The Adventures of Gordon part 5

The Messenger Olympics - London’s Calling

The dress code appears to be grunge. Or cycling grunge, if such a genre exists. This is cool cos, like a lot of people here, I went through grunge first time round. It’s easy: you just buy black clothes and keep wearing them for ages. The same goes for the bikes – mostly old stee l track frames that have been heavily customized by a combination of wear and tear and the owner’s own eye for fashion. Both riders and bikes are ‘distressed’ by hard days working on the roads and hard nights living it up.
It’s probably just as well that there is no dope control at the London messenger Olympics, as most of the participants would test positive for massive quantities of beer. Performance enhancing? Maybe not but it does seem to go with the territory.
The event is centred around a race across town – an Alleycat - from somewhere in London to somewhere else in London and from there to somewhere else in London and so on. Actual destinations are kept a secret by the organisers although you do occasionally wonder whether it’s a case of them playing their cards close to their chests or not having a clue themselves. Lets just say that they were very much keeping to their anarchistic principals. If NASA had countdowns like that we’d still be waiting for them to get to the moon.
  I had thought of entering, but didn’t know the town. London all looks the damn same to me. There was the option of following everybody else but that involves keeping up and some of those guys are not only seriously quick but utterly mental to boot. So, I stood well back, drank beer and took photos.
There was even a guy on a Plug – an excellent bike for this sort of racing, it seems. He’s called Hillbilly and was also at the trackstand contest the next day, where he stood still long enough for me to get him in focus.