The Velominati - The Hardmen: Legends and Lessons from the Cycling Gods

The Hour Record is distinct from other Cycling events by being raced over a defined time, rather than distance. In a normal bicycle race the objective is to cover the prescribed route in the least possible amount of time. There is a not inconsiderable psychological benefit to this, and in fact it can drive us to push harder, especially when climbing. Upon sight of the crest of the hill we can tick down the gears and push harder just to make the suffering stop that much sooner.

The Hour Record is immune to such tactics. Suffer as much as you can, for an hour. No more, no less. Sixty minutes. And then count the laps to see how far you went. And thats not even the best part. Were not talking here about an undulating course where you gain speed on a descent, to carry over the next rise and ease the strain in the legs even if for a brief moment. We are talking about an hour on a velodromes uncompromising track. The black line on the track represents a virtually flat oval along which the distance of the lap is measured. The rider must adhere as closely as possible to this line or sacrifice unmeasured distance; round and round for an hour, with a lap typically consumed in less than thirty seconds quite a lot less if you are harbouring any hopes of breaking the record. Based on the size of the velodrome and your target distance, challenging the record means around 120 laps or more, anticlockwise; hopefully you are better at turning left than Derek Zoolander.

And so it was writ: none shall look better suffering than The Prophet.

Before their hour attempt, the rider will have determined how far they think they are capable of going, and will have scienced the shit out of things like average lap split times and even a specific lap-by-lap schedule they want to keep to, in order to have even a hope of meeting their goal. The other painful element here is that the rider is on a track bike, not a typical road bike; the gear is fixed, so there is no changing to an easier one when you realise youre fucked. The choice is final, and you wont know how good or bad your choice was until you are committed, much like that time your cousin double-dog-dared you to jump the water pipe on your skateboard.

For a hundie-odd laps, fighting dizziness and boredom are the least of your worries. Your biggest worries centre on the fact that, with every turn of the pedals, you are breaking down the fibres of your muscles one by one, leaving less functional muscle mass available for the next revolution of the pedals. Assuming one hundred revolutions per minute mostly because it makes the arithmetic simple and everyone hates complicated arithmetic, thats 60,000 revolutions of the pedals where your muscles are physically less capable of sustaining the required power than they could the revolution before. But still you have to maintain and sustain the effort; pacing is crucial.

There is a horrible joke about a young and old steer standing on a hilltop, looking down on a bunch of cows grazing in the valley below. The young steer says to the old, Lets run down there and fuck one of those cows! The old steer says, What say we walk down there and fuck all of em. The Hour is all about being the old steer.

Eddy Merckx was the Greatest Cyclist of All Time. Full Stop. Before Merckx set fixed wheel to track, the Hour Record had been broken twenty-three times, and by the most prestigious names in the sport. Fausto Coppi and Jacques Anquetil both held it; each was regarded as the greatest rouleur of his generation. But the man who first held and popularised the Hour Record was Henri Desgrange, who went on to found and organise the Tour de France. Henri was obsessed with figuring out ways to make Cyclists suffer more, to find better ways to make riding bicycles a test of human capability. And a long string of Cyclists submitted to this test, in search of an unbeatable Hour Record. At the time of Eddys 1972 attempt that record had been set by the Dane Ole Ritter in 1968, with a distance of 48.653 km.

Setting an Hour Record necessitates going out with guns blazing but also being as consistent as possible in your lap times, due to the aforementioned malicious muscle-fibre-breakdown effect. Eddy, however, had other plans. There are minor records for the fastest 10 and 20 km efforts, which are unrelated to The Hour, but which he felt compelled to take on along the way, due to his insatiable appetite for winning things. This meant starting his effort like the young steer, but finishing like the old.

Merckx utilised every aerodynamic advantage available to him, including a special silk one-piece skinsuit and a custom frame built by Ernesto Colnago. He had his drivetrain and handlebars drilled out to remove all unnecessary material in an effort to make the bike as light as possible. His handlebar stem was the first ever made of titanium, a material poorly understood at the time; inspection of the stem reveals it was cut from a solid billet of metal and filed by hand to give the shape of a traditional stem. The file marks remain visible.

Merckx, of course, set a new Hour Record of 49.43 km, but the effort meant he had to be carried from his bicycle. After he had composed himself, he said:

Throughout this hour, the longest of my career, I never knew a moment of weakness, but the effort needed was never easy. Its not possible to compare the Hour with a time trial on the road. Here its not possible to ease up, to change gears or the rhythm. The Hour Record demands a total effort, permanent and intense, one thats not possible to compare to any other. I will never try it again.

He later said the effort took a year off his career; Im only glad it was from the tail end and not the front end or middle bit.

A full eight years later it took one Francesco Moser with an ultra-high-tech aerodynamic bike to break Merckxs record. Mosers record stood until the 1990s, when Chris Boardman and Graeme Obree traded the record, using ever-evolving time trial positions. The technology was advancing more quickly than the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale) had a stomach for, so it issued new regulations that prohibited all but the most basic Going a step further (back), in 1997 they modified the Hour regulations to stipulate that all future attempts be made on a Merckx-style bicycle: round tubes, spoked wheels and drop handlebars. All prior records set using aerodynamic equipment were reclassified as Best Human Effort distances, and Merckxs 49.43 km mark was re-established as the official Hour Record.

The first rider to attempt this new (old) Merckx-style record was Chris Boardman, who broke it by a whopping 10 metres. Boardman was the consummate bicycle geek, going so far as to work with Royce, a small component manufacturer based in England, not only to build him a near-frictionless set of hubs and bottom bracket but also to develop special spoke nipples that were recessed into the rims. Boardman was delighted with this innovation and convinced of the aerodynamic gain it would bring. (Years later he took the bike to a wind tunnel where, ironically, it was determined that his aero nipples provided virtually no measurable advantage, apart from the obvious mental one.)

In 2015 the UCI finally came to its senses and updated the regulations to allow the kind of aero machinery universally used in time trials; this set off a flurry of attempts which culminated with Bradley Wigginss monster distance of 54.5 km at the Lea Valley velodrome, track-cycling home of the London Olympics in 2012.