France and Friday

In case you hadn’t gathered, I was away for a few days on what can only be described as a serious in-depth research trip just for you, the readers of this blog.

Ok, so that’s a bit of a lie, but I did definitely ride a bike and watch some Olympic cycling and even read about cycling.

The reading about cycling came first as I splashed out £9 in the airport on a copy of Privateer. The investment turned out to be well worth it and the intelligent, interesting and visually stunning magazine kept me interested through the holiday, er, research trip. I can thoroughly recommend the magazine and will be looking out for it again, even without a plane journey to get through. This was an excellent counterpoint to French radio in the car which seemed to consist of an entire playlist of about 8 songs, on constant repeat. Just because it’s in my head and so I’m sharing it with you, here is one of them:



There. Now you hopefully have the same earworm.

The bike riding took the form of some hired Trek 4-Series bikes to explore the salt-flats of the Camargue. As far as a review of this bike goes I feel that it could well be a solid budget performing mountain bike in a sensible size and with a good number fewer spacers under the stem to make the geometry a bit more aggressive. As it was, it worked fine for a few hours of flamingo watching and pottering in the sun and seemed to offer a nice lock-out on the forks, which could be ideal for the sort of tow-path riding I’m sure it will mostly see.

Finally, some news from around the last few days to keep you going into the weekend as normal service gets resumed next week.

Starting in London where you’ve probably seen this attractive video around promoting slightly whimsical cycling in the city:



There was also news from Boris of both a large-scale cycling festival to happen next year and an optimistic idea to build cycle lanes connected to the rail-routes over the city.

Neatly linking to the London theme, have a look at this view on how the Olympic mountain bike course was built from Wired magazine.

Like I planned this whole thing I can segue neatly to more Olympic related things as James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner man, gives his views on track cycling. In this piece he suggests an event where engineers are given free rein to design faster bikes. This is an event that already exists, and is, in fact, the human-powered land speed record.

The idea of engineering leads this twisting story to an iPhone app which might seem like it could only have criminal uses, but has actually been used to help recover a stolen bike.

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