Cyclopedia. Part 19

VeLIB Groundbreaking scheme set up in Paris where a vast fleet of rather heavy bikes are rented to anyone for a nominal fee. Lyon was the pioneer, while schemes had been established in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Oslo, but Paris was the first to be established on a truly ma.s.sive scale in a national capital city with no history of bike use. Other cities have followed suit including London.

Paris has some 20,000 bikes distributed between 1,500 automated rental stations, approximately one station every 300 m. The bikes are gray, made in Hungary by the Lapierre company, which also supplies high-end bikes to the La Francaise des Jeux pro team. They weigh 22.5 kg (a top racing bike is around 8 kg), have three-speed gears, lighting by LEDs that are always on and are powered by dynamo, a basket, and a locking system.

Use is by subscription, allowing an unlimited number of trips up to 30 minutes; longer rental periods cost from one euro, on a sliding scale that increases with the length of rental to 151 euros for 20 hours. The idea is to encourage people to use the bikes for short, frequent trips rather than hanging on to them.

The system has proved ma.s.sively popular but has not been without its pitfalls. Three people were killed in traffic accidents in the first year, and estimates vary as to the number of bikes that were stolen and recovered in various states of distress or taken to EASTERN EUROPE and AFRICA to be sold on. It seems to be several thousand at least. The company that runs the scheme, JC Decaux, complained initially that it was simply too tough and expensive to make any profit.

Getting the subscription is not totally straightforward: "Like all good things French, getting out a one-day Velib ticket at a roadside machine involves a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare of special codes, endless b.u.t.ton pressing and loud swearing," was the verdict of one British writer, Angelique Chrysafis, in the Guardian. Computer crashes are not uncommon, while the bikes have to be shipped around the city to compensate for the uneven flow of journeys.

However, in a city that previously barely had a bike on its streets, cycling is now ubiquitous. Velib has also introduced a whole new social element to the capital as people help each other use the bikes-another chance for the French to initiate romances-while convention demands that if a bike has mechanical trouble, its saddle be pointed in the air to alert other users and maintenance teams.

VeLOCIO Pen name of the JOURNALIST Paul de Vivies, the man who invented the term "cyclotourisme" and edited the magazine Le Cyclisme in which he described his tours in glowing detail. Is credited with inventing the derailleur, although this is not strictly accurate (see GEARS); he was, however, a tireless campaigner on behalf of multiple gearing and at the center of a group in Saint-Etienne that developed the gears. He is best known for: The seven commandments of cycling: 1. Make your stops few and brief, so that you never let up.

2. Take small and frequent refreshments: eat before you get hungry, drink before you get thirsty.

3. Never ride until you are abnormally tired, when you lose your appet.i.te and cannot sleep.

4. Put on more clothes before you feel cold, and take them off before you feel hot; don't be afraid to expose your skin to sun, air, and rain.

5. Eliminate wine, meat, and tobacco from your diet, at least during a ride.

6. Never push too hard; remain within your limits above all early in a ride when you are tempted to expend too much energy because you feel full of strength.

7. Never ride because your pride tells you to.

VELOCIPEDE Term loosely used to describe early bicycles prior to the arrival of the penny farthing in the 1870s; see BICYCLE, BONESHAKER, and DRAISIENNE for more details.

VeLODROME D'HIVER (Vel d'Hiv) The name of Paris's most celebrated indoor track has come to stand for French complicity in the deportation of Jews to n.a.z.i death camps during the Second World War. The track is known mainly now for the Rafle du Vel d'Hiv (the Vel d'Hiv roundup) in which thousands of Jews were detained in the track before deportation. A memorial now stands near the site of the track at Quai de Grenelle, close to the Eiffel Tower.

The Vel d'Hiv was built by HENRI DESGRANGE after an earlier track owned by his paper L 'Auto was demolished during construction of the Eiffel Tower. It hosted various sports but was best known for cycling, with Ernest Hemingway among those who watched racing there. It could hold 14,000 people and its super-steep bankings were known as "the cliffs." It was the scene of a memorable near-riot in 1947 when the crowd protested ajudging decision by throwing anything they could lay hands on: food, cushions, crutches, and even a chamberpot.

