The YouTube algorithm recently spat out a video of Kaden Groves almost crashing on stage one of last year’s Tour de France. I saw it at the time, but my mind immediately got swamped with the rest of the Tour, and I totally forgot about it.
Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week
It happened like this: an EF Education rider went down in front of him. Groves hit the brakes, and his back wheel lifted a good foot off the ground. Instead of doing as physics demands and falling headlong over the bars, Groves covered a good three or four bike lengths with only the front wheel on the ground. Then he landed the rear, swerved, braked and lifted the back wheel off again, put it back down again and finally swerved again round the fallen rider.
At full speed it’s less than a second. In slow motion, it looks like poetry. My immediate response was uncharitable: “It’s only bike handling if you can do it twice. Otherwise it’s just luck,” I scoffed. It’s the kind of thing my old-school mate Bernard would say.
And it is true that when it comes to that sort of emergency bike handling, genius and panic can look identical. We’ve all managed miraculous saves that were just good fortune – your tyre hits a grippier bit of road mid-skid and you flip back upright, and that sort of thing. You usually sort genius from panic by looking at the outcome. If Groves had bounced the back wheel off the ground a couple of times, swerved, swerved again but then been felled by a loose bike and fallen off, we wouldn’t be talking about handling. It would just have been a crash with an element of comedy.
What spoils my attempt to scoff at Groves is that in truth I’m certain that faced with the same situation again, he could pull the same move again. Or, and this is worse, maybe he would produce a better move. In contrast, if I got 100 attempts at it, I would die every single time.
This is the problem with pro riders. They know what they’re doing. Cycling isn’t first and foremost a skill sport – you don’t become a pro by practising flashy manoeuvres from the age of three, but as a rider develops they almost invariably learn at least enough to survive.
I do have some talents. But they lack immediate wow-factor. “I can bunny hop a two-foot plank on my cross bike,” you brag. “Oh, yeah? Well given enough to eat, by this time tomorrow I can be almost 500 miles away,” I reply.
I have tried. I learned to rub my front wheel against the wheel I’m following in a team pursuit without automatically landing on my face, for example. But I can’t do it anymore. I learned to hop sideways over kerbs – an almost essential skill in any open road race. But I’ve forgotten that too, as I painfully found out a couple of years ago when I tried it on a Brompton. Unlike learning to ride a bike, learning to not crash a bike is something you forget effortlessly.
Other things I can’t do include flicking a dropped bottle out of the way with my front wheel, track standing, and a proper cyclo-cross mount. I can sort of do one, but only if I concentrate so hard my tongue sticks out, and I don’t think that counts.
My problem is I’m too old to learn any of this now. Do I wish I’d spent 1990 doing nothing but learning to track stand and hop a cyclo-cross plank? Of course I do. Do I think I’d miss the chemistry GCSE that I got instead? I mean, I know education is a wonderful thing, but I honestly know which I’d get more use out of these days.