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Man v bike.pngVideo: Man vs bike - The Guardian finds out whether a journo-MAMIL on a superbike is faster than an elite rider on a Boris bike
Is it about the bike? At the very top level, as Chris Froome demonstrated yesterday, it's even worth swapping bikes to gain that crucial advantage. But surely a top rider will beat any of us run-of-the-mill cyclists however much he is handicapped by being made to ride a heavy, slow tank of a bike?
That's what The Guardian's bike columnist Peter Walker and elite racer Iain Cook set out to find out in this video. Walker scored a rather luscious BMC TMR1 aero rocketship and lumbered Cook with a succession of, ahem, more practical bikes: a £250 Pinnacle, Walker's own Dutch commuter complete with child seat and basket full of newspapers and, of course, a Boris Bike.
Starting at opposite sides of the Herne Hill Velodrome, they duked it out in a series of two-lap individual pursuit sessions to determine whether man or machine reigns supreme. The results might surprise you.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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12 comments
9 minutes long
Can some one sum it up, in like, one word - who won
So I guess this experiment means that buying a £6000 BMC will make me competitive in a national race?
A fourth test - the journo on the BMC v the national level rider on his own bike or even another BMC.
Would have shown just how good the guy was.
I don't mind fluff like this. But you don't learn anything you didn't already know...
They actually wasted money to make this video ?
Talk about pissing it out the window...
Amusing but, as the senior surgeon said to the junior doctor in one of the old "Doctor in the ...." films, "What's the bleeding point".
Amazing what you can get paid for nowadays!
You can get an aero crouch on a Boris Bike: Grasp the front of the carrier, rest your elbows on the bars and go for it!
But yes, very lame.
On a slightly related point, I've often wondered what difference changing teams, and usually bikes, makes to a pro. In the motorcycle racing world it's increasingly important to be on the 'right' bike o be successful. In pro cycling, is there a 'best bike' ?
I agree the test was pretty much pointless - but they seemed to mention that themselves several times
A more sensible test would have had two comparable riders - or even the same rider clocked on different bikes
It's vaguely interesting. Vaguely.
But ultimately pointless. There is absolutely no effort from the journo on the first test.
The relevance to being about the bike/rider is what a given rider can do with a given bike. The pro would be many seconds ahead of himself on even the Pinnacle.
Would've made more sense to do a hill climb, really. But then I'm taking it a bit too seriously.
I knew it, it's not me it's my bike. #vindicated
Wow this is lame...