It's All About the Bike (17 page)

Even so, the one place on a bicycle you don't want to carry unnecessary weight is in the wheels. As wheels are accelerated round as well as forward, the mass of rotating parts is doubled, for the purposes of calculating acceleration. So, if a 22 lb bike has 13 lb in fixed mass and 9 lb in rotating mass, the effect will amount to 31 lb. It's partly why high-quality wheel rims are made of lighter materials like aluminium and carbon, not steel. It's also why the quality and attributes of rims, spokes and hubs can have a greater impact on the performance of a road-racing bicycle than any other components.

‘I'm gonna steer you towards a DT Swiss rim. DT Swiss have been in the business a long time and I know how history makes you Brits feel kinda warm,' Gravy said.

Ah, the comfort blanket of history. DT Swiss began drawing wire at a mill on the banks of a river outside the town of Biel in 1634. The wire was used in the manufacture of shirts for soldiers in the French army. Biel, the cradle of the watch-making industry, is famous for micro mechanics and the manufacture of highly specialized tools and machinery. It's the sort of pedigree that makes me feel, yes, warm.

The rims — model RR 1.2 — weighed around 18 ounces. They were made of aluminium, but they looked robust. The spoke bed was reinforced and, Gravy explained, the whole rim was coated in helicopter rotor paint, which adds to the longevity.

The weight and strength of any rim is, of course, only relevant within the total assembled structure: put another way, you can buy the most expensive rim in the world, but if the wheel is badly built, it's no good to you. As to colour, I had the choice between black or silver — a no-brainer for me. Scratch black paint and a
new wheel rim looks old; scratch silver and it's silver underneath.

The RR 1.2 was not a cycling fashionista's choice. It wouldn't bring tears of envy to the eyes of the ‘weight weenies' — the sub-cult of road cyclists who obsess about the weight of every component. But the wheels would, Gravy assured me over and over, last a long, long time.

People were ambling in and out of the shop while Gravy and I talked. Some had business to conduct. Others simply came in to chat, over the dub reggae, with one of the mechanics — about bike parts, routes or that evening's music gig across the street. It was as laid back as a beach bar in Antigua and it said much about the strong, friendly community that exists around the bicycle in Fairfax.

The previous evening, I'd wandered around Fairfax, a town of 7,000 resolutely individual people and home to Van Morrison in the 1970s. I watched all the smiling cyclists spilling into the town centre from the surrounding pine-covered mountains, at the end of their evening rides. I ate Vietnamese food at the farmers' market in Bolinas Park, listening to a busker playing classical guitar. I had a smoothie in the organic supermarket and a beer in 19 Broadway, listening to a blues gig. In Peri's Silver Dollar Bar, the dance floor was full of people jiving to swing music. The manager led me into the ladies' toilet — a shrine devoted to Elvis. ‘You gotta meet the guy who did this, right?' he said. ‘He's called Rudy Contratti. You can't miss his place. He's gotta a picket fence made out of old skis and a 14-ft blue marlin stuck to his house.'

I invited myself into Rudy's, passing beneath the 14-ft blue marlin. We had a beer (‘I drink it cold, Rarb. Can you handle that?' Rudy asked) and a tour of his fleet of fully restored, art deco bicycles from the 1930s to the 1950s. The bicycles were museum pieces. The house smelt sweetly of marijuana. I thought
Fairfax might be the kookiest town I'd ever idled into. It was a town of big hats and tattoos; a town of healthy people who held your eye and smiled spontaneously; a town where purple trousers had never quite gone out of fashion. I asked Rudy if people in Fairfax were happy. ‘Let's put it this way,' he said, ‘ain't nobody here lost money in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi. And everyone rides a bicycle.'

‘For sure everybody rides,' Gravy said. ‘I never owned a car.' For every mile of paved road, there are 15 miles of dirt road in Marin County. There are half a dozen groups going out riding from Fairfax every day: you can join any one. As a kid, Gravy used to ride all over Mount Tamalpais, which is how he met the guys at the birth of mountain biking in the mid-seventies.

