Somebody at my pal Bernard’s workplace lately identified to him that the bike store not far away had closed. “I suppose biking’s simply not cool anymore,” she mentioned. “I heard that somebody was going to open a paddleboard store. I believe that’s extra what cool persons are doing as of late.” The story made me snigger. Taking a passive-aggressive swipe at Bernard for not being cool is like taunting him for the stodginess of his Victoria sponge – it simply makes it clear that you just’ve confused him with another person. And it put the picture of Bernard on a paddleboard in my head. He’s not a buoyant persona. He’d find yourself punching a dolphin, or one thing.
A number of nationwide champion on the bike and award-winning writer Michael Hutchinson writes for CW each week
What isn’t humorous is the closure of the bike store. It was a pleasant, unbiased store – I used to name in to borrow the odd instrument, thus depriving them of the few kilos they’d have made in the event that they insisted on doing the job themselves.
I suppose I hoped that perhaps I’d write about borrowing the instrument and the way I’d used it to gouge a gap in my body’s paintwork, that this might assist the entire biking economic system, that biking would go from power to power and so they’d get their revenue again that approach. It didn’t work. The store’s gone, and I’ve nonetheless obtained their rear-mech hanger alignment instrument. There are related unhappy sinkings within the worlds of distributors, bike clothes, and biking cafes.
It looks as if solely yesterday that I used to be attempting to realize a specific amount of credibility by saying I used to be a bike owner earlier than it was cool. Now I’m having to inform folks I’m nonetheless a bike owner regardless of the actual fact it’s not cool anymore, and it’s not almost as satisfying a brag.
And now we’re dropping the ITV protection of the Tour from 2026. We’re not even cool sufficient for the advertisers of donkey sanctuaries, funeral planners and individuals who make baths with doorways within the aspect.
However in fact I’m unsure that we have been ever actually cool. Biking, within the UK at any price, actually had an upswing in visibility by the 2010s and into the pandemic years, however that’s a unique factor. There have been some high-profile, charismatic athletes that appeared to outline a brand new sport for a brand new era of followers and riders. Individuals who knew you have been a motorbike rider immediately wished to ask you about helmet aerodynamics and how Tour de France riders peed. There’s much less of that now.
What issues to me, although, is that there are much more of us now than there have been earlier than. Many, most likely most, of the newcomers have stayed. When you assume biking isn’t as high-profile because it was just a few years in the past, that’s nothing in comparison with how subterranean in profile it was all the way in which again within the before-times. We weren’t a lot a sport as a hearsay. We could also be moaning about it now, however there are an terrible lot extra of us to do the moaning. That’s progress.
I nonetheless hate the post-pandemic ‘correction’ out there that’s pushed in any other case viable companies to the wall. And it is going to be an actual disgrace if we lose free-to-air TV protection – I’m unsure it prompted fairly as many individuals to take up biking as is often supposed or we’d all have a donkey within the backyard and a slot booked on the crematorium too, however for lots of followers it was a treasured summer time communion.
When you have been into biking as a result of it was cool, and also you’ve now deserted us to go paddleboarding, effectively, I’m sorry to see you go. I’ll simply level out which you can get a puncture in an inflatable paddleboard too, and it’s actually laborious to search out someplace good to face when you repair it.