By then the track had a gruesome past. During World War II it was used for rallies by France's largest fascist party and was first used as a prison in summer 1941. The Rafle du Vel d'Hiv occurred the following year, when police and gendarmes rounded up 13,000 Jews and imprisoned an estimated 7,500 in the track for five days, in appalling conditions due to the heat-the gla.s.s in the ma.s.sive roof had been painted blue to deter bombing and the windows were kept closed. There were only five lavatories and one water tap, and a little food and water brought in by Quakers and the Red Cross. There were many suicides, and any escapees were shot. From there prisoners were taken to camps outside Paris and thence to n.a.z.i death camps.

There is still debate about the complicity of the man in charge of the track, Jacques G.o.ddet, who went on to run the Tour for 40 years after the war. It is known that he handed over the keys to the Germans although his supporters claim that he had no choice.

The track was demolished in 1959 after a fire, and the site is now occupied by flats. The memorial stands on a curved base, representing the track, and depicts deportees including children, a pregnant woman, and a sick man. It was inaugurated in 1994; a year later the French president Jacques Chirac opened the debate about France's past by acknowledging that French gendarmerie had collaborated with the occupying forces. It is the site of an annual holocaust memorial ceremony.

VERBRUGGEN, Hein (b. Netherlands, 1941) A combative, articulate Dutchman who ran the UNION CYCLISTE INTERNATIONAL from 1991 to 2005, introducing a number of innovations to cycling-some successful, some less so-before moving on to become a prominent figure in the Olympic movement.

Verbruggen began his cycling career in marketing, working for the Mars chocolate bar company when they sponsored a professional team in the early 1970s. By 1990 he had risen up the hierarchy of cycling to head the professional arm of the sport, the FICP, and in 1991 he became UCI president.

Under Verbruggen professional world rankings were brought in along the lines of the ATP ranking in tennis-these were actually invented by the French cycling magazine Velo-a yearlong World Cup was inaugurated and attempts were made to export cycling beyond its European heartland, with major events in Canada and the UK. The UCI was moved to its present base in Aigle, Switzerland, and a world cycling center set up, including a velodrome designed by the SCHUERMANN family. Moves were made to bring in nations such as AFRICA.

The cycling calendar was radically altered, with the VUELTA A ESPAnA moving from April to September and the WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP from August to September. The Vuelta has never seemed to work so late in the year and the World Cup concept did not take off as the TOUR DE FRANCE came to dominate the cycling season in the 1990s. Once Perrier pulled out, the event never found a sponsor and was eventually dropped.

In 1996 Verbruggen achieved his masterstroke, gaining professionals access to the OLYMPIC GAMES. To enable that, the sport had to be brought under one banner. The amateur and professional categories were abolished and replaced by Elite and Under-23. Under Verbruggen both MOUNTAIN-BIKING and BMX were brought into the Olympics, but there was controversy when the long-established kilometer time trial was dropped.

The DRUGS problem became increasingly high-profile in the 1990s and in an attempt to limit the use of EPO, the UCI under Verbruggen brought in blood testing in 1997, initially to monitor professional cyclists' health. The tests were counterproductive, actually encouraging the use of EPO within a certain limit, but they paved the way for more radical blood profiling as well as tests for blood transfusions.

When Verbruggen moved on in 2005, his final initiative was to devise the ProTour structure, which guaranteed entry to major races for teams who paid a registration fee to the PT-run by the UCI. It had a stuttering start. The two organizers who run the bulk of professional events, Italy's RCS and France's AMAURY SPORT ORGANISATION, wished to retain the right to choose who rode their events and were worried that the UCI's agenda was to strip them of lucrative broadcasting rights.

The outcome was a four-year standoff with the governing body during which the Tour was sometimes run outside UCI rules and antidoping regulations, with bitter exchanges of words that took the Tour organizers to the brink of breaking away to set up a "rebel" movement within the sport. Peace broke out in 2008, but the ProTour epitomized Verbruggen's legacy: radical and controversial.

VUELTA A ESPAnA The third of cycling's great Tours along with the GIRO D'ITALIA and TOUR DE FRANCE, the Vuelta is also the youngest, founded in 1935, initially with the support of General Franco's military dictatorship (see POLITICS). Not surprisingly in a country hit by a dire civil war, the Spanish Tour took two decades to become established; the second edition in 1936, held shortly before the conflict began, was close to being canceled.

The Vuelta was not a regular fixture on the calendar until the mid-1950s and suffered for many years from a calendar date (mid-April to early May) that put off Italians preparing for the Giro, which began a few days after the Vuelta finish, and was too early for stars building to the Tour de France, but it has not been improved by a switch from April to September masterminded by HEIN VERBRUGGEN.