‘I was the first little punk on the scene with all these dudes wearing logging boots and jeans and getting all sideways on their bikes and going super fast,' he said. ‘You know, they had this gonzo attitude and they were so into it, it was infectious. I got involved.'

The other side of Gravy's life is no less intriguing. His Dad is Nick Gravenites, a Blues legend, upon whom John Belushi's character in
The Blues Brothers
is based. His Mum was flatmate and stage-clothes designer to Janis Joplin. As a baby, Gravy lived in a flat above the Grateful Dead on Haight Street, San Francisco, navel of the hippy movement that gave counterculture to the world. I asked about the move from the all-night crowd to the keep-fit crowd.

‘Yeah, the bicycle saved my life all right,' Gravy said. ‘And building wheels is like tuning guitars: every spoke has to be humming perfect.'

Sapim have been manufacturing spokes in Belgium for over ninety years. Apart from a few tools, the company makes nothing
but spokes and the small nuts or ‘nipples' that secure them to a wheel rim. Expertise, innovation, strict quality control, specialization, the ability to adapt to technical developments in other parts of the bicycle and a small loyal workforce: these are the characteristics of Sapim. They also happen to be characteristics common to the best bicycle component manufacturers from the birth of the industry until today. I'd read all about Sapim. The company bears the stamp of quality.

Their spokes have been ‘a staple' in the world of professional racing for decades, according to Lance Armstrong's ex-team director and confidant, Johan Bruyneel, a former pro rider himself. Perhaps more than anyone in the modern sport, Bruyneel knows that success in road racing is about scientific precision. Love and hate in the Technicolor peloton, doping, courage and the depth of human suffering make better newspaper headlines, but the reality is — you win with the best components. Armstrong won all his seven Tours on Sapim spokes.

Sapim make a great range but Gravy recommended the traditional round, double-butted stainless steel wire spokes. They are lively, springy, and less prone to breakage with a little fatter surface area for threads, which increases the strength of the ends. Gravy opened a lever-arch file and extracted a spoke from a plastic sleeve. In his tennis racket paws, it looked like a spoke from a child's bike. I could see it was ‘double-butted', with a middle section that was thinner than the ends: I knew this increased elasticity and strength while reducing failure from fatigue.

The front wheel of a bicycle is symmetrically dished, it carries less weight than the rear and it doesn't have to bear any torsional load. This means you can get away with lighter spokes. Gravy recommended the standard Race model for my front wheel: 2 mm in diameter at the ends, down to 1.8 mm in the centre.

As the rear wheel has to be stronger than the front, Gravy
suggested something different: the Sapim Strong spoke. It, too, was double-butted, but 2.3 mm at the ends down to 2 mm in the middle. On a 28-spoke rear wheel, it would provide a great balance between ‘feel' and durability. And it fitted with the overall philosophy of the bike — an everyday riding bike, built to last.

Most spokes are made from stainless steel: it's strong and doesn't corrode; it has good fatigue resistance and it's easy to cut smooth, strong threads for the nipples. You might find titanium or ornately shaped carbon fibre spokes on very expensive wheels. But, like oval and flattened spokes — designed to reduce wind drag, but susceptible to torsional twist — these are really for racers who value weight and performance over durability and cost. Most cyclists require round, stainless steel, and double-butted spokes. Gravy knew well what I needed. And in selecting different spokes for my front and rear wheels, I was getting the full benefit of the made-to-order service.

The big question was whether the Strong spokes would fit through the holes of my Royce hub. Rolling a spoke between his thumb and forefinger, Gravy placed it carefully through a hole in the flange. With a ‘tch-ik', it dropped into place.

‘Oh, yeah. Look at that. That's awesome.' His face broke into another Golden Gate smile. DT Swiss RR 1.2 rims, Sapim spokes — Strong in the rear and Race in the front, standard brass nipples. It was a deal. We high-fived.

