There are many pleasures to be taken from a friend buying a new bike. There is telling them they bought the wrong model. There is picking it up with a theatrical grunt and saying, “Yeah, you’re right, it’s always as well to buy something robust.” And, for me anyway, most enjoyable of all is bluntly asking how much they paid for it.
The UK national sheepishness about matters financial means that most people would rather die than just tell me. For example, even my bold-as-brass mate Bernard was evasive last summer when he showed up with a new bike:
“Nice. How much did you pay for it?” I asked.
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“Well, I got a deal on it. You know, I’ve got a mate, and he… ah, he sorted me out,” he said.
“You’re a lucky man. Who’s the mate? What’s the deal?” I said.
“You wouldn’t know him, he’s in the trade. I don’t think he’d want me to tell you.”
Michael Hutchinson is a writer, journalist and former professional cyclist. As a rider he won multiple national titles in both Britain and Ireland and competed at the World Championships and the Commonwealth Games. He was a three-time Brompton folding-bike World Champion, and once hit 73 mph riding down a hill in Wales. His Dr Hutch columns appears in every issue of Cycling Weekly magazine.
I’ve heard lots of variations on this down the years. People arrive on bikes so new they have tiny flecks of polystyrene stuck to them, but which they claim to have bought at wild levels of discount as a used bike on Ebay. And you’d be surprised how many people I’ve known who have, “…a rich mate who buys a new bike every six months and sells the old ones cheap to get rid of them.”
The most dramatic claim of all is that they didn’t pay at all. I have one middle-aged acquaintance, whom I’ve known on and off for twenty years, who simply claims that manufacturers or distributors give him bikes, shoes, helmets – everything essentially. He describes himself as a brand ambassador. For what brand exactly he runs his embassy depends very much on what his most recent expensive acquisition is.
The evasiveness has become more pronounced in recent years. For a long time, well into my early years in the sport, it was unusual for a racing rider to “buy a new bike”. Instead their house or garage contained a constantly shifting collection of bits – bits bought, bits found, bits taken off one bike to make way for an upgrade, bits borrowed off a friend (usually me) and never returned.
These bits would arrange themselves into a bicycle, then as more bits appeared, a second bicycle would coalesce, then maybe a third. Only a small proportion of these bikes were ever bought per se – they just happened, as if they’d been assembled by mice in Shimano overalls. The biggest purchasing event would be a new frame, and back then frames were relatively cheap compared to the full build. Riders of a certain age aren’t just embarrassed about the price, they’re embarrassed they’ve “bought a bike” at all.
The other reason for the evasion is that we all want to feel we’re insiders. No one wants to be a mere consumer node in an activity that’s part of their identity. We want to know the inside line, have connections, be able to pull strings. And how can you possibly bill yourself as an insider if you have to hand over actual money to a faceless corporation just to lay your hands on a bicycle? I mean, aren’t we all brand ambassadors really?
I’ve come to really admire people who just go the other way completely. Earlier this year I asked someone how much their bike cost and was genuinely taken aback when he just said, “£5,000. Then I upgraded the wheels for another £2,000. Good value I think – what d’ya reckon?”
But honestly, my all-time no-bullshit, unembarrassed answer (and coming from a 40-year-old competitor) was, “I don’t know. My mum bought it for me, and she didn’t say how much it cost.”