A showpiece finish on the Paseo de la Castellana avenue in the capital Madrid is traditional, but the heartland of the Basque Country is never visited, for political reasons (see POLITICS again). Sometimes the Vuelta seeks out Tour climbs in the Pyrenees but more often it heads for its own legendary ascents: the Puertos de Serranillos and de Navalmoral in the Sierra de Gredos west of Madrid, or the climb to Lagos de Covadonga in the lonely Cantabrian mountains on the Atlantic coast, home to some of the last wolves in Europe. The Sierra Nevada is another fixture.

Founded in 1935 by the newspaper Informaciones, the Vuelta was shamelessly political, vaunting its "patriotism" at a time when that meant support for the right wing headed by General Franco; it was firmly linked with the regime. At first foreign stars had to be brought in for cash: FAUSTO COPPI was well past his best when he accepted 11,000 pesetas a day to ride the 1959 race while JACQUES ANQUETIL at least gave value for money in 1963 by winning.

The Vuelta hosted occasional visits from the likes of EDDY MERCKX, who missed the 1973 Tour de France so he could win it while Hinault took a legendary victory in 1983, whipping the home stars but having to push so hard he damaged a tendon close to his knee and could not race for a year. The Vuelta truly began to feel like an integral part of the international cycling calendar only after Franco's death led to Spain's reintegration with the wider world, helped by the arrival in the 1980s of Spain's biggest star since FEDERICO BAHAMONTES, the charismatic, unpredictable Pedro Delgado.

Coat of Many Colors =.

Unlike the Tour and Giro, the Vuelta was not founded by a paper with distinctively colored pages; because of this, and because of the infrequency with which the race was run in the early years, its leader's jersey has changed color time and again.

Light orange 1935, 1936 White 1941 Orange 1942, 1977 Red 1945 White with a red stripe 19461948, 1950 Yellow 19552000 Gold 2001present "Everyone has forgotten what it was like back then," wrote LAURENT FIGNON, who rode the race in 1983. "Spain had only just emerged from the Franco era. It was like the third world; anyone who went over there at the start of the 1980s would know what I mean. For cyclists like us, the accommodation and the way we were looked after were not easy to deal with. Sometimes it was barely acceptable. Professional cyclists of today cannot imagine what it was like in the 1980s in a hotel at the backside of beyond in Asturias or the Pyrenees. The food was rubbish and sometimes there was no hot water, morning or evening."

Delgado's first Vuelta win in 1985 was hugely popular at home, even though to a non-Spaniard it was clearly a setup, with ROBERT MILLAR the victim. The arrival of "Perico" coincided with an economic boom in Spain, and the beginning of live television coverage of the Vuelta. The number of Spanish teams blossomed and with MIGUEL INDURAIN dominant in the Tour de France from 19911995 Spanish cycling boomed briefly, even though Indurain never rode the Vuelta in his best years. Instead, the dominant forces in the 1990s were Swiss: Tony Rominger, who rode for a team sponsored by the Asturian dairy cooperative Clas, won from 19921994, while Alex Zulle, backed by the Spanish lottery ONCE, took the 1996 and 1997 races.

As the 21st century dawned, the Vuelta appeared fragile yet again. There were rumors that the format might be tweaked and that it might revert to its old, popular spring date. It is now seen as a consolation race for those who have slipped up in the Tour de France, while some stars simply turn up to get a fortnight's preparation for the WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS and then go home to rest. The Tour organizers AMAURY SPORT ORGANISATION bought a 49 percent stake in the organizing company Unipublic, but of the big three, the Vuelta looked to have the least certain future.

W.

WAR An army cycling unit manual issued at the end of the 19th century recommended that when fighting cavalry its members should turn their bikes upside down and spin the wheels to spook the horses. It is not recorded whether or not this strategy was ever used in anger, but it reflects the reality of the day: the bicycle was more than a means for people to get about: its impact on personal mobility meant it was seen by the government as a key instrument in war.

Simply put, if you could get your foot soldiers into action quickly, that could change the outcome of a battle. Moreover, unlike conventional cavalry mounts, the bicycle did not need feeding and could be easily transported overseas. There were early proposals to put together fighting battalions mounted on HIGH-WHEELERS, but it was the advent of the SAFETY BICYCLE in the late 1880s that led to the formation of bicycle detachments.

