Every professional cycling team needs a headquarters — a place where it stores everything needed to keep 30 riders on the road. At the service course there’s everything you can imagine you’d need, from spare team-bus toilets to bed mattresses and bottles of water to physical therapy supplies. There are shelves full of jam, detergent, and chamois cream. Toothpaste, beer, and bleach. It’s a bit like a bike shop mixed up with a supermarket, without any registers. Take a look.
Wrapping fresh, new tape around your handlebars can make your bike look and feel like new. Here’s how to do it.
No two bicycle workshops are quite the same. Some are pristine, super-organized spaces run with a firm hand: everything has a place and everything is in its place. Others look like utter carnage, yet the resident mechanic seems to know where everything lives.
You cannot build a bike from scratch or service it properly without high-quality tools. This excerpt from Bike Mechanic celebrates the tools of the trade and their care.
The rules of the road are left at the start line, and the police wave you on to speeds unheard of in built-up areas. It’s pretty remarkable that there aren’t more accidents. Sometimes it’s a miracle that everyone gets home in one piece — near misses are inevitable.
The wheel change is a pressure situation; practice and a calm approach is essential. It’s the one time that a mechanic can really help his riders during a race. Good changes take a few seconds.
There is one thing that has always been and remains a part of the daily toil — bike washing.
A mistake by the pro team bike mechanic can cost the team the race
There was a time when adjusting a bike needed a lot of tools — even setting up a pair of brakes required hours of patience.