There are days in cycling that are as dreaded as they are inevitable. In this example, I had secretly hoped that somehow Katie Archibald would keep racing forever. But last week she announced that she’s decided it is time to move on to other things.
This made me sad in a way that few rider retirements do. I’ve worked in and around cycling for a long time, but there are relatively few riders of whom I’d describe myself as a straightforward fan. Katie is one of them. I cared about her successes. I cared about her setbacks. I cared about how things were going for her.
On the track she looked like no one else, and I think that’s where my enthusiasm started. I tend to be a fan of riders who have power. Yes, I like watching someone whose career is built on tactical flare, or someone who sparkles erratically, lights up the race, then dies away. But when it comes to instinctive fandom, I want riders who can pile the watts high and pile them all day long.
>> Why Katie Archibald was such an exceptional athlete
(Although Katie had tactical acumen to burn – she was the first rider who pointed out to me that the team leading at a lap to go for a Madison sprint usually goes on to take the points. It doesn’t sound right, but next time you watch a Madison, watch for it and you’ll find she’s spot on.)
I’m also selfish with my fandom. I want value from my emotional investment. So another reason I liked watching Katie race is that she never let me down. Often she (and usually her team or Madison pair) won. But even if she didn’t, she was almost always in it till the end. Her disappointing races felt rare.
She’s aggravatingly talented in other ways. I interviewed her for a podcast a few years ago. When we got the video call up and running, she explained that the backdrop was Laura and Jason Kenny’s basement, because that’s where she was staying. (It was in the aftermath of Covid, so it made sense for a variety of reasons.)
Former time trial national champion from ten miles to 12 hours, Dr Hutch is a TV commentator, aero consultant and has written multiple books on cycling and sailing.
She ended up giving me a weird upside-down tour of the underside of the Kennys’ floor. “This is the spot where Laura always kicks off that pair of clumpy shoes she likes and wakes me up… this is just below their evil washing machine…” I had to pause the recording so I could stop laughing and straighten myself out. It gave me the idea for a reality TV show called something like “Stalker in the Basement”, but I suspect the only person who could have presented it was Katie and she’s much too intelligent to waste on that.
And of course she wrote a great column for Cycling Weekly for a couple of years – as an insight into being an Olympic athlete it was fabulous. As an insight into being Katie Archibald it was better.
Even in her departure she’s got class. I admire a rider who calmly decides it’s time to move on – so many good riders cling on to racing too long and find that when they finally stop they’ve been obsessed with the aerodynamic properties of their shoulders for so long that they have no coherent idea how to function as an adult member of society.
And even more, I admire someone who goes to find a real job outside sport and do something that’s actually useful. It’s fitting that Katie is abandoning us to be a nurse. I can’t imagine she’ll be anything other than brilliant at that too.
It’s going to feel odd to be a fan of a nurse I’ll almost certainly never meet in a professional capacity at a hospital I’ll never visit, but there we are. That’s what I’m going to be.
How To… Choose between the bike path and the road
Often there is a choice between using a road and using a parallel bike path – the latter almost always shared with pedestrians. And yes, it’s a choice. You can use either. Even if no one will ever believe you.
Which you use depends on many things: your speed, your journey, and most importantly, exactly which way you would prefer to end up in hospital.
The hazards on the shared path are multiple. There are pedestrians, children, dogs and, most of all, cars, either parked on the path or driven by people who feel that looking before driving over the path to a turning or driveway is an infringement of their civil liberties. Most of these risks you can mitigate by going slowly.
On the road, you can go faster and there’s really only one hazard. The problem is that it’s a big one. A curiosity of the shared path is that it makes the road beside it more dangerous because so many drivers think you should be on the path. They have hand gestures on the subject that they’re convinced repeal the relevant provisions of the Road Traffic Act and the Highway Code, and feel empowered to overtake at a range of 20 centimetres.
Of course you’ll also get quite a lot of abuse on the path from pedestrians who feel you should be on the road and have their own range of gestures. But at least the pedestrians are not usually quite so heavily armed.
Acts of Cycling Stupidity
I hear of a rider who went on holiday with a few non-cycling friends, taking his bike with him. Over dinner the first evening he treated everyone to a long speech about the toughness of cyclists, their laughter in the face of pain and suffering, and a full-length, “80 kph protected only by a bit of Lycra – footballers could learn a thing or two from us,” routine.
The following morning he went out for a ride. 10 km from their rented house his front wheel slipped on some gravel and down he went.
Suffering from a small bruise and some torn bar tape, he phoned his wife and requested rescue. “Can you bring some antiseptic, I’ve got a bit of a graze,” he said. “And maybe you don’t tell the others where you’re going?”