The 26th Middles.e.x (Cyclist) Volunteer Rifle Corps, formed in 1888, was the first, with cyclists divided up according to their mounts: safeties, high-wheelers, TRICYCLISTS. The Middles.e.x numbered nearly 400. In 1906, cycling maneuvres involved 50 cyclist companies. There were experiments with defensive tactics against cavalry such as putting the cyclists inside a "fence" of cycles and trials with various tricycle-borne machine guns. Armed cyclists feature in "The Land Ironclads," a short story written by H. G. Wells just before the First World War. In that conflict, the British army included 14 cycle battalions, totalling 7,000 men, with folding bicycles made by the Birmingham Small Arms company (BSA) most commonly used.

The British were not the only ones using two-wheeled soldiers. Cycle maker Bianchi produced a folding bike in 1915 for the "bersaglieri," the Italian light infantry, in 1915, which had fat tires and suspension for off-road use; it is claimed to be the precursor of the MOUNTAIN BIKE. The future double TOUR DE FRANCE winner Ottavio Bottecchia was part of a cycling squadron on the Austro-Italian front while the Tour de France founder HENRI DESGRANGE oversaw the training of 50,000 French cycling soldiers during the conflict.

World War I cut short the careers of several greats: the 1907 and 1908 Tour winner Lucien Pet.i.t-Breton was killed near the front at Troyes in 1917, while other Tour winners to lose their lives were Octave Lapize, shot down in 1917 close to Verdun, and Francois Faber, killed in 1915 while carrying a comrade back to his lines through no-man's-land (see HEROIC ERA for more on these champions).

More fortunate was Paul Deman, first winner of the Tour of FLANDERS, who was a spy working for the Belgian secret service, smuggling doc.u.ments into Holland on his bike. He was decorated for bravery by the English and French as well as his homeland; shortly before the war closed he was arrested by the Germans and sentenced to death, with the armistice happening just in time to save him.

There are other tales, such as that of the 1938 Tour winner GINO BARTALI: along the lines of Paul Deman, the "Pious One" pretended to go out training each day in occupied Italy but in fact he was a courier working for a resistance network riding between Florence and a.s.sisi: he advised on train movements, but most important, hidden in his frame were forged doc.u.ments that were used to make fake pa.s.sports enabling Jewish refugees to escape. The network is said to have saved some 800 lives.

Bartali's great rival FAUSTO COPPI spent much of his war in a prison camp in North Africa; their teammate in the 1949 Tour de France Alfredo Martini, on the other hand, used his bike to ferry Molotov c.o.c.ktails for the Italian partisans, a risky business on the rocky roads of the time. On a more sinister note, the VeLODROME D'HIVER in Paris earned a grim reputation after it was used as a transit camp when the n.a.z.is and French collaborators rounded up thousands of French Jews for transportation in 1942.

Numerous troops of cyclists also figured in combat in the Second World War; at the Normany landings, for example, paratroops were dropped with folding bikes, again made by BSA. The Germans used cyclist battalions in their invasion of Norway, and 20,000 cycles were vital in the j.a.panese attack on Singapore through supposedly impa.s.sable jungle. The cycle was the vehicle of choice for guerrilla groups-b.o.o.by-trapped by Italians in Rome and by the Vietcong-while in the Vietnam war thousands of bicycles and porters were used to ferry supplies for the Vietcong. One senator remarked, only partly in jest, that it would be better to bomb their bikes than their bridges.

Switzerland maintained bike-borne troops into the 21st century while the Swedes kept them going into the 1980s. Both used heavyweight machines; the final Swiss bike, the MO-93, had seven-speed gears and carry-racks front and rear. The Swedish bike was sold under the Kronanbike label after Swedish army bikes kept finding their way onto the secondhand market.

The end of the First World War was marked, in spring 1919, by the running of the Circuit des Champs de Bataille, a seven-day stage race starting and finishing in Strasbourg along the Western Front. The roads were barely recognizable, the riders ill-trained, and outside the major cities there was no food to be found. A truck followed the race carrying potatoes, meat, and b.u.t.ter. PARIs...o...b..IX was also run that spring, through the devastated cities and ravaged countryside of Northern France.

"It's h.e.l.l," wrote HENRI DESGRANGE. "Sh.e.l.l-holes one after the other, with no gaps, outlines of trenches, barbed wire cut into 1,000 pieces; unexploded sh.e.l.ls on the roadside, here and there, graves. Crosses bearing a jaunty tricolor are the only light relief." That year's race was christened "h.e.l.l of the North" by another writer, and the name has stuck.

