High performance
I don’t understand, or even like, most of cycling’s cultural or industrial ideology. It probably sounds a bit highfalutin to talk about ideology, but I think it’s the right word. There is a whole load of cultural baggage and thinking that defines how, why, and who for cycling media and industrial manufacturing operates. My sense is that almost all of it is aimed at some illusory idea of “performance”.
Performance, as an idea, is rarely interrogated though. And as a result, most everything is made with a specific set of goals in mind that exclude other conceptions of what cycling can be and who it is for. Most of the stories we read or watch are distorted by this. The way we define performance, and consequently the stories we tell about cycling, affect how comfortable our bicycles are, our expectations for them and what we use them for. Their “performance” influences cycling’s ecological and social sustainability.
“Performance” in cycling means light and fast for road and gravel racing, or else it means strong and fast enough for hardcore mountain bike racing. But try and use one of those for doing your food shopping and you’ll soon realise that your gran’s old Raleigh Twenty with a basket is far higher performance for that. Or head out on a ride for a picnic in the hills and a £400 hybrid with a pannier rack is higher performance than some massive enduro mountain bike. It sounds obvious when it’s stated like that, but the sport-focused cycling media and industry don’t see it that way, so marketing, design and cultural energy isn’t put into these less glamorous, but more sustainable and egalitarian cycling cultures. Consequently, huge numbers of people are riding round on road bikes with massive stems in a vain attempt to get comfortable on the bicycle equivalent of a racehorse when they’d be better served by a comfortable burro.
Similarly, the fixation with lightweight (PERFORMANCE) has led to carbon fibre being the material de rigueur. Unfortunately, it’s extremely finite lifespan and fragility means all todays high performance bicycles won’t survive to become tomorrows town bike beaters like the high performance steel bikes of yore. Even if they do make it, their structural integrity won’t be trusted or deemed worth the risk. To landfill!
I appreciate all this is somewhat just semantics. But I kind of want to reclaim the word performance for healthy, proletarian cycling. A lot of bikes out there are extremely low performance. My god, they force you to carry your snacks and tools in a pocket, and you get soaked by road spray when the roads are wet. What low performance.
This reframing of performance might just help make some folk feel more included in cycling culture. There’s already some change in the stories that are being told about riding, which is super cool to me. I love reading about little weekend adventures that feel like the sort of thing I might be able to do. I could live without seeing another mountain biker paralyse themselves doing tricks in the Utah desert.
A while ago, I went on a ride with a friend. We cycled the back roads to the seaside one evening. It was a perfect summer evening, so we ended up sitting on a bench at the harbour for ages just talking, looking at the boats, laughing at the crazy industry at Avonmouth, where the cranes look like dinosaurs. It was great. But the sun was dropping fast by the time we got up to pedal home. My friend was riding his all singing all dancing carbon electronic shifting road bike. It didn’t have a dynamo and we didn’t think we’d be out late so he’d brought no lights. We decided to ride home on the Pill path along the river Avon rather than risk the roads with no lights. Of course, my bike has dynamo lights, and wide enough tyres for the roughish track. So I rode slowly so my friend could use the beam of my headlight to see and inch his way along the track with his narrow tyres. It turned into a fun adventure, but it was a stark reminder of high performance cycling…