I’m having to tell people I’m still a cyclist despite the fact it’s not cool anymore

Someone at my friend Bernard’s place of work recently pointed out to him that the bike shop round the corner had closed. “I suppose cycling’s just not cool anymore,” she said. “I heard that someone was going to open a paddleboard shop. I think that’s more what cool people are doing these days.” The story made me laugh. Taking a passive-aggressive swipe at Bernard for not being cool is like taunting him for the stodginess of his Victoria sponge – it just makes it clear that you’ve confused him with someone else. And it put the image of Bernard on a paddleboard in my head. He’s not a buoyant personality. He’d end up punching a dolphin, or something.

Michael Hutchinson

Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week

What isn’t funny is the closure of the bike shop. It was a nice, independent shop – I used to call in to borrow the odd tool, thus depriving them of the few pounds they’d have made if they insisted on doing the job themselves.

I suppose I hoped that maybe I’d write about borrowing the tool and how I’d used it to gouge a hole in my frame’s paintwork, that this would help the whole cycling economy, that cycling would go from strength to strength and they’d get their profit back that way. It didn’t work. The shop’s gone, and I’ve still got their rear-mech hanger alignment tool. There are similar sad sinkings in the worlds of distributors, bike clothing, and cycling cafes.

It seems like only yesterday that I was trying to gain a certain amount of credibility by saying I was a cyclist before it was cool. Now I’m having to tell people I’m still a cyclist despite the fact it’s not cool anymore, and it’s not nearly as satisfying a brag.

And now we’re losing the ITV coverage of the Tour from 2026. We’re not even cool enough for the advertisers of donkey sanctuaries, funeral planners and people who make baths with doors in the side.

But in truth I’m not sure that we were ever really cool. Cycling, in the UK at any rate, certainly had an upswing in visibility through the 2010s and into the pandemic years, but that’s a different thing. There were some high-profile, charismatic athletes that seemed to define a new sport for a new generation of fans and riders. People who knew you were a bike rider suddenly wanted to ask you about helmet aerodynamics and how Tour de France riders peed. There’s less of that now.

What matters to me, though, is that there are a lot more of us now than there were before. Many, probably most, of the newcomers have stayed. If you think cycling isn’t as high-profile as it was a few years ago, that’s nothing compared to how subterranean in profile it was all the way back in the before-times. We weren’t so much a sport as a rumour. We may be moaning about it now, but there are an awful lot more of us to do the moaning. That’s progress.

I still hate the post-pandemic ‘correction’ in the market that’s pushed otherwise viable businesses to the wall. And it will be a real shame if we lose free-to-air TV coverage – I’m not sure it prompted quite as many people to take up cycling as is commonly supposed or we’d all have a donkey in the garden and a slot booked at the crematorium too, but for a lot of fans it was a treasured summer communion.

If you were into cycling because it was cool, and you’ve now abandoned us to go paddleboarding, well, I’m sorry to see you go. I’ll just point out that you can get a puncture in an inflatable paddleboard too, and it’s really hard to find somewhere nice to stand while you fix it.