Bike racing across Europe never quite stopped during World War II, although the major Tours were not organized. The Tour de France organizer Jacques G.o.ddet was always proud of the fact that he had refused to put on his race under occupation in spite of coming under pressure; the Giro, for its part, was replaced by a series of one-day races with an overall t.i.tle, the Giro di Guerra. The Tour of Flanders was the only major event to be run in an occupied country, and did so with German police help; this led to controversy after the conflict. In France, races were run virtually up to Liberation in both the occupied and non-occupied zones, as Jean Bobet relates in his detailed Le Velo a l'Heure Allemande (Cycling in German Time, La Table Ronde, 2007). In Great Britain, the near-absence of traffic on wartime roads enabled Percy Stallard to bring in road racing, European style.

WATSON, Graham (b. England, 1956) The first Anglophone photographer to break into the tightly knit group of snappers who shoot European cycle racing and who consequently has done much to popularize the sport in English-speaking nations over the last 30 years. Like TV commentator PHIL LIGGETT, Watson started as a bike racer; he spent time working in a London photo studio and began his photography career shooting for Cycling magazine. He moved to Winning in the 1980s where he made his name thanks to his work with breakthrough stars such as SEAN KELLY and GREG LEMOND, and thanks to one sequence of pictures in particular showing Jesper Skibby being run down by the organizers' car in the Tour of FLANDERS.

He has been a fixture at leading US magazine VeloNews for many years and has been close to LANCE ARMSTRONG since the Texan turned pro in 1992. As well as selling pictures and annual calendars and working for many of the top teams, Watson has produced over 20 books, including inside accounts of his life in bike racing. These offer a different perspective to that of most writers, because motorbike-borne photographers have unique access to the decisive moments of the greatest races.

WEIGHT An obsession for professional cyclists. The story goes that when the Italian trainer Luigi Cecchini began working with the Dane Bjarne Riis, he handed him two kilogram bags of sugar and said: imagine riding with that lot under your saddle. Riis lost a few kilos and won the 1996 Tour, albeit, he later confessed, with the help of EPO as well. There are also tales of riders training with weights under their saddle, although none now go as far as Jean Robic, the 1947 Tour winner, a featherweight who would collect a bidon containing 10 kg of lead at the top of a mountain to help him keep up on the descent.

The importance of weight loss when climbing is clearly ill.u.s.trated, although the precise effects vary from rider to rider, because of factors such as the steepness of the hill, the rider's power output, and the percentage of a rider's weight that is lost. One estimate (MICHELE FERRARI's) is that a kilo adds 1.25 percent to a rider's time up a hill. That means, in essence, that for each kilo a rider is heavier, he is having to work 1.25 percent harder.

The ratio between the power a cyclist can produce without "blowing up"-sustainable power-and his weight is the key figure: Ferrari estimated that the figure a Tour winner needs to produce is 6.7 watts per kilo (quoted in Dan Coyle, Tour de Force). In 2009, weight loss was one of the keys to BRADLEY WIGGINS's transformation into a TOUR DE FRANCE contender: the Briton went from 77 kg at his track racing weight to 73 kg. Critically, he lost weight while minimizing his loss of power. His trainer estimated that even at his Tour weight, he would still be able to ride a 4,000 m pursuit at 4 minutes 15 seconds pace, only slightly slower than he was doing in training in the run-up to the Beijing OLYMPIC GAMES.

WHEELS Relative to its weight, the bicycle wheel is one of the strongest man-made constructions, having to take loads in various planes: up and down (radial-the rider's weight, b.u.mps in the road, braking), side to side (lateral-particularly where the rider is standing on the pedals to climb a hill), and twisting (torsional-the circular motion from the chain and sprockets that drives the bike forward). An experiment with a conventional wheel built by Condor Cycles estimated its working load-to-weight ratio at about 400-1.

Early BONESHAKERS featured wheels of "West Indian hardwood, amaranth, makrussa, hickory or lemon tree"; wood continued to be used for rims, particularly for track racing, up to the Second World War. They were made either by turning a single strip into a hoop and biscuit-jointing the ends, or by lamination.

