This article was first published in Rouleur Issue 139
It can begin in any number of ways. A careless touch of wheels, a solitary wet leaf on a shady corner, or a simple miscalculation of speed and terrain. What’s next is predictable – a jolting screech of disc brake rotors, instinctive screams, and the hollow thunk of carbon fibre striking and skidding across asphalt. Thirty years ago, it was different. Rim brakes made little noise, so the screaming came first. The impact was crunchy and metallic, sometimes producing a smattering of sparks. The aftermath, though, follows the same script. In the best case, the rider gets back up, as adrenaline masks the initial pain. Grasping their hip, they wobble in circles, quivering like a newborn foal, wincing and doubling over. Within seconds, a lone figure arrives out of nowhere, with a set of wheels in hand, assessing the damage and setting about getting their rider back on the bike.
Professional team mechanic is, by necessity, a callous profession. Responsible for the equipment, they leave the human element to the soigneurs. But it’s not easy. In the aftermath of a crash, the primary concern should be the health of the rider. Once confident of this, the flowchart is easy to follow.
Are they up? If so, get them back on the bike. But the bike’s broken! Is it an easy fix? If so, then fix it. If not, pull the spare off the team car. Then, get them back on the bike. Are they able to ride? Push them as they clip in. Do they begin riding? If yes, job complete. If they immediately crumple to the ground, they probably can’t ride the bike. Return the spare to the car roof. Reorganise your workspace in the car to make room for the hapless rider. Prepare to share your lunch.
This was my job, on and off, for close to two decades, spanning from 1985 to 2017, and given all the tasks of the job, this above scenario was a throughline. Everything else changed. Equipment, tools, races, team structures – they all evolved (or devolved in some instances).
The ceaseless march of innovation regarding how a racing bicycle works, leads many observers to assume that bikes have become more complex and, consequently, more difficult to maintain. When presented recently with this opinion, I began thinking. Sure, there are more gears and fewer cables. But what about the job of a team mechanic? In the 80s, we spent our winter camps turning 200 rims, 100 boxes of hubsets, and 40 lbs of spokes into wheels. Now, mechanics just have to find a recycling centre to drop off the boxes used to ship the complete wheels. A decade ago, our thumbs stayed smudged through the season from tubular glue. Today, tubeless tyres have kept cans of Mastik’One collecting dust on warehouse shelves.
Will a mechanic starting a career today have a tougher go of it than old-school mechanics? Can you even compare the two eras?
Rules and regulations
A peripheral factor to consider while comparing the past team mechanics to the present is the sport’s governing body, the UCI. The current appearance of racing bicycles has primarily been a result of the Lugano Charter, finalised a quarter-century ago. During the prior decade, road cycling design was the Wild West, and time trial equipment was the O.K. Corral.
In the 1970s, mechanics did what they could to increase performance. They stripped hubs and bottom brackets of grease and reinstalled loose bearings with heavy oil to reduce friction. They drilled out chainrings, downtube shifters, and brake levers to reduce weight. Mechanics even removed handlebar tape from the stem down to the brake lever, but this was more of a mental ploy, conveying to the rider that this effort was something special.
Low-position bullhorn-style handlebars became more common after the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. Then, in January 1984, Francesco Moser rode a machine to a new Hour Record, and the team mechanic community heaved a collective sigh of resignation. The frame was steel, but seemed contorted, as though a surrealist had designed it. The bullhorn bars remained, but the mismatched disc wheels grabbed headlines, and the mechanics braced for the next innovation.
Greg Lemond drew attention with his clip-on aero bars in the finale of the 1989 Tour. By the early 1990s, designers went berserk. Lotus, Pinarello, and Hotta solidly hit the mark with their monocoque, airfoil designs. Many didn’t. Originally designed for velodrome use, builders soon supplied modifications allowing for a rear derailleur and brakes. Sadly, they seemed to spare little thought for the cables required to activate them – mechanics spent hours fishing steel cables into tiny holes clogged with foam and debris. The shifting was seldom ideal, but good enough to get through a quick, flat effort.
By 2000, the UCI clamped down on all of it by formally approving the Lugano Charter, requiring all frames to be of the traditional “double-diamond” shape. And like that, the monocoque frames disappeared from road racing. Mechanics discarded the modified spokes they’d fashioned to clear foam from afterthought cable channels and soon, manufacturers incorporated internal cable guides that, while designed to ease the setup process, regularly became gunked up, blocked, or dislodged altogether.
