On the Road Bike (24 page)

‘Yak.'

‘What?'

‘Yak skin.' And with that, he carefully parted the paper flaps protecting the shoe from ultra violet light and negative ions, and he buried his nose right up to his eye sockets into the shoe, inhaling deeply, as if snouting for truffles. After a period of time long enough for me to become a little uncomfortable, he came up for air. ‘That's the real deal.'

As he re-emerged, I noticed a change. He was in a heightened state. Simon Mottram, the founder of Rapha, had transcended. He had left us all behind.

And at that precise moment, a famous television personality walked into the room. How very Rapha.

I don't know when I first became aware of them, ‘The Raphia', my name for the semi-secretive, palpably affluent, metrosexual elite who wear Simon Mottram's stuff. After all, their choice of apparel (not clothing) almost by definition eschews the attention-seeking primary colours of conventional cycling garb.

At first it was an occasional sighting. I'd overtake one of their number on Blackfriars Bridge; as I headed north up Farringdon Road, they'd be swinging right. As they made for their offices in the City, I ploughed on towards King's Cross. Dressed from head to toe in black, they would invariably be sitting astride an achingly cool bike, the kind that is not available for purchase by ordinary folk. At least not at Halfords.

Then there was the Rapha cycling team.

About five years ago I started presenting televised races from the provinces, The Tour Series. These are humble, city-centre circuit races from strictly non-Metropolitan places like Redditch, Woking and Kirkcaldy. Raced over an hour around a tight course, they are full-blooded, honest scraps, which usually end in a bunch sprint. Big crowds cheer the riders on from behind barriers.

British domestic cycling teams fight a constant battle to scrape together enough money to keep going for another season. They rely, at least for the most part, on a headline sponsor and a number of smaller benefactors who demand a little space on their kit. It's a woefully unstable financial model as sponsors come and go, often lasting no more than a season before they wise up to the reality that it's a pricey hobby more than a marketing tool. As a result, the mysterious logos, the exotic and banal nomenclatures, the kaleidoscopic nature of their kits, make up a bewildering and mildly comic homespun patchwork.

It makes for tortured broadcasting.

‘So, Matt, do you think that Cycle Premier Metaltek will try to get a man in the break today, or is it a course which suits Motorpoint Marshalls Pasta better?' The longer, and more unlikely sounding the name, the fewer races they'll win, by and large (an equation, incidentally that often holds equally well for the Tour de France, where Team Sky trounced both Radioshack-Nissan-Trek and Omega-Pharma-Quick Step).

But then, and quite distinctly, there's Rapha. They're actually called Rapha-Condor-Sharp, although I always forget the Sharp bit, quite often omitting the Condor middle name as well. It's Rapha that holds sway in the aesthetics of the team. The kit is black (with the merest dashes of preconception-challenging pink). The bikes are black. The cars are black.

Their riders know that they catch the eye in the peloton like no others. As the dark-destroyers of the race stand at the start line, they are aware that all other kits look cobbled-together in comparison; they look like panthers in a room full of rescue cats. This doesn't make them fast, but it makes them look like they're going to be fast, which is, I am certain, a marginal gain.

My experience of bicycle racing in Britain (aside, it should be said, from the Tour of Britain, which is grander by far in scale and purpose) had largely been restricted to these evening ‘criteriums' up and down the country; homely, warm, family affairs, attended by crowds of local enthusiasts; middle-aged men dragging reluctant children along after school, programme collectors carrying plastic bags full of their booty looking beadily around for a glimpse of Malcolm Elliott, gaggles of friends from the same cycling club, all dressed in matching Lycra. In other words, the sequence of faces along the hoardings at the side of the race track holds up a mirror to the eclectic constituency of the British cycling scene.

I love these evenings; the bewilderment and resentment they engender among the non-cycling majority of the population amuses me greatly. Barricades go up without warning all along the high street. Traffic comes to a standstill on the outskirt of town. Race headquarters are invariably housed in the town hall. The Victorian marble staircases echo to the clack-clack of cleated shoes, and, for one evening only, busts of local dignitaries and former mayors frown at the passing parade of shaved legs and wrinkle their granite noses at the smell of embrocation.