The development of the HIGH-WHEELER led to a focus on wheel design and a gradual evolution from the cart-type wood spoked wheels used by early cycles such as the DRAISIENNE. The key development came in 1870 when JAMES STARLEY patented the Ariel high-wheel cycle. This had wheels on which the spokes were tensioned so that the riders' weight was suspended; four years later, Starley introduced tangential spoking, in which the spokes ran at opposing angles, crossing over each other.

Steel rims were initially ubiquitous, with wood used for racing, but aluminium gradually took over, with the main market difference whether the rim was single walled-one layer of metal-or double walled, with two, for greater strength. Over 130 years later, specialist rim-makers such as France's Mavic, makers of the legendary SSC black-anodized tubular rim (Special Service des Courses) still supply this kind of rim.

But at the racing end of the market, there have been other developments in recent years. The first disc wheel design appeared in 1892. The idea was that it would be more AERODYNAMIC than spoked wheels, but there were already questions about how it would perform in side winds. It was not until FRANCESCO MOSER smashed the HOUR RECORD in 1982 that disc wheels came back into the picture. The breakthrough was in the idea that on the flat at least aerodynamics mattered more than weight. Moser's use of the wheels was challenged but his lawyers won the case by arguing that the wheels actually had one single spoke.

Carbon-fiber discs are now ubiquitous wherever pure speed matters: time trials on road and track and track endurance races. Rear discs are always used, with the choice of a front disc depending on wind conditions, as wind from the side can affect the bike's stability. Variants on the disc include one-piece carbon wheels with three or four vast flattened spokes.

From 1994 when CAMPAGNOLO brought out the Shamal, the top end of the racing and then the CYCLOSPORTIVE market was gradually taken over by deep-rimmed wheels, which had a V section rather than the traditional shallow U. These are put together in the manfacturer's factory, rather than lovingly crafted from individual spokes, rims, and hubs in a wheelbuilder's shop. "Factory-built" wheels, carbon-fiber for racing, aluminium for training, are now the gear of choice, and in a time trial, one will be used at the front end rather than a disc. Virtually every cycle component maker has gotten in on the act.

WIGGINS, Bradley Born: Ghent, Belgium, April 28, 1980 Major wins: Olympic pursuit champion 2004, 2008; Olympic team pursuit champion 2008; world pursuit champion 2003, 2007, 2008; world team pursuit champion 2007, 2008; world Madison champion (with Mark Cavendish) 2008; world junior pursuit champion 1998 Nicknames: the Twig, Wiggo Further reading: In Pursuit of Glory, Bradley Wiggins, Orion, 2010 A mainstay of the GREAT BRITAIN Olympic TRACK RACING team who won two gold medals in Beijing and then equaled the British record set by ROBERT MILLAR when he finished fourth in the 2009 TOUR DE FRANCE. Wiggins is a gangling Londoner-although born in Ghent-with a penchant for the Mod culture of the 1960s, the music of punk rockers the Jam, and a collection of electric guitars. He is also one of the finest impersonators in professional cycling: his imitation of fellow 2009 Tour star MARK CAVENDISH is particularly hilarious.

Wiggins's estranged Australian father Garry was a top professional on the SIX-DAY RACING scene in the 1980s; by 1998, Bradley had surpa.s.sed his father by taking the junior world pursuit t.i.tle, and in 2000 at the age of 20 he won an Olympic bronze medal in the team pursuit. The world pursuit t.i.tle followed in 2003, and in 2004 he took three medals in the Athens Olympics: gold in the individual pursuit, silver in the team event, and bronze in the Madison. No Briton had achieved anything to match this since the 1960s, but Wiggins received little recognition at home; his sense of deflation was such that he turned to drink for several months, getting through his entire collection of Belgian beer and spending much time in the pub.

He made his Tour de France debut in 2006 and rode strongly in the 2007 race, coming close to winning a time-trial stage, but had his sights fixed on defending his Olympic t.i.tle in Beijing. He took three gold medals (individual and team pursuits, Madison) in the 2008 world championships and followed up with two golds in the pursuits in China despite suffering from a severe virus shortly before departure. The following year, having got the Games out of his system, he astonished most of European cycling by riding an almost perfect Tour, struggling only on the penultimate day's mountaintop finish at Mont Ventoux and finishing just 32 seconds behind third-placed LANCE ARMSTRONG, who tipped him as a possible future winner. It was an improvement that hinged on two things: weight loss and his need to find new goals after his Olympic triumphs.

