Postcard from an old friend
— Sixteen years after I won several races on it, my old bike is still working hard for someone.”
Republished courtesy of: 8ch
Great photographer that our friend 8ch is, it took me a moment to realise what he’d captured.
He sent us the photo having passed it by chance last Friday evening: my old Ribble chained to a railing in Carfax, Oxford.
I won a few races on this bike in 1994 when I was still a kid. I lugged it around for years after I quit cycling and eventually, ahead of a big house move, I gave it to 8ch for whom it was probably much too small. Some time later, 8ch himself moved and he gave the bike away to a good home.
Fifteen or sixteen years later, it’s still out there doing its job. It looks to have all the same bits – even the dodgy old 105 brake and downtube shifter I put on temporarily after a crash and never got around to fixing. And yes, you can still see my name on the top tube.
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Who you gonna call?
Hello you, I'm Mike Padgett. I'm not a Princeton curator, Knoxville mayoral candidate, Kentuckian pastor or Arizona journalist, I just share the same name. In fact, I am a consultant working in user experience and information design.
I also enjoy travel, concerts, films and walking.
I'm originally from Yorkshire, England but nowadays I live in Belgium. My current favourite Belgian beer is Black Albert.
Shameless self-promotion
Over a year in the making, Dopeology.org is my latest personal project: a topology of doping in thirty years of European pro road cycling.
I collected information from thousands of sources, then I modelled and published it via a lightweight user interface.
August 23rd, 2010 at 16:39
This is such a nice little story. It’s just a shame your old bike can’t use the internet to look you up!
August 23rd, 2010 at 17:01
Hey Mike!
Great post…glad you like the the picture — I’ll keep my eyes open for it in the future and try to get a few more pictures of it.
I was at the Exposure exhibition at the Tate Modern this weekend looking at a video that was exploring eroticism and cars (at least I think it was, I got bored after a couple of minutes) and some guy, who looked like Michael Palin — well, he looked like someone famous, said that he could never understand the fuss about cars, bikes are far sexier.
That got me thinking…has there ever been a more perfect marriage of form and function in one design? Not in my world!
You’re right about the ‘old’! Chuckle!
8ch