Recently in Bikes Category

The bicycle is a piece of modern art. As a piece of design it's unrivalled in the 20th Century for its purity of form.

Lance Armstrong has been riding a who bunch of beautifully decalled bikes through his comeback season. Putting aside all other sentiments, the Damien Hirst decorated one is among the most beautiful pieces of bike art I have ever seen.

It's part of the stages project: Find out more about the Stages Project on the Trek Bikes site

Video interview via Hypebeast with KAWS, another one of the artists involved

KAWS - STAGES PORTRAITS BY LA MJC from La MJC on Vimeo.

I'm in Paris this weekend and really want to go and check out the Stages Exhibition at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin which runs until 8 August 2009.

Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin
76 rue de Turenne 75003 Paris
T : +33 (0)1 42 16 79 79
Gallery hours: Tue-Sat, 11am-7pm

I'll try and remember my camera and grab some pictures.

Rober Millar isn't just Great Britain's best climber and Grand tour finisher, he's where my love of road cycling springs from and an inimitable icon.

The piece below has been doing the rounds of cycling fora over the last couple of days. It features Millar, late in his career, revisiting his home town of Glasgow with a French television crew in tow. Unsurprisingly, he's word-perfect in French and idiomatic with it to boot. That is quite some skill.

I've been trying to piece together my earliest cycling memories because I've always struggled to remember where the seed was planted that has lead to what is now a 20-year obsession with the Tour De France. I think it begins with the 1989 Tour and Robert Millar's stage 10 victory.

I've come to this conclusion because of the relics as much as anything: a Peugeot Equipe boy's racer which belongs to my brother. He also has somewhere a pair of Z-team mitts and I'm certain he had the jersey as well. That year Millar rode for Z-Peugeot.

I can vaguely recall being glued to the Channel 4 coverage that year as that was the year I won a scholarship to Bradfield College, but really I was more fascinated by cricket at the time. My mum's Guyanese, cricket to West Indians being a matter as serious as cycling is to Italians.

But I was jealous of my brother's bike and kit, that much I can remember. Millar's was nothing like it but every child dreams a bit to covers the gaps in reality. We probably tried to imitate Millar on the hill near our house that led up the railway bridge, me on my Mark 2 Raleigh Burner, him on the Peugeot or his Mark 2 Night Burner.

As the years went by I used to look at the Peugeot in the garage and think about riding more. But I ended up with a god-awful Peugeot mountain bike on which the backend was so poorly built that the wheel pulled off to one side under any pressure on the pedals. That put me off riding for ages.

When I rediscovered cycling I rediscovered Millar as well, a guy so cool he featured in The Face magazine at a time when it was the hippest thing in the newsagent.

My girlfriend is currently in the process of trying to buy herself a road bike. Were she looking at men's bikes then she'd have a huge array of brands, equipment and parts to chose from. As she's a woman, she's forced to accept that the industry seems to believe there's no need to cater for half the population properly.

It's not that she hasn't been able to find something she likes. With her eye for style and a desire for a bike that she wants to look at and enjoy riding, she has settled on the Bianchi Dama Bianca She

Any excellent choice both on the choice of brand and appearance. The alternative was the Specialized Dolce Elite but some unknown reason they've chosen to change the paintjob from a clean white to the uninspiring and frankly a bit ugly nail varnish red (I'm assuming that's what they're attempting, although I've been told "If it was red that would be fine. But it's burgundy, who wants that?").

Beyond that the issues are multiple and incredibly frustrating for me, as someone trying to help her with the process using my knowledge, and her, as someone who just wants to buy a bike she likes and ride it.

Let's deal with her issues first, as these are the most important.

Do you have it in stock?

Bianchi seem to be having a bit of a nightmare getting this season's models into stores. Evans are going to phone once they've got the size and model in. Apparently they are planning only to bring in six (yes, 6, six) of the 53cm size into their shops in the current order. 4 are pre-sold, so if we want one we're going to have to be lucky and keep chasing them.

The rise of the euro

Since we first looked at the bike the euro has risen strongly against the pound. It's affecting the whole bike industry and it's why the bike has jumped from a price of around 675 GBP to 871 GBP. This is hitting everyone hard and seems to be coming without warning from retailers.

Complete lack of a site reviewing women's bikes

Pretty much any bike that goes to market for men will have a review somewhere online, no matter how incomplete or partisan it may be. I've done a few searches now in similar terms and come up with next to nothing. What really annoyed me was the almost complete absence of an English language site that focuses on cycling for women. There used to be shecycles.com but that now only redirects to RoadcyclingUK where I could only find review of a 2006 Specialized Dolce.

Arguably it's like there being no male equivalent of Net-a-porter for men but, as a wider point, it's the lack of choice that bugs me. There's probably five bikes to choose from at that price point for a woman compared to dozens for a man. How on earth are we meant to get more women cycling if they can't find a bike they like?

Lack of choice

I've already touched on this but my girlfriend has been reading this and pointed out the things I was perhaps ignoring: she just wants to buy a bike and be able to ride it, not worry about buying several hundred quid of modifications to make it right.

Off-the-peg is what the vast majority of hobby cyclists will buy as their first serious bike. If you want to go boutique brand/custom built it is going to cost you much more in any case and that is a big financial commitment if you are still trying to decide if cycling is for you.

The specification on lots of the bikes I looked over was lower than the male equivalent in some cases which could be down to the lack of volume to offset cost, or the premium on "women specific" design.

Now that I've got this bee in my bonnet I really want to hear from people in the bike industry, both manufacturers and retailers, as well as women cyclists about the hurdles that seem to exist to them getting into the sport and recreation of cycling.

Reflecting back on Cycle, the London bike show at Earls Court, I was reading Carlton Reid's thoughts over on quickrelease.tv and I think he's right about how the industry is missing a coming trend:

"Don't get me wrong, aspirational bikes are good and a show stuffed with stealth black hybrids and Dutch roadsters would turn off the techies, but if Joe Breeze is right, 'transportation bikes' will become a bigger category than the mountain bike was in the '80s and '90s. If so, the bike trade is in the pre-MTB phase of largely ignoring what's staring them in the face." - quickrelease.tv

But where I disagree is on what constitutes a "transportation bike". For me any bike has the potential to be a transportation bike rather than a specific style of bike, as seems to be the way they are presented at present. The brief that I would put together for one is less a feature of design as an ethic of use:

A transportation bike is any bicycle that can transport the rider and their goods safely between two points without requiring them to adapt their mode of clothing to do so.

Based on that I'd argue that the trend is a change in philosophy of use, rather than the specific type of bike in use. And coming back to Carlton's view that the industry is missing a trick this was most evident in the sector where I think there's scope for huge invention: accessories.

Looking around the show I didn't see many of those things that make life easy for people to use their bike for transportation everywhere: luggage, racks, clothing, lighting, mudguards. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough.

There were a few items which I think are already ahead of the curve. For example, the Knog lights which I'm thinking of investing in. They've got what I'd call a "non-proprietary fixing" which I think is their brilliant USP: no need for an annoying bracket that only works with one brand of light and which is a right bugger to replace if it goes missing or gets broken/stolen.

You can buy them from the London Cycle Chic Shop from as little as 7 GBP.

Malcolm Elliott and Stephen Roche, originally uploaded by leguape.

Malcolm Elliott and Stephen Roche having a chat. No I didn't ask for an autograph, although I swear Roche thought I was a nutter because I kept on going past them and muttering as I got a bit lost and was going round in circles.