By the end of the season he was the object of one of cycling's biggest transfer battles between Team Sky and his 2009 backer Garmin, eventually moving to the fledgling British squad.

In 2008 he published his MEMOIRS, In Pursuit of Glory. The t.i.tle was thought up by Brad and his wife, Cath, and the book delves deep into his relations with his father and his problems post-Athens.

WOMEN At the start of the cycling era, the new pastime played a key role in getting women out of the kitchen, away from chaperones, and out of constraining multiple petticoats and corsets into "rational" dress. Surprizing as it may seem now, the CYCLISTS' TOURING CLUB was involved in at least one case in the 1890s where a female member was refused entry to the women's bar in a hotel because she was wearing "rational" dress-in essence baggy long trousers-rather than a skirt.

"For women, the bicycle became a vehicle of liberation from domesticity and isolation," wrote the historian Jim McGurn in On Your Bicycle (John Murray, 1980). There were disputes over the pros and cons of rational dress and long skirts, and public resistance in remote parts to the former; it remained an issue until the 1920s.

Women began racing soon after the first men's race in 1869 but the cycling authorities have consistently failed to keep up with their progress. There were early records set by the American Jan Lindsey and Germany's Marguerite Gast, while the best early women's track racer was Helene Dutrieu of France (see opposite), who set an hour record of 39.190 km; the infamous "Choppy" Warburton (see also SOIGNEUR) had female proteges such as "Lisette"-Amelie le Gall-who won an early world championship in 1896.

Six Great Women's Champions =.

Helene Dutrieu (b. Belguim, 1877, d. 1961) First women's HOUR RECORD holder, setting a distance of 39.190 km in 1895. Dutrieu was one of a group of professionals who used the Simpson lever chain immortalized by HENRI DE TOULOUSE-LAUTREC. She won world track t.i.tles in 1897 and 1898, and in November 1898 she won a 12-day race in London. She was awarded the Cross of Saint Andre by King Leopold of Belgium and went on from racing to stunt cycling (for example, looping the loop), motor sport, and then aviation. In 1910 she became the fourth woman in the world to be licensed as an airplane pilot, causing a minor scandal when it was revealed that she did not wear a corset in the c.o.c.kpit. She was the first woman pilot to stay airborne for more than an hour. She later took French nationality and was awarded the Legion d'Honneur.

Eileen Sheridan (b. 1942) was British cycling's second woman star after Marguerite Wilson, a double winner of the British Best All Rounder (1949 and 1950). Sheridan set records at most of the set time-trial distances before turning professional for the Hercules bike company to break place-to-place records. Her best was Land's End to John O'Groats (1954) in 2 days 11 hours 7 minutes. She featured in a doc.u.mentary made by Dunlop ent.i.tled Spinning Wheels: Cycle Sport 50s Style, which also included REG HARRIS, and did publicity for Player's cigarettes.

Maria Canins (b. 1949) Italian who combined cross-country skiing and road racing at the highest level, becoming JEANNIE LONGO's greatest rival in the late 1980s. Canins was a great climber but a weak time triallist, so her best wins were in races where she could use her climbing skills. She twice won the women's Grande Boucle, won four medals in world road t.i.tles (two bronze, two silver), and took stage races such as the Giro d'Italia and Tour of Norway. She went on to take two mountain-bike world t.i.tles as a veteran and 15 Italian cross-country skiing championships in various categories.

Connie Carpenter-Phinney (b. 1957) American who came to cycling from speed skating, in which she won a national t.i.tle in 1976. That year she won the US road and pursuit t.i.tles, repeating the double in 1977 and 1979. In 1984 she became the first women's Olympic road race champion in Los Angeles, narrowly outsprinting her teammate Rebecca Twigg. Carpenter was also a national collegiate standard rower. She is married to Davis Phinney, a stage winner in the Tour de France in 1987, and their son Taylor is tipped to be the next big name in US cycling.

Yvonne McGregor (b. England, 1961) was one of the first wave of British track cyclists to succeed after the beginning of lottery funding in 1997. Like CHRIS BOARDMAN, McGregor was a time triallist, hour record breaker, and pursuiter who was trained by Peter Keen from the early 1990s. The Yorkshirewoman took a surprise win in the points race in the 1994 Commonwealth Games, then was part of the British track riders' breakthrough in Sydney, taking bronze in the individual pursuit. She added the world t.i.tle that year and was made an MBE in 2002.

