Even for the most dedicated hardware freak, the choice of cycles on the market these days is bewildering. A good selection will be on show at the Cycle Show at Earls Court, London this weekend. From the mass market to the niche boutique, every style of bicycle and accessory will be on display in an extraordinary cornucopia of carbon fibre, aluminium, steel, titanium, magnesium, scandium and probably some more alloys I've never heard of. If it can be fashioned into hollow tubes to construct a bike frame, someone will have tried it.
From the sheer array, it's obvious there is a boom in top-end road bikes: there have never been so many, nor so good. Two or three grand will buy you a replica bike from the pro peloton; two or three thousand more will purchase a machine that would make a world champion green with envy.
At this price, there are two factors: one is weight. In 2000, the sport's international governing body decreed a minimum mass of 6.8kg (15lb), since only silly money could create a lighter bike, probably at the risk of compromising safety. Within a couple of years, most teams were, like formula one motor-racing squads, having to attach lead weights to their machines to keep them legal. Now you can buy a technically non-compliant bike in most high-street shops, and at the bike shows you'll see prototypes that tip the scales at about half the regulation amount. That is a bicycle you could comfortably pick up with the tip of one extended finger.
The other factor is brand exclusivity. The best of the major marques - the Treks, Specializeds, Giants et al - are excellent bikes: the fastest, most efficient human-powered vehicles in history. Why look further? There are two decent reasons: the big manufacturers can claim economies of scale, but arguably, if you take your custom to an artisan operation, you are buying a bike where more of the price you pay has gone into making the bike than into subsidising the marketing campaign. You are also more likely to be offered a custom-made option. Instead of buying an off-the-peg bike in a standard size, you can buy one not yet made until your particulars have been fed through a computer program that will enable the frame-builder to size the bike precisely for you (and it doesn't have to cost a fortune; prices start at a few hundred). It's like having a tailored suit made, or a hand-stitched dress.
There is, of course, a snob value and perhaps an element of bogus mystique to the bespoke bike. But there is something special about riding a bicycle that has been designed around you. All-day comfort and the banishment of backache are the practical side. More transcendently, there is a sense of dynamic harmony, a blurring of boundaries between where you end and the bike begins.
Listening to a radio documentary about musical instruments last week, I heard a soloist asked to compare a perfectly good modern violin with a Stradivarius. She likened the difference to a painter being able to use a palette of hundreds of colours, instead of, say, six: a vastly richer, more textured experience. It's the same with a hand-crafted bicycle: what you get may not, in a technical, performance-oriented sense, be as good as the off-the-shelf machine, but it will have a personality the mass-produced item can never match. That bike is not just a ride; it's a relationship.
