I was once on a Mavic press launch, somewhere in the French mountains. Our merry band of bike journalists was augmented by some of Mavic’s sponsored riders, including Jérôme Clementz and the flamboyant Frenchman Cédric Gracia. As we stopped for lunch at an outdoor café, I found myself sitting next to Cédric as he was talking about the stresses that wheels have to undergo.
Now, any form of spoked wheels, from three-speed paper-round-bike to road racer, are pretty flippin’ extraordinary. As a structure they can hold many times their own weight and are flexible, yet strong. They can absorb shocks from the trail, they can flex and take side hits, all while keeping air in the tyres they support. Really impressive at any speed.
However, it was only when listening in on Cédric’s conversation that I gained a new respect for the humble wheel (and their builders). Cédric was describing what wheels go through during a downhill race.
“You know how, when you’re going into a corner, full gas? As you hit the max gees in the corner, you can feel the bike load up, you can feel the tension in the whole frame. You can feel the wheels load up and the stress in the spokes and rims in the corner. Even the tyre knobs are stressed. You know?”
I had to admit that I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. I simply don’t ride that fast. I’ve seen riders (including Cédric) who can ride that fast, though, and there is an extra level of speed that a pro racer has that seems inaccessible to the rest of us mortals.
They ride a completely different course to us. They’re not bumping over the chunky rocks.
No, they’re launching here…
…and they’re touching down…
…here,
…just in time to throw the bike into a corner, converting all of that straight-line speed into a right angle vector using the power of pro rider magic.
And that’s often just the cross-country racers. It seems that the hours and hours spent training and racing on a bike convert into a subconscious one-ness with the machine that many of us mortal trail riders only get to feel occasionally, perhaps once a year at the end of the perfect summer ride.
On that perfect afternoon, on that perfect ride, looking ahead we can visualise how the next 50 metres of trail are going to play out. We can sense exactly where our tyres will go, where they’ll lighten up, where there’ll be a bit of predictable slide on the way to setting up the perfect corner and where we’ll leave that little puff of dust in the air on the sun-dappled exit: the only sign that we’ve been this way.
Just that one glimpse is enough to realise why pro riders dedicate hours of cold, wet trail time to training. To live in that elevated state of trail mastery must be an addictive thing.
And, as most racers ride on bikes and components that are the same as we can buy in the shops, it can’t just be the bike making them that fast. We can all get the same gear as them, we just need whatever dab of magic that they have and we’ll be able to keep up… right?
Spare a thought for those racers out there, right now, putting the miles in, ready for summer glory. But also spare a thought for their long-suffering wheels.