Leontien Van Moorsel (b. Netherlands, 1970) Triple Olympic champion in Sydney in 2000, where she won the road race, the time trial, and the 3 km pursuit. She defended her road t.i.tle in Athens in 2004 in spite of a crash on the penultimate lap, after which she retired as one of Holland's most successful Olympians. Van Moorsel traded on a glamorous image, wearing bright lipstick and long painted fingernails, but took time out of the sport between 1994 and 1998 to recover from anorexia and depression. On her return she won the world time trial t.i.tle and took silver in the road race on home soil.

In GREAT BRITAIN, the Rosslyn Ladies' Cycling Club was founded in 1922. Marguerite Wilson was British cycling's first woman star, a record-breaker who rode as a professional in the 1930s, breaking every women's record on the books including the END TO END and 1,000 miles. It was not until the 1950s that women's racing took off again; the Women's Cycle Racing a.s.sociation was founded in 1956 and began running a national road race championship. Eileen Sheridan won the first women's BBAR and 100 t.i.tle in 1950. (The first women's national TIME TRIAL championship was the 25 held in 1944).

While the UCI began holding a women's road race world t.i.tle in 1958 (the first held in Reims, France, won by Elsy Jacobs of Luxembourg) under pressure from Eileen Gray, one of the first women to race in British national colors in 1946, they did so against a certain amount of opposition, and women's racing truly began to gather pace only in the 1970s and 1980s. That was thanks partly to an upsurge in interest in the US after the foundation of the Coors Cla.s.sic, and by the end of the 1980s most of the best women's races were in North America.

The women's TOUR DE FRANCE started in 1984 and was run concurrently with the men's race but that came to an end in 1989 and a similar event known as La Grande Boucle Feminine is run by a different company, but lasts less than a week. The toughest races on the women's calendar are the Tour de l'Aude and GIRO D'ITALIA, while the women's World Cup includes scaled down CLa.s.sICS such as Fleche Wallonne and the Tour of FLANDERS. The money available in women's road racing is minimal compared to what is on offer for men; the disparity is far greater than, say, in tennis.

MOUNTAIN-BIKING has played a key role, because women competed on equal terms from the sport's beginnings in the 1970s and the sport did not have road racing's tradition of discrimination. That meant that when mountain-biking took off in the early 1990s women such as Britain's Caroline Alexander and the Americans Juli Furtado and Missy Giove were able to make a far better living than if they had been racing on the road.

On the other hand, questions about women's cycling were still being raised in the early 1990s, when there was debate about the length and toughness of women's road racing-the UCI felt distances should be restrained, while some races such as the OreIda Cla.s.sic in the US deliberately went outside the rules.

Women's racing in the OLYMPIC GAMES began only in 1984 and in the Commonwealth Games as late as 1990. At the time of the Beijing Olympics the British sprinter Victoria Pendleton rightly complained that women were discriminated against in track racing, with only three events to the men's seven. This will be put right in 2012, but is many years overdue.

(SEE ALSO BERYL BURTON, NICOLE COOKE, JEANNIE LONGO, ALFONSINA STRADA).

WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS.

Cycling as a world sport was not unified in the 19th century but the dominant organization was Britain's National Cycle Union, strictly an amateur body. Their national t.i.tle races were considered unofficial world championships. The first was a mile race at Wolverhampton in 1874, won by JAMES MOORE, while in 1879 a long-distance race was organized, lasting 26 hours and won by Charles Terront of France. When the NCU helped to found the International Cycling a.s.sociation, that body ran the first official world championships, held in Chicago in 1893 to coincide with a world exposition. There was limited partic.i.p.ation from outside the US, which took two of the three gold medals.

The Italians began campaigning for a world road-race championship after the First World War, and an amateur t.i.tle was inaugurated in 1921. The French Grand Prix Wolber was considered an unofficial professional world t.i.tle until the UCI ran its first professional road race t.i.tle in 1927, with pros and amateurs riding together on the Nurburgring in Germany. The winner was ALFREDO BINDA of Italy. The UCI has been slow to promote women's racing and there was no world t.i.tle for women until 1958, when the winner was Elsy Jacobs of Luxembourg.

Defending the world professional/elite t.i.tle is a rare feat. Only five men have managed it: Georges Ronsse (Belgium) 19289

Rik Van Steenbergen (Belgium) 19567

RIK VAN LOOY (Belgium) 19601

Gianni Bugno (Italy) 19912