It's All About the Bike (14 page)

For the first thirty years of the twentieth century, racing had little impact on the development of the bicycle. This is a curious anomaly: during the 1890s and then from the 1940s until today, the technological development of the bicycle has been inextricably linked to the sport through the testing and marketing of new products. The improvements between 1900 and 1930 — butted tubing, aluminium components, early derailleurs — came from the benign world of cycle touring. In fact, competitive sport held
the evolution of the bicycle back. The racing community spurned any developments that might somehow detract from the purity of their sport. The view was that human valour should be allowed to prevail over technological advantage.

Henri Desgranges, the editor of a French sporting daily, developed the idea of the Tour de France in order to outsell a rival newspaper. He wanted stories of machismo in forbidding mountains, adversity in extreme weather, heroism and the crucifixion of men. He wasn't interested in gadgetry. Desgranges said: ‘Variable gears are only for people over forty-five. Isn't it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles rather than by the artifice of a derailleur? We are getting soft.' When the French component company Mavic produced the first aluminium wheel rims, Desgranges prohibited the use of them too. The perfect Tour, he often said, would have a perfect winner if only one man survived. The circulation of his newspaper flourished. Desgranges' control over the Tour ended in 1937.

Tullio Campagnolo manufactured parts in a workshop behind his father's hardware store, before registering the company and inaugurating production of the quick release in 1933. In the same year, he patented a prototype derailleur mechanism, using a sliding hub and rods attached to the seat stays. This was slowly modified and improved over the course of more than a decade until, in 1948, Gino Bartali used the
Cambio Corsa
(‘race changer') derailleur in the mountain stages, en route to victory in the Tour de France. In 1950, a parallelogram
derailleur with an extended jockey cage — something we'd recognize today — was revealed at the Milan bicycle show. It was as complex a piece of componentry as the bicycle had ever seen, but it meant that no-fuss gear shifting was suddenly a reality. Everyone wanted one. Only pro racers and amateurs with deep pockets could afford them.

In the early 1950s, the bond between Campagnolo and the elite of road racing was sealed with a string of victories for riders using Tullio's components: Hugo Koblet in the 1951 Tour de France; Fausto Coppi in the 1950 Paris—Roubaix, the 1952 Giro d'Italia and Tour de France double, as well as in the 1953 World Road Race championships. Both riders were using
Gran Sport
derailleurs.

Campagnolo, now employing over 100 people, began to reappraise and manufacture pedals, seat posts, cotterless cranksets, aluminium hubs and chainwheels. Business boomed. By the 1960s, the company diversified into motorcycle hydraulic and cable disc brake components, magnesium wheel rims for super-cars like Maserati, and even aerospace parts, including the chassis for a NASA satellite launched in 1969.

A staggering amount of research and development in close association with professional riders ensured that all the ideas to improve the bicycle introduced by Tullio reached a point of unrivalled reliability, before the product was sold on the market.

Tullio Campagnolo died in 1983. Plaudits and awards — the Stella d'Oro by the Italian Olympic Committee, the Cavaliere del Lavoro, Italy's highest business honour — had been heaped on him by then. In a lifetime of inquiry, he re-appraised many aspects of the bicycle, established the most coveted name in the components industry, and helped claim ownership of the racing bicycle for his country. Eddy Merckx gave a eulogy at the funeral: ‘I tell it to you in bad Italian, maybe, but with an Italian heart
because, thanks to you, there is a piece of Italy with your name on all the bicycles of the world.'

Until recently, the history of the bicycle was murky. Only following the rigorous academic work of a small collective called the International Cycling History Conference has it become clearer. Prior to the late twentieth century, the true technological progress of the machine, together with the hands and minds involved, was muddied by the proprietary claims of several industrial nations. Such jingoism was at its worst before World War I. Germany claimed Baron von Drais's 1817 ‘running machine' was the first bicycle, though it was really only a prototype. The French avowed that de Sivrac had invented the bicycle in 1791, but it was a non-steerable machine. In England, it was maintained that the bicycle, in fact, began with the Rover Safety in 1885. Even the Scots staked their claim with the story that Kirkpatrick MacMillan, a Dumfriesshire blacksmith, added reciprocating cranks to a velocipede forty years before that. There was no consensus. Then, in 1974, an Italian literary historian, Professor Augusto Marinoni, chucked a big stick in the spokes.

