.photo copyright anne cutler - these photos will be available in the 2009 jacquie phelan thrift shop fashion queen calendar

Cycling legend Jacquie Phelan joins cc (we must have made an impression on her recent trip to Edinburgh) and in her first article for us looks at Giant's claim to have invented the compact geometry road frame, something which Charlie Cunningham might contest, but being too nice to do so Jacquie does so on behalf of her equally legendary other half.

* * *

Ten years after the ‘invention’ of the compact road frame – and twenty five years after I raced my slopey Cunningham road bike at the Tour of Texas – Bicycle Retailer (BRAIN) says Giant Bicycle Co. “introduced the world to compact geometry.”

Here at Cunningham Applied Grandiosity, we plead to differ. We do so every decade or so.

The Oct. 1 2000 issue of BRAIN claimed “Compact Road Bikes Go Against Road Tradition.” We know about ‘tradition’. Charlie’s bikes nodded politely in that direction, but Preferred Not To. Much was made of the hazards of aluminum frames before the fat unpainted tubes became acceptable. Well, maybe not ‘unpainted’…

Being the official spokesperson for the Polite One, I decided, rather than write another letter to the magazine (and cc. it to Giant) to let it all blog out. Commercial bluster needs pruning, scales need to be zero’d, stories need to be repeated.

This one is the old yarn about racing around on the least beautiful bike in the peloton. It was in 1982. I get shivers thinking about how strong and stupid I was then, how little I knew about bike handling, and how to handle officials (being the coach’s pet mattered as much as one’s VO2 max), etc. Gunning for a slot on the L.A. Olympic team, I elbowed my way into as many serious races as chutzpah allowed, among them the 82 and 84 Tour of Texas. Talentwise, I was unpolished, but my aluminum road bike attracted a lot of attention.