‘I'm going to hit the trenches now and build some wheels. And you're heading up the mountain . . . I've just seen Joe Breeze walk in with an original Breezer mountain bike and you . . . are . . . in . . . for . . . a . . . treat. I wanna go! You're gonna go do Repack, with original Repack riders, on original Repack bicycles. You're gonna be mobbed. You're gonna have smoking, flaming, burning wheels of fire. Yeah!'

*

I can clearly remember the first time I rode a mountain bike. Like the first time I listened to a Sony Walkman, it was a defining moment. I was walking down a steep street at university, behind the students' union, in 1987. Coming up the other way I saw Mark, a design student; we worked on a magazine together. I knew the hill well. Climbing up it on my battered ten-speed racer was an out-of-the-saddle wrench that scraped cigarette tar off the floor of my lungs and made my calf muscles bulge like chicken drumsticks. Despite the gradient, Mark was pedalling freely and keeping pace with his mate, who was on foot. They were having a conversation. I'd read about mountain bikes but I'd never sat on one — they took a while to get from the dirt trails of Marin County to the Georgian streets of Bristol. The first time I did, I wanted one.

The story of the invention of the mountain bike might be the most intriguing chapter in the entire history of the bicycle. It's certainly the most unlikely. Around 1973, several young Californians began modifying pre-World War II, balloon-tyred, American single-speed ‘cruiser-bikes' in order to ride them downhill, at full tilt, on footpaths — for fun.

The distinctive feature of this new style of cycling was that it was
off-road.
The aged bikes, nicknamed ‘clunkers', were neither designed nor built for the task, but they were cheap and dispensable. Riders hammered them until they broke, then bought another one. One of the most coveted models was the Schwinn ‘Excelsior': the relaxed frame geometry, long fork rake and high bottom bracket gave this model a small design advantage over others.

Soon, the riders began to modify these clunkers. Non-essential parts were stripped off. New parts, cannibalized from every kind of two-wheeled vehicle, were added. Tyres got fatter and more knobbly, frames were strengthened, brakes were improved,
stronger brake levers and quick-release seat posts were affixed, cranks got longer, chainsets got better; in time, derailleur gears and thumb shifters appeared. All these features and components had been invented previously; it was just that no one had put them all together, on one frame, with the specific aim of blitzing downhill, off-road.

The greatest concentration of riders actively modifying clunkers was based around Mill Valley, San Anselmo and Fairfax, small communities in Marin County, north of San Francisco, around the foot of Mount Tamalpais. Here, fortune brought together a young, energetic group. There were no more than half a dozen key players, but it was a critical mass. They were athletic, inquisitive and highly competitive. They included: Charlie Kelly — rock band roadie, writer and general outlaw — who was the charismatic organizer; Joe Breeze — decorous local boy and racing cyclist, who grew up riding over Mount Tam, could build frames and had access to his father's machine shop; Gary Fisher — a Category 1 competitive road racer and mechanic with a sense of inquiry and plenty of chutzpah; Tom Ritchey — a successful road racer and full-time frame-builder when he graduated from high school. None of them went to college. They shared a passion for bicycles. Otis Guy, Larry Cragg, Wende Cragg and Alan Bonds were part of the same crowd of friends and also influential. In the hands of this small coterie of inquiring cyclists, the clunker evolved into the mountain bike.

Over the years much has been made of the fact that they were a gang of dope-smoking, hippy bike bums. They may have used the early clunkers to ‘tend north country cash crops' as Gary Fisher wrote, and they were ‘a bunch of people who didn't have to go to work every stinking day', as Charlie Kelly said. But the invention of the mountain bike was not like a cartoon from
The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
It was dynamic.

At the heart of the story was Repack — a dusty, often
precipitous, off-road footpath that drops 400 m in just over 3 km (1,300 feet in 2 miles) with an average gradient of 14 per cent, down the side of Pine Mountain, a foothill of Mount Tamalpais, finishing near Fairfax. The young mountain bikers had been riding it for a couple of years, during which time one question simply wouldn't go away — who is the goddam fastest? There had to be a race. The gang met on 21 October 1976. It was a time trial. Riders set off from the start at 2-minute intervals. Alan Bonds won. He was the only rider who didn't crash. His dog, Ariel, came second.