On day 34 of coronavirus confinement, Rohan Dennis snapped and hurled himself into the forbidden countryside in a Porsche 964.
His Instagram showed a view from the driver’s seat in some lay-by near Girona, the great engine at tickover and the petrol almost empty. It looked like he had no idea where to go next. By that evening, he had deleted his social-media accounts. (They’ve since returned, including the naughty picture.)
On day 34 of my own confinement, I decided to launch Bicycling in the Age of Shopping.
I had thought about this for a while but never pinned down the details. I still haven’t – not even close – but I have a flexible title and some pent-up enthusiasm.
The goal is to identify what matters in cycling by a process of elimination. I shall pitch style against fashion, the personal against the corporate, mechanical rigour against wishful thinking, and the full weight of history against any fad I disdain.
Joining me in this vague venture, from issue #2, is the advice columnist Cecil A Throckmorton. And from time to time I may enlist the help of others as interviewees, photographers, subject-matter experts, propagandists, or worse. It could be you.
Jobst Brandt
Jobst Brandt (1935–2015) was the closest thing I had to a hero. Without him, this newsletter would certainly not exist.
An underground legend in California, he rode far and hard on rough roads before gravel had a label, dragged local racers over the Sierra Nevada mountains on leg-breaking ‘death rides’, and toured the European Alps each summer for half a century.
Brandt – although the internet prefers Jobst, pronounced yopes by English speakers – had a German-American economist father and retained a fiercely economical outlook throughout his life, living in a small house at 351 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto and donating generously to conservationist causes.
Brandt read mechanical engineering at Stanford and did his military service in Germany, where he bought a Porsche 356 to supplement his bicycle. The English-language handbook was a mess, so Brandt told Porsche he could fix the translation. Porsche agreed and after that first job moved him onto race-car design and later front-suspension design for production cars. Back in the US he eventually settled into a long career at Hewlett-Packard, thriving on ‘The HP Way’. Among his achievements were important contributions to hard disk drives.
But he loved bicycles most of all, and for his friend Bud Hoffacker of Avocet he designed cyclocomputers, a shoe that could bend up for walking but not down while pedalling (US Patent 4,547,983), and smooth-tread tyres – mostly for free as a hobby. Even the company name, Avocet, was a reference to Brandt’s fascination with birds. Avocet computers were hot stuff in the 1980s, and Brandt designed their innovative user interface and circuit-board logic, plus the signal-smoothing algorithm for their barometric altimeter.
Today’s Ritchey logo is Brandt’s work, too. In fact, Brandt had an outsized influence on many people in the San Fransisco Bay Area cycling scene, and for many reasons. He was the archetypal Renaissance man.
From 1989 to 2011 Brandt amassed a veritable encyclopaedia of cycling in thousands of Usenet posts. Many are still accessible via Google Groups, and I intend to bring the best of them to a new audience with this newsletter.
Brandt kept doing the huge rides of his youth into old age, albeit slower each year as a multitude of broken bones and heart problems took their toll. But he was still blasting along in the 50 × 15 gear at the age of 74.
On a solo ride in January 2011 to celebrate his 76th birthday, Brandt crashed for the last time. Reports say he suffered a brain injury in the accident or later in hospital. He never rode again although he prepared his bicycle for that possibility. He never wrote again on the internet. His cycling career was finally over.
Eighteen months later, Bill Bushnell took this poignant photo of Brandt at home, a downed bird with only his Gavia Pass poster on the wall to remember what was.
I have seen even worse pictures of his decline, but I prefer to remember the Brandt of Ray Hosler’s calendar:
This is not a love letter. Brandt was an ass about some things, slow to accept defeat or apologise, grievously inflexible, and no less (or more) sexist than typical male engineers of his generation. But he had a profound influence on my thinking about bicycling and beyond.
This Tuesday will be the fifth anniversary of his death.
Frank J Urry
These words appear on pages 36–37 of Salute to Cycling, a booklet published in 1956 by Phillips Cycles Limited, once the second-largest bicycle manufacturer in Britain (after Raleigh):
Some time ago I stood on the gallery of Earls Court and saw the colourful display of hundreds of bicycles, and on closer inspection came to the conclusion the trade had done a fine and very attractive job in the decoration of their wares. No wonder the young folk fall for the bright coatings and think little or nothing of the possible appearance of their property after a year of wear and tear—and weather. Colour and plating do not make a bicycle run easily or smoothly, it merely adds attraction to an attractive article and undoubtedly assists in the selling of it. Any maker or dealer will confirm that statement. But, and again I am giving my own opinion, the proof of any make of machine is in the riding, and the colour of its skin adds nothing to its running values. If the tinted bicycle with its attractive panels of paint and plate is to retain its smart appearance, it will involve you, or someone, in frequent cleaning and polishing. By this you will realise that while I admire some of the colour combinations, I prefer all black, preferably rubberised enamel, for the finish of my own machines.
It lasts in respectability; a simple wipe over restores the major portion of its neatness after a period of winter neglect, and as most bicycles are more neglected than preserved, including mine, and if you prefer simplicity to fashion, then the all black finish is to be recommended.
Samuel Dilworth
That’s me. I don’t belong in this company, but it’s my newsletter.
I’m a 38-year-old British-Irish-Finnish writer living in Paris, France. A broken shoulder and the coronavirus pandemic have conspired to keep me out of the saddle for months, but things are looking up.
By way of introduction, I plan to share details of my bicycle rebuild in issues to come, with a focus on the reasons behind my choice of components. You can tell a lot about someone from their bicycle. Urry would approve of the colour.
Until then, as Brandt often said:
Ride bike!
Samuel