On yer bike! Freud and middle-aged men in Lycra
The ever-present fear of ridicule among cycling’s weekend warriors tells us a thing or two about human nature
I learnt this week that Sotheby’s has entered the market for high-end road bicycles. So I called Paul Redmayne, senior vice-president for luxury private sales at the auction house, who told me that the first bike they’d sold, in 2023, was a Colnago C68, “wrapped in gold leaf with a diamond embedded in the top tube”. Last year, a machine ridden during the Tour de France by the eventual winner, Tadej Pogačar, sold at auction at Sotheby’s for $190,500.
This got me thinking not only about Thorstein Veblen’s account of conspicuous consumption and the rise of the leisure class, many denizens of which today have swapped the golf course for the group ride, but also about his contemporary Sigmund Freud’s theory of the narcissism of minor differences.
If you ever want a demonstration of both ideas, head on a Saturday morning to the 9W Market, a café on the west bank of the Hudson, 20 miles or so north of New York City. The bicycle racks will be full and the place will be crawling with middle-aged men in Lycra — or “mamils” — on their mid-ride coffee-and-cake break. Completing the 100km loop from Manhattan to the little town of Nyack and back, with a refuelling stop in the Palisades, is a rite of passage for any New York-based amateur road cyclist worth his or her salt.
Now, to the uninitiated, one “mamil” — defined by the dictionary as “a very keen road cyclist, typically one who rides an expensive bike and wears the type of clothing associated with professional cyclists” — looks very much like another. But to members of the species themselves (and I am one), our differences are as important as our similarities.
These are expressed in the kinds of bikes we ride (carbon fibre frames, naturally, but with what kind of chainset or gear ratio?), the kit we wear (the choice between Rapha, say, and Pas Normal Studios is heavily freighted) and the way we wear it (heaven forbid that you should inadvertently place the arms of your special cycling glasses under your helmet straps).
As Freud put it in Civilization and Its Discontents, “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other”. Actual feuding on the group ride might be rare, but the fear of ridicule is ever present.
On my last visit to the 9W Market, as I clattered towards the coffee counter in my cleats (anyone cycling in flat shoes or trainers immediately identifies themselves as a hopeless neophyte), I agonised about the height of my socks (white, obviously). Were they long enough to avoid the disdain that comes the way of anyone wearing ankle socks or, perish the thought, “no-show” socks that expose the ankle?
Last year, Pogačar’s Slovenian compatriot, Primož Roglič, caused consternation in the two-wheeled fraternity when he rode stage 12 of the Tour in no-show socks barely visible above his cycling shoes (again, white).
The uproar was partly a matter of aesthetics and partly an expression of professional cycling’s obsession with aerodynamics and the science of “marginal gains”. Wind-tunnel experiments have shown that wearing specially designed “aero” socks reduces drag.
You might object that such considerations are irrelevant to the fiftysomething recreational rider for whom a 100km ride at the end of a long working week might be at the outer limits of their endurance capacities. And you’d be right.
But splashing out on a bike that once belonged to a member of the pro peloton is tempting if you can afford it. Redmayne tells me that Sotheby’s is also now offering clients a Tour de France “experience” in which you embed with one of the teams and receive a custom-made bike and kit. The cost? “Six figures.”