Outside in the VIP area, the mayor himself, accompanied by his good lady wife, stands shivering under a dripping umbrella, clutching a damp vol au vent and a glass of Chardonnay as the race thunders past every two or three minutes. You can read his mind if you look hard enough. ‘Is this really going to get me re-elected?'

It was in this wholesome and distinctly un-Rapha context that Simon Mottram first introduced himself to me. A trim Yorkshireman in his forties with sharp but friendly features, greying hair and something of a smile playing across his face at any given time.

In many ways, this was precisely the environment which so revolted Mottram, the über-aesthete, that he determined to create an alternative vision for the cycling world, if not the world itself. So it was strange to meet him there, in a drizzly car park in semi-deserted Milton Keynes.

Many years later, cosseted by the drifting of quality espresso steam in and around the Rapha office, I listen to the Man in Black tell me how it all began. Or rather, what it was that he was running away from: British cycling, and everything that looked and smelt like it.

‘Impenetrable. Totally unaspirational, unengaging, undesirable. I hate it. I never joined a cycling club. I didn't want to go to a scout hut and talk about changing a bottom bracket. That's not my world. I wanted to be on my bike on the Tourmalet, riding in the tyre tracks of the great.

‘I'm a Brit who was lucky enough to go to France every holidays. That's where my heart is. Over there. Not drinking tea in a lay-by in a deck chair. I have no interest. British cycling history isn't what I'm about, frankly.'

And then he concludes with, ‘I'd rather be in Provence.'

I put it to him that British cycling's got considerable charm, great character, a wonderful, eccentric heart.

He cuts me dead. ‘You can romanticise anything.'

But his most withering criticism is not for circuit racing, which, despite its lack of a Tourmalet, is at least racing, but for time-trialling. He loathes time-trialling. And Britain's backward, nerdish, fetishistic love for this discipline.

‘Lots of British cycling is still populated by testers (time-triallists). Lots of geeky stuff and winning on your own. It's hard for Rapha to really connect.' I wonder briefly if he uses the word ‘Rapha' as the Queen would use the word ‘one'.

‘We're about looking to the Continent, people in love with the experience of it. Riding in mountains. Riding in groups. Wearing a cap back to front, and maybe sunglasses.'

I remember when Rapha first extended an invitation to me. Would I like to attend something called the Smithfield Nocturne as their guest? It was not the last time that I have gone along with one of Simon Mottram's suggestions without fully understanding what they were.

Except for the fact that it was in Central London, the Nocturne was exactly the same as any other one of these evening bike races: a tight city centre, barriered-off circuit, which the peloton hurtles around for an hour or so. This is essentially all there is to criterium racing. It is borrowed, as is so much of cycling, from the Continental scene, and specifically Belgium and France, where every other little town used to run its own event at some point in the calendar. Historically, and particularly when big stars from the Tour de France have come to the race, the outcome has been pre-determined by payment. Wins would be regularly bought and sold. It was all part of the spectacle, the charade, the fun; so long as it looked good, no one would ask too many questions.

But the British ‘crit' scene is different. Aside from the usual skulduggery involving unnecessary pit stops for recovery when phantom mechanical issues suddenly strike with seven laps remaining, these are honestly ridden races. Only last year, I listened to two Dutch riders on the Tour de France talking in reverent tones about the British scene. It was one of those humbling occasions when Dutch people choose to speak English to each other in order to be inclusive.

‘You've not heard of the Tour series?'

‘Never.'

‘They're amazing. They're like actual races.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘You know, an actual race. A real race.'

‘Oh!' They both looked at me, as if demanding an explanation for such a quaint practice.

‘I don't know.' I threw my hands up.