Marinoni revealed to the world a sketch of a bicycle by Leonardo da Vinci. The sketch was found in a folio of drawings from Leonardo's studio known as the
Codex Atlanticus
and dated to 1493. On the reverse of a drawing of a military fortification, between a caricature and, bizarrely, promenading penises, there was a sketch of a bicycle complete with two similar-sized, in-line wheels, an elementary steering system, cranks, a saddle and a chain connecting a chainwheel to a sprocket on the rear wheel. All the fundamental elements of the bicycle were there. Its proportions were strikingly close to the machines of today. Here was proof that Leonardo had invented the bicycle, a bicycle with a drivetrain no less, at least 300 years before de Sivrac, Drais,
Michaux, Lallement, MacMillan, Starley or any of the other pretenders. Here was indisputable proof that the bicycle was Italian. The only people to whom this was
not
a knee-buckling revelation were the Italians themselves. Deep down, the
Tifosi
had known all along.

According to Marinoni, monks at the Abbey in Grottaferrata near Rome discovered the sketch during a restoration project of Leonardo's work. Reams of drawings from his studio had been glued into albums in the late sixteenth century, one of which was named the
Codex Atlanticus.
The monks had painstakingly unstuck the pages, revealing a vast array of new drawings covering an extraordinary sweep of not-yet-invented technology. And there was the bicycle. The sketch became familiar worldwide when
The Unknown Leonardo,
a scholarly tome on the restored manuscripts, was published in 1974.

Leonardo's engineering ideas are striking; many were centuries ahead of Renaissance technology. He drew sketches of a helicopter, a parachute, load-lifting devices, a wooden ‘car' driven by springs with geared wheels, triple-barrelled cannons, a glider, a portable bridge and scuba gear. That a vision for the world-changing invention, the bicycle, first appeared in the frenetic corridors and trammelled passages of the brain of one of the greatest engineers in the history of mankind, in 1493, appealed to bike fanatics everywhere. Marinoni's timing was good. In 1974, the oil crisis — the OPEC embargo on oil to the USA because of support for the Israeli military during the Yom Kippur War — was in full swing. Bicycle sales were booming and the number of bike fanatics grew daily. The bicycle sketch was published again and again, in newspapers and cycling and engineering periodicals. It probably made it on to dish towels at some point. Quickly, it became an accepted part of the history of the bicycle.

There was one problem — the sketch was a hoax. It may even
have been a deliberate fraud, added to the volume during the lengthy restoration of Leonardo's papers, to claim proprietorship of the bicycle for Italy. Foisted upon a gullible world, it worked. In fact, it worked so well that no one considered it appropriate or necessary to investigate the provenance of the sketch for twenty years. A little detective work led Dr Hans-Erhard Lessing, a German transport historian, to conclude the sketch was a forgery. Upon examination, it proved to be a poor forgery; an amateurish doodle on top of an original sketch of two geometrical circles with some lines. We'll probably never know who the forgery was by. Professor Marinoni was probably no more than naive in propagating it. One of the monks, then?

To me, this is the most appealing story. I'd like to think that a cycling-mad monk in the Laboratorio di Restauro, part of the venerated library within the tenth-century Abbey of Santa Maria di Grottaferrata, was bored one day. The
Codex Atlanticus
comprises 1,119 pages of drawings and writings dating from 1478 to 1519. The monks had been working on restoring it for five years. On this day, say sometime in 1972, our cycling monk holds up sheet 133. The backside of two pages, which are stuck together, is translucent. He spies the faint outline of two geometric circles; two wheels, perhaps. He holds the paper closer to a light that scarcely breaches the gloom of the medieval library. He squints again, harder. ‘Yes, yes, there's definitely a set of wheels. Could there be a frame too?' he thinks. ‘And components? Could it be a bicycle? No, wait, if it's a bicycle, that means . . . a miracle.'

