Originally published in California Bicyclist, August 1991 Chances are, if you've yet to get stoked on tandems, then you're probably a closet smart aleck just waiting for the chance to thrill us with your wit and humor. We tandem riders have heard it all. But that wouldn't be good for the bikie image and promoting universal harmony, so I just bite my lip instead. It is absolutely inevitable that when I'm captaining and the stoker is a female, we hear something along the lines of the following. The retreads are out in force when we roll by on the tandem.
Sexism is bad enough without the women participating.
Not to mention that Elaine Mariolle is the stoker most commonly found sharing Mr. Moots with me. The laws of physics and the designers of tandems decreed that the heavier rider should captain and the lighter rider should stoke. No sexism, machoism, or mindless libido flapping going on, just plain old physics. In other words, the captain sets the line, the frame gets thrown to the side by the stoker's weight, then the rear wheel follows on a slightly different line. This effect, called stoker lag, increases exponentially as the stoker's weight goes up or as the tandem frame's torsional rigidity goes down.