Smithfield's is the old meat market right next to Barts Hospital on the fringes of the City of London. It is a wonderland of ornate Victorian steel, wood and glass, which is ringed these days by gastro pubs and eateries for the chattering classes. At night, lit up for the occasion, and thronged with doctors from Barts, lawyers from the chambers and bankers from the Square Mile, it bristled with wealth and grooming. There were no kagouls here, no plastic bag clutching, bearded cyclo-fans. No one had ridden down to the race with trouser clips. This was the sleek, dark heart of Rapha.

And at its core the Rapha VIP area, into which I untidily spilt my presence. Simon Mottram greeted me warmly and pointed me in the right direction for a free glass of wine and an organic sausage. He looked in his element.

‘The Nocturne. That came out of our heads,' he later tells me. ‘We didn't have to do that. We've never made any money out of it. We lost loads of money on it. We could have just done a day at Hillingdon – that's what anyone else would have done.' Rapha, though, are not ‘anyone else'.

In the VIP area, the uniform was the thing: black jeans with discreetly expensive and minutely reflective trim, slim-fitting merino wool, old-fashioned-looking racing jerseys, either cream, or black, but with traces of colour in cunning little places, and caps; black, white with rainbow stripes, or discreetly tweed in nature with a black strip woven into the fabric bearing the embroidered name (black on black): Rapha. Pink T-shirts with black lettering. Black T-shirts with white lettering. Rapha.

Mottram's appropriation of the word Rapha is a curiosity in itself. In the 1960s there was an iconic French cycling team called St Raphaël, sponsored by a sickly sweet eponymous aperitif. It was the team of Jacques Anquetil, the first French five-time winner of the Tour de France. But their second team often raced simply under the shortened name, Rapha.

Mottram hit upon the word ‘Rapha' in 2004, and needed to buy it. ‘It sounds brilliant. It sounds European, Mediterranean, which is, I think, what the sport is. It sounds aspirational, a bit luxurious. So I bought the trademark.'

He cut a curious, and legally tenuous, deal for the right to use the name with Raphaël Géminiani, the former team manager (his first name a strange coincidence). It kept him awake at night, worried that Géminiani would renege on their arrangement and come hunting him down. Géminiani had a reputation for wanting to have people hunted down. But eventually the name belonged to Simon Mottram.

And within a short space of time it was being worn en masse, outside a meat market, for post-work drinks and a bit of a bike race in the middle of London.

‘Whether you work in advertising or the City or technology, if you've got the right sort of mentality, if you're that sort of person who likes the stories and the richness and the design and can afford it, you'll be a Rapha customer.'

It was overwhelmingly homogenous. The aesthetic extended way further than just the clothes. It seemed there was no one there with nothing to say for themselves. I was introduced to a documentary filmmaker, a corporate lawyer and a museum curator. I made small talk with the CEO of a Soho advertising agency. Being uninteresting, unengaging, unglamorous was off-limits. I struggled for things to contribute. After enough time had elapsed for me to decently be seen to take my leave, I necked my wine and fled, without even waiting to find out who had won.

It was at around about this time that I started to hear the rumours that James Murdoch was a Rapha fan. Things were getting serious indeed.

Back at Rapha HQ, with a glass of water and a fresh espresso at his side, Simon Mottram was getting a bit exercised.

‘When people actually meet people from Rapha, they realise that we're not wankers. We're just like them. We like riding. But we also quite like talking about it and telling stories about it.'

Once a month, he tells me, he allows himself to dive into the shark-infested waters of the Internet and scour the forums for messageboard threads about Rapha's latest initiative. They have their haters. And by Rapha, what they really mean is Simon Mottram, since his thumbprint is on everything they do and everything they sell. It's not always much fun reading what is being said.

‘I have no problem with them. But they continue to have a huge problem with us. The more charitable among them admit they don't understand why it's working. The less charitable think that we are some kind of marketing construct, that's raping their heritage. Rapha aren't stealing the sport. We're just doing it rather well.'

‘Do you get stung by them?'

‘Yes, I do. I do.' He stops to think about it, as if trying the statement for size before committing to the following sentence, knowing for sure that I would find it irresistible. That I'd have to print it.

‘Frankly I think I'm doing more for the sport, doing what I'm doing, than pretty much anyone else.'