It's a carbon world
Today, all frames in the pro peloton are carbon fibre. Starting in the 80s, steel frames – long the standard – gave way to titanium, lugged carbon fibre tubes, and aluminium. When building up these frames, preparation was essential. One had to hand-machine all the surfaces. Bottom brackets, headsets, derailleur hangers, bottle cage bosses, even the little adjustment screws in the rear dropouts – everything had to be smoothed out, or replacing parts down the road would become increasingly more difficult. Today, press-fit bearings eliminate the need to machine these various frame surfaces. Clearly, this would be considered an easier task for today’s team mechanic.
Tubular time
Long ago, mechanics built wheels. They could spend hours lacing up wheel after wheel. If they were solo, this could take days. Today, the mechanic simply unboxes the completed set, and after inspection, it’s ready. So, another plus to the current system.
But what of tyres? In the past, tubulars had to be mounted on dry rims and stretched for at least a day. Then, in a series of application methods, none of which matched another mechanic’s, we applied glue to both rim and tyre, and, at the expense of thumb skin and finger ligaments, we delicately willed the tyre – usually with a flourish of profanity and threats to the manufacturer – onto the rim. Today? Well, in fairness, I don’t know. The switch away from tubular tyres occurred after my last race at the 2017 UCI World Championships in Bergen, Norway. It appears there are some similar steps in the process; each seems to present its own challenges. So, we’ll call this one a tie – both designs leave the mechanics wondering what they did to make the designers hate them so much.
The big componentry change
The parts that make the bike move and stop are where the lasting innovation has occurred over the last four decades. We started the 1980s with six-speed freewheels, downtube friction shifters, and rim brakes that could elicit prayers in wet conditions.
Now, they run 12-speed cassettes, wireless electronic shifting, and disc brakes that not only offer safer stopping ability, but often announce to all when a rider is applying them.
More gear choices and more effective braking are improvements. These systems should require complex knowledge for those who maintain the equipment. But there are tradeoffs. Once, it was simply a process of replacing old cables with new, springier ones to improve the gear shifting. Now, that link is no more. With wireless shifting the norm, replacing gear cables through the brake hoods and housing is a thing of the past. Hydraulic disc brakes, being a closed system, also negate regular cable replacement.
There are, of course, additional processes that make up for these extinct tasks. If you mentioned “software update” in the 1980s, a soigneur would likely appear with a tub of chamois cream. Now, updates to the system are a regular task. As well, replacing hydraulic fluid, though not a regular process, presents novel challenges that might baffle an old-school mechanic.
Park Tool’s Director of Education, Calvin Jones, sees components now as a plug-and-play affair.
“We were better mechanics,” he contends. “We could fix things. We had to fix things…[today] no one is taking apart the axis derailleur.”
Greg Miller, a mechanic with 25 years of experience in professional cycling, mainly in Europe with Mavic neutral support at Grand Tours and Classics, views the modern equipment as “finicky”, while suggesting that the older designs were such that “nothing went wrong with the derailleur unless you crashed and bent it. Then you’d just grab it with your hands and straighten out the dropout. In ten seconds, you’re good to go.”
Today, this event would require a bike change.
Inside the job itself
What about the team structure? How has that changed over the years? I worked alongside Kevin Grove in the late 1990s; he with one middle-tier US team, me on another. Often, we set up shop in close proximity at race hotels. During the 1997 Vuelta a Asturias, we even shared a Spanish mechanic named Abel. My team director, Ed, hired Abel to assist me, but, since Kevin and I were the sole mechanics for our teams, and with nine riders, morning prep, team car, and evening prep duties all falling to one person, Abel happily split his time between us as race events warranted.
Now, Kevin is approaching three decades on the WorldTour. He’s currently the performance time trial mechanic for Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe – a notable job title. Not long ago, teams completed the Tour de France with three mechanics who did it all. They washed bikes and cars, repaired equipment, glued tyres, transferred gear between hotels, and jumped out of the follow vehicle wherever necessary. Surely, at some distant time, teams did it with even fewer hands.
During this year’s Tour, Kevin travelled to each time trial a day or two ahead and attended to the riders’ needs. He then returned to the team’s service course near Munich to clean and service each bike before returning for the next race against the clock.
Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe employs 14-15 full-time mechanics through the season, and four or five of them worked this year’s Tour. Other teams cycle staff throughout the race to avoid burnout.
In addition to staffing progress, other aspects have improved life for mechanics. Geoff Brown, National Team Mechanic for Canada Cycling, explained how GPS technology helped. He recalled how during an early-season US Postal Service Team training camp in 1997, the new handlebar and stem sponsor underestimated the first delivery of product so there wasn’t enough to go round each rider. This meant mechanics had to make a visit to the local distributor in Los Angeles which was a three-hour drive to a town not well known for its reliable infrastructure and ease of travel to remedy the situation. It wasn’t a simple task.
“We jumped into the team car,” Geoff recounted, “and drove to wherever it was in LA. I’d never been before… I had handwritten directions!”
What's the verdict?
Ultimately, we can express the pro team mechanic trajectory as a mountainous stage profile. The start, representing the 1970s, is a gradual yet steady run-in towards the mid-1980s, where it dips slightly lower with the advent of indexed shifting and sealed bottom brackets. There is then a steady climb to the mid-1990s as machines become more complex, mechanics are building imaginative wheels within the regulations, and team staffing remains low. The peak hits right at the turn of the millennium as regulations arrest some of the difficulty. From that point, the profile steadily descends as teams expand, equipment advances to the current plug-and-play model, and responsibilities spread across more mechanics. At the end, we’re slightly below the start ramp. Old school mechanics win and will continue saying, “In my day…”
Until the mid-1990s, a small cadre of mechanics tended the equipment, often alone, and a persistent myth began. George Noyes, one of the early mechanics to travel to Europe and eventually settle there, recalled an impression that stayed with many of us. “I thought you had to stand up all night to be a good mechanic.”
The bigger picture
One morning, in 2012, I sat in an airport lounge in Amsterdam. Enjoying a rare perk that allowed me such luxury, I sipped a Bloody Mary as I anticipated all my projects at home. A psychiatrist from Boston eventually struck up a conversation. Curious about my job, she asked, and I regaled. I recalled a crash during the Glava Tour of Norway, which I’d just finished, and a crash during an early stage. The location was a dip in the road where the ground on both sides fell into deep ditches, flooded from recent rainfall.
I approached at full gallop, a wheel in each hand, unsure of what I would find or who I would help. Soon, I saw Daniel Colli crawling up the embankment, his bike in one hand, clawing at the grass with the other. He was remarkably unscathed. He grinned, shrugged his shoulders, and with a quick check of the brakes and wheels, he was off.
It was when I turned around that I discovered the carnage I’d blithely passed through seconds before. Various moans wafted from both ditches. On one side, a fractured arm. On the other, a motionless figure, half-submerged, his silence more jarring than the screams. Medics had finally arrived and attended to the most seriously injured, and the broken arm tended by his mechanic didn’t even make the cut.
I made my way back to the car, and with a hearty “Andiamo, Tom!” Massimo hit the gas, and we continued.
“Does that happen often?” she asked. “I guess. Yeah.”
“Have you ever been diagnosed with PTSD?” she replied. She soon conceded that she specialised in such treatment with war veterans and explained that PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] can emerge from accumulated traumatic events.
I uncomfortably waved away such an idea, and we continued chatting over free Bloody Marys until we parted ways to find our gates.
But I thought about it some more. I remembered another neutral service job I’d done when a rider, crumpled beside a guardrail in Massachusetts, asked if he was good to get back on his bike. I suggested he sit tight, as most of his teeth lay scattered around him, and then frantically flagged down a passing medical car.
This repeated dance is the throughline that bonds us all. Bikes are easy, or they are difficult. Tyres pop on with little fuss, or resist all your struggles. Yet, all mechanics throughout time see the immediate results of crashes. The rider suffers crashes physically. Mechanics compile them emotionally. We can’t show it, but we do care about our riders. Over time, each crash builds up in the mind. For me, it’s not a collective haunting. Rather, it’s a library from which my subconscious periodically checks out a book to remind me of priorities and to reduce all those engineering riddles to a mere inconvenience.
