faded. Funny that. Are the two events related?

I always found Mottet quite guarded and taciturn when he was a rider, but I bet he has some stories. I wonder if he'd be ready to tell them now?

...according to Esquire (though it could be any men's magazine) include Genefic HD eye cream by Lancome. £39 for a tube. Also – bear in mind that (apparently) my face really needs this stuff on a daily basis – Chanel Ultra Correction Lift cream. A steal, yes, a steal for a mere £87 a tub. There was a gatefold advert on the inside front cover of Esquire that month. Chanel was paying.

The eight products anyone's face really needs? Let's see. Soap. Water. Sleep. Is that eight? Ah, fuck it, a smear of Vaseline to stop you getting chapped lips. Now piss off, you ad-driven, space-filling, will-this-do, pseudo-feature writing muppets.

Copenhagen is 'well civilized'. I offer three pieces of evidence in support of my thesis.

1. Popkorn is not allowed in the screening room of the Gentofte Kino. You can buy it in the foyer, you can eat it sat beside the real fire in the foyer, but you can't ever take it in to the hall and its spacious rows of seats (like they've ripped out every other row so as everyone can stretch their legs). See? Civilized.

2. Copenhagen public toilets are present, correct, functioning, mostly free and clean – hell they've even hot hot water, soap and paper towels as opposed to one dribbling cold tap. That would be remarkable enough, but the fact that there are public toilets at all (compared to the thuggish megatropolis of London which has no public toilets, just chained up rusting ruins, memorials to a more genteel age) is worth a shout. The existence and number of public toilets in a city is in direct proportion to its civility. Ergo, London, you are barely fit for savages.

I read (online) opinions about the future of publishing every single day. Print supporters and new prophets of doom. There are two scenarios or options.

The most popular is Option 1. Print is dying so say Hi! to the brave new digital world.

Option 2 is generally laughed at (oh, those Comments can be cruel). Print will wheeze on, surviving on shrunken revenues and much reduced staff, pay and conditions.

Well, call me crazy, but I don't think either side is right. So, in the red corner, 'Print's not dead'. And in the blue corner, 'Tablets and apps will triumph.' Nobody seems to have pointed out that there is a Third way (oh fuck, not that again).

The old print dinosaurs say - at best - magazines will shrink (number of titles, revenues, sales) but effectively downsize and shuffle on doing much reduced business. The Tablets'n'apps proselytisers say tablets and mobile devices will replace print sooner rather than later, thus saving old media like digital cavalry coming to the rescue of the beleaguered print old timers.

The Third 'way' is that print publishing shrinks to such an extent that it can't generate enough money to support journalism, photography, design and tech development. And if you don't have the resources to finance that stuff, its hard to see precisely who will produce the content that might generate revenue on tablets and mobile web devices. So a mooted vibrant digital news and magazine business model dies too.

Clerkenwell Green, January 16, 2012

Oh, you mean winter