It would be quite a paradox, wouldn’t it, if after London’s success against Paris in winning the Olympics, the most significant British sporting success this summer turned out to be the one that happened not in London but in Paris. All hail Bradley Wiggins, a yellow-jerseyed hero for our times, the new patron saint of the velocipede-smitten British.
Wiggins is of course already a triple-gold Olympian, and Britain does well in cycle races across rather shorter distances than the Tour de France – think of Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton and Jason Kenny as well as Wiggins right now. This Saturday we’ll see the road race finals zipping close to my front door; then the wonderful “Pringle” velodrome comes into its own for the sprints.
But cycling is one of those very few sports – and indeed may be unique – that is far more than a competitive activity. Indeed, it’s a full-blown environmental, transport and health revolution, a popular craze, an urban mania.
Almost all of us watching the bulk of Olympic events – the diving, butterfly swimming, 100m sprinting, javelin-throwing or gymnastics – are simply oo-ing and ah-ing in awed admiration at the skill, guts and physique on display. A miniscule minority of younger people will be enthused so much they take up a sport, stick with it, and find it a source of pleasure all their lives. Wonderful – but we’re talking about a minority. We, the majority, are mere spectators and always will be.
Cycling’s different. I’m old enough to remember when a thinly clad, colourful figure on a skimpy-looking bike with low handlebars was a rare sight. Weird looking, probably French. Here, bicycles were sturdy, three-gear objects for children, students and, as Orwell told us, old maids.
But over the last decade, speeding up in the last few years, all this has changed. Our streets have been filling up with Lycra-clad buttocks and formidable helmets. Month by month, the stream of cycling commuters swells, from the suits on their Raleighs and folding bikes to the cool kids whose super-expensive machines come with a whole lexicon of weird names – Forme Zenith, Ghost Race Lector, Nukeproof Snap, Kona Shonky. Once my local high street had building societies, clothing shops and video stores; now it’s all bike shops, brimming with clothes, drinks, “nutrition bars” and more gleaming ironwork than the Royal Armoury.
London tends to hog the attention with its blue bike lanes and (unfairly dubbed) Boris bikes, with their now-unfortunate Barclays branding. To be fair, building on Ken Livingstone’s work, Mayor Boris Johnson has done quite a lot for cycling in the capital. For once, the bike systems pioneered on the continent have translated quite effectively to Britain. Those who said our climate was too dismal and our winters too long for cycling to really take off have already been proved wrong.
A London School of Economics study last August suggested that around 13 million Britons were regular cyclists. That must be nearer 15 million by now. In Manchester and Bury, for instance, there’s an ambitious programme of erecting glass-box “cycling hubs” where people can safely leave their bikes – theft being one of the dangers of urban cycling. Four years after Bristol was chosen as Britain’s first “cycling city”, it has impressive systems of lanes and cycle-parking spaces.
Indeed, in virtually every city or town there are helpful websites for cyclists, maps, and advice on journeys and car-free routes. More and more major firms have schemes to encourage employees to arrive by bike. Outside the cities, the Bristol-based campaigning group Sustrans promotes 12,000 miles of traffic-free routes – the National Cycle Network.
However, this revolution is nothing like complete. In 2010, the last year for which have figures, 111 cyclists were killed on the roads and 2,660 were seriously injured. Even in London, despite the ballyhoo, few cycling commuters have routes that don’t involve close calls with lorries and speeding cars. Until big cities have a web of car-free routes that can carry most people on two wheels where they need to go, urban cycling will remain dangerous.
And smelly. More good employers are providing changing facilities and showers, as well as safe places to leave bikes, but they are still in the minority.
So there is a way to go. In its latest edition, Prospect magazine carries a thoughtful, slightly wistful piece by the former Labour MP Chris Mullin in which he calls for the abolition of the private car. Mullin says he wants “a return to that brief golden age when the bicycle was king, when every little town and many villages were connected to the railway network, and when our inner cities were habitable”.
That might be going too far for today’s politicians, but the effect of hard times and the oil price on budgets, and the sheer misery of modern car commuting, suggests that a more radical agenda could be popular. That means much bolder support for cycling, with cars banned from many more roads and parks. It’s one of the few radical shifts in lifestyle that is easily deliverable and for which there is no real drawback: the benefits for the environment and indeed the health of the nation are obvious. Of course, the old and young who can’t cycle mustn’t be forgotten, as public transport is enhanced. But this is all doable. It’s a policy that literally goes with the flow. Instead of new motorways, let’s have Wiggins-lanes everywhere.
Twitter: @jackieashley
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