Cycling while black
By: Simon Usborne
Tags: Tour De France, Cycling, BlackLivesMatter, Olympics

The bicycle has for decades mobilised minorities, yet cycling today is a startlingly white sport. Mani Arthur is at the forefront of a movement for change.

When Mani Arthur was seven, his father bought him a bike for his birthday. It was pink and white. In Kumasi, a city in the southern Ashanti region of Ghana, few of Mani’s friends had wheels of their own. Older boys began paying Arthur to use his bike. More than pocket money and popularity, it gave Arthur freedom. He would ride to the local football pitch, to the shops and to the dusty trails at the city’s edge.

“I used to absolutely adore that bike,” Arthur told me. “It gave me independence I wouldn’t have had. It gave me the freedom to explore.”

Arthur moved to London when he was 10. His father was a security guard. His mother worked as a cleaner for Haringey council. Football quickly became the boy’s new obsession. Apart from a brief fling with a BMX bike, memories of cycling began to fade.

Much later, Arthur began riding to work in Westminster, where he had become a civil servant. In 2011, he joined three colleagues on a charity ride from London to Copenhagen. Arthur, then in his mid 20s, found the going hard. But the ride was a reawakening. “It brought those childhood memories back and just made me feel, like… the awe of the world and that sense of adventure,” he recalled.

In 2012, Arthur watched Bradley Wiggins become the first British rider to win the Tour de France. He marvelled at the victories of Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton, who were among a dozen British gold medallists on the track and road at the Olympic Games in London.

Britain was waking up to its potential as a cycling nation. Arthur wanted to be part of it. He joined Strava, the popular fitness app, and began trying to race against his own personal best times on sections of his commute. He got some budget Lycra and cycling shoes and found a cycling club in North London. One Sunday morning in 2013, he joined a club ride in the quiet lanes of Hertfordshire.

Arthur was not surprised to find himself as the only black cyclist in the group. It had not escaped his notice that every victorious British cyclist in London had been white. It was the same in Rio in 2016, where British teams in more than half of sports were all-white, including all 26 cyclists. Kye Whyte, a BMX racer from Peckham in South London, is the only non-white rider in Team GB’s cycling squad for the Tokyo Olympics, which start next month.

It took 98 editions and more than a century of the Tour de France, meanwhile, for a single black rider — Yohann Gène, who was born in Guadeloupe — to make the start line, in 2011. Another decade later, Nic Dlamini of South Africa is the only black rider in this year’s Tour, which started on Saturday.

Arthur, who had the gear and was by then in pretty good shape, quickly gained the attention of an older man on the club ride. “I was comfortable, riding along and talking but he kept saying, ‘hey, this is a racing club, we really want racers — do you think you’re up to it?’” The man pointed at two fast guys at the front. “He told me, ‘These are the kind of riders we’re looking for’,” Arthur said. “I was like, ‘yeah, I can aspire to be like them, give me a 12 months and I’ll be as good’. That was my mentality — to be constantly positive.”

At the end of the ride, the group gathered at a cafe for a coffee. The little comments kept coming. “Eventually we saw a cyclist riding past and the man looked at me and said something like, ‘ah, look at this guy, you should probably join him’. It was a black guy riding a bike. Everyone laughed, and I laughed uncomfortably. And that’s when it dawned on me. He didn’t want me in his club, and all the things he’d been saying were hinting at that. He was like, ‘isn’t that guy your friend? You should join him’.

“I just thought, for fuck’s sake, really? I laughed it off, went home and never wanted to join a club again.”

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At 8am on a humid Saturday morning last Summer, a group of cyclists was gathering on the grass inside the running track at Regent’s Park in central London. They stood two metres apart with their bikes at their feet. It was the first time since lockdown had been introduced in March that the Black Cyclists Network (BCN), a two-year-old and rapidly growing group, had hosted a ride.

Soon, the cyclists would be riding laps of the Outer Circle, an almost three-mile loop of road inside the park’s perimeter that has long been a popular place for cyclists to train and commune. As more riders arrived — soon there would be almost 100 — some were chatting. Many, including me, didn’t yet know anyone. We were all waiting for Mani Arthur.

“Hello everyone,” Arthur, founder and leader of the network, shouted as he entered the centre of the group. “I thought you were all going to make excuses and not turn up. That’s why we have our rides on a Saturday so you can’t say you’ve got church and blame God for it — you have to show up.”

Arthur, who is in his mid 30s, had an easy smile and a thick beard. He was dressed in the Black Cyclists Network’s all-black kit with its three fine stripes around the chest and upper arms. The colours of the stripes — red, yellow and green — honour a tradition of tricolours in cycling as well as several Afro-Caribbean national flags, including Ghana’s.

Not everyone was dressed in Lycra. Nor were all the bikes expensive carbon fibre machines. There were tracksuit bottoms, and commuter bikes worth less than some other riders’ sunglasses. There were women and older riders, and new riders. It was, by the standards of Regent’s Park, where I have been riding for more than 15 years, a diverse group. Everyone, bar three or four of us, was black.

Arthur was on a mission to transform a startlingly white sport, from the grassroots to the elite level. More than a century after bikes gave flight to women’s suffrage, he is also part of a wider movement to revive the bicycle’s potential as a vehicle for change.

“It’s a historic moment, what we’re trying to do here,” Arthur told the group. He had expected 40-odd people to show up after putting word out on the BCN social media channels (the network now has more than 2,000 members on Strava and 18,000 Instagram followers). But word quickly spread.

As Arthur prepared to split riders into smaller groups for what remains a weekly ride, he suspected a sense of wider solidarity weeks after Black Lives Matter marches in the UK had combined with surging interest in cycling in lockdown. “We’re trying to bring more people of colour into cycling and it’s amazing to see the community react to that,” he told the crowd.

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Marlon Moncrieffe, a black former racing cyclist and a lecