The cycling underclass, the pure tester.

I'm not talking about your occasional indulger, I'm talking about your typical flat course, fixed distance tester, socially inept and involved (to an obsession) in the aerodynamic arms race with his fellow old duffers.

This is a phenomena you only see in the UK, you won't see one of these guys riding a bike in the rest of Europe, they're a throwback to the days when road racing (which had become established in Britain in those days) was banned by the authorities, perhaps fuelling the current anti cycling brigade who also don't exist in the same numbers on the European continent. This was when these fixed distance events took a stronghold and courses were described/whispered to each other and read from a small black book, kept in an alpaca jacket. This avoided any untimely contact with the local coppers and you could say, "I'm just riding my bike" (exactly one minute behind another) and definetely not racing. The rule that you have to shout your number also came about from these far gone days, when you obviously couldn't wear an number on your back, but is still practiced now!
You'd have thought things had moved on, but sadly not, there is somehow still a demand for this type of racing on irrelevant dual carriageway courses, the kind of roads that cyclists avoid in their usual riding patterns, but testers flock to in order to get a traffic assisted time, even riding out into the lane to get as much drag as possible from passing juggernaughts. Testers will tell you this kind of race had bread a host of worldbeaters, naming Boardman, Obree, Beryl Burton, Sean Yates , MacIntyre etc, but if you look past this you'll realise that most good riders have at some point tried testing, but quickly moved on to other areas of the sport before they lost complete use of their brain.

The pure tester also carries with him a rather peculiar social ineptitude, unable to interact constructively with normal people, normal people are not particularly interested that a 53x13 equates to a 114.1 inch gear (I had to look that up, don't get the wrong idea), but pure testers can chat to each other for hours on the merits of one particular gear ratio. It must be an incredible surprise when they leave the cocoon of their race HQ, a layby on a semi-motorway in the middle of nowhere, then drift into the real world with all it's intricacies and those 'odd' people who have no interest in the aerodynamic advantages of not fitting a bike computer. These people are the nerds of the cycling world, but unlike nerds they rarely have the ability to operate in cyberspace, closing their social world into brief exchanges with other ageing social retards in a layby, wearing a lycra skinsuit one size too small, just picture this for a second, it's not a pretty sight.