About 25 years ago I was just "getting into" proper cycling; a bike was slowly morphing from a toy, through merely a mode of transport and finally into a machine to have fun on and explore the world. I was learning to mend and replace bike parts, just starting to enter the murky world of "specialist clothing" and hanging around bike shops being an annoying teenager. I absorbed and learned from snippets of the Tour De France that were sneaking onto the television and then "The High Life" appeared on the goggle-box; a Granada TV documentary about Scottish cycling pro Robert Millar, a sporting champion unsung and unrecognised by a British public that were hugely ignorant of cycling, despite him bagging several stages and winning the King Of The Mountains jersey, achievements that would have him front-page news these days. Here was a man who was small, weedy, thin, not particularly handsome, grumpy, quite the loner and could do wonderful things on a bike. I could identify with all of those attributes and I could work on the "wonderful things on a bike" bit. I had my first hero. Two images from "The High Life" have stuck indelibly in my mind; the camera car trying to follow Millar as he shot down an alpine descent, greasing his way between on-coming cars and cliffs as he pulled away to finally disappear from shot around a bend, and him sitting in the back of the team car at the end of a stage peeling his team jersey off walnut-brown arms to reveal a torso of Scottish-White skin beneath. I was totally hooked. A spark had been lit. This would be the sport for me. I only saw it the once, if it was repeated I never caught it, the programme came out on video but is almost impossible to track down, and there are mere gobbets available on the web. So it is with a giddy heart that I find out that "The High Life" is finally available on DVD (apologies if this is old news to some), I do hope the damp mists of time have been kind to it and not let the memories sadly rust a bit. Where’s my credit-card? www.bromleyvideo.com
A Hero Returns
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They're not slalom barriers, they're Sheffield stands for parking your bike.
@momove I would think that spending time training someone up, putting the time and effort into that only to have most people move on relatively quickly isn't a great business model. I know there is the argument that "if your business has to take advantage of people to run then its not a viable business" but thats the reality of some of these shops. Up to a point, thats exactly what apprenticeships have always been. A business get cheap labour that might help them a bit and the apprentice learns something.
One may wonder why bureaucrat Lappartient wants to reinvent the wheel with a massive injection of DEI and drastic reduction of money. Let the best cyclists win, period. Meanwhile, women's pro peloton needs means and support to attract new sponsors, increase TV coverage, improve salaries and prize money.
So they want to pay people a pittance "for the experience", not record their leave accrued, have them ineligible for sickness pay, then complain about them not being experts on e-bikes, bikefitting and more?
No right-wing media frothing about this?
Made worse by the fact the road has recently been closed for services works for a few weeks, and that was brilliant while it lasted.
Whilst all the changes made are broadly good, there are a host of businesses that can and will suffer for them if they are unlucky enough to hire bad people or simply have bad luck. Small businesses are already really hard pushed to turn a profit with all the pressures of NI, wages, rent, energy costs etc so at some point we do need to find a way to support small businesses and encourage their growth rather than encouraging their demise at every opportunity by treating them in exactly the same way as big, wealthy businesses. A country is built on the businesses people start. When all people see is risk with little chance of reward, why would they even try. Its already an issue for plenty of people who start up a one man band and grow to the size where they could and should start thinking of turning things into a proper company with employees. Do you take this risk or do you just in a comfortable place and take more holiday to avoid the pitfalls of VAT and all the issues with hiring people etc?
First casualty already: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd95ezw4003o [Particularly bitter about this one as it's a regular running route for me.]
Difficult to know as (a) most teams don't publish accounts, (b) even if they did, riders may be treated as contractors and buried in with other things, and (c) what gets counted is complicated (there are sponsors paying riders directly, sponsorship in kind, release payments to other teams, etc. etc.). Seems to be about 70-80% (and growing) of costs related to paying riders in some way, though. Don't know what the picture looks like in those other sports for comparison, though. Most of them do tend to have stadium costs to factor in, which may be not inconsiderable (though also a source of income, especially if they own them and can host other events there).
@mdavidford Curious if the distinction between a budget cap and a salary cap is more important for cycling than other sports. Maybe I don't follow other sports closely enough to know what's going on behind the scenes, but it feels like for the sports with a salary cap (NBA, NFL, NHL etc.) it's all about the players, whilst for cycling the rider is of course very important, but a lot of money goes on other things - most obviously the equipment, but also things like support staff (chefs/mechanics etc.), training camps, wind tunnel testing etc. I note F1 has done the opposite and has a cost cap that specifically excludes driver's salaries (i.e. aiming to level the playing field mechanically speaking, but teams can still chuck money at getting the best drivers).
1 thought on “A Hero Returns”
More on the DVD, and Britain’s greatest ever pro cyclist
http://www.thewashingmachinepost.net/bob/index.html