The abbot coughs loudly in another aisle. Our monk returns from his reverie. Carefully — for this is his expertise — he peels away the backing page of folio 133. The pages were hurriedly stuck together by Pompeo Leoni, the sculptor who acquired Leonardo's drawings in the late sixteenth century. There on the page are two circles with some unexplained markings. There is
no bicycle. The disappointment is great, almost as great as the disappointment that no Italian has won the Giro d'Italia for three years, nor the Tour de France for seven years. It's 1972, remember: a nadir for the
Tifosi.
It's Merckx, Merckx and Merckx out there.

Idly, our monk starts doodling — just a few spokes. Thinking of the great frame-builder, Faliero Masi, ‘the tailor', in his workshop under the Vigorelli velodrome in Milan, he pencils in a frame. Then the face of Cino Cinelli appears to him, and he draws a handlebar. He's merely filling in the blanks. ‘Of course Leonardo invented the bicycle,' he says to himself. He starts drawing faster, with purpose — cranks, pedals, and sprockets. The winged emblem of Campagnolo flits through his mind. ‘What does it matter? Everyone knows the bicycle is Italian. It's as Italian as the dome of St Peter's.' A saddle, and it's done. He glues the pages back together again. A bell rings. ‘Ah, lunchtime,' he says.

‘Italians like design, colours, shapes. We care a lot about the aesthetics of the bicycle,' Lorenzo Taxis said. ‘This is the part of the bicycle you could really say Italy has ownership of. The care in the details, it's part of the Campagnolo way. We are a product-oriented company. Our products sell at the top of a pyramid of a mature industry. The bicycle has not changed for a long, long time. Only the performance has improved. So the development of all new products is followed by Mr Valentino Campagnolo himself. He believes that if you can bring to the market outstanding products that also look beautiful, then the business takes better care of itself.'

Campagnolo are today best known for their ‘Gruppi' or groupsets — a set of components made by the same manufacturer, designed and machined to work together. The first Campagnolo Record
‘gruppo'
was marketed in 1958. Prior to groupsets, quality
bicycles were commonly equipped with components cherry-picked from several different manufacturers: brakes by Mafac, crankset by Chater-Lea, pedals by Barelli, and so on. The debate about the pros and cons of the groupset has simmered among cyclists since 1958. The argument in favour is that components are manufactured to work efficiently together, while providing a unitary look to a bicycle. The argument against is that the big component makers have reduced consumer choice and successfully reserved for themselves a larger share of the market.

At the beginning of this project to put my dream bike together, I vowed to eschew the groupset. I sketched out in my mind a bike with perhaps a Tune chainwheel, Specialités TA cranks, brakes by Ciamillo, a Stronglight chain and Campagnolo derailleurs. When I mentioned the plan to Brian Rourke he winced: he actually physically recoiled, like someone receiving a low-voltage electric shock. When he'd recovered, he carefully made the case for a groupset, or at the very least a drivetrain comprising matching components. The compatibility issue was significant: ‘You could have yourself a right headache, Rob,' he said. More important to Brian, though, was how the bike looked. It was OK to go off-piste with the hubs and the seat post. Even the brake calipers could be from an alternative manufacturer. But the drivetrain, derailleurs and integrated shifter/brake levers were sacrosanct, on purely aesthetic grounds. Brian had been right on so many other things. I chose to trust him.

Once the decision to buy a
gruppo
was made, I knew precisely what I wanted: Campagnolo Record. The first Record
gruppo
in 1958 comprised a chainset, bottom bracket, hubs, seat post, headset, front and rear derailleurs and pedals. Today, it's a more refined list: chain, chainset, cassette, front and rear derailleurs, levers and brakes. It's a hideously expensive kit. For me, it would be a massive indulgence. I'd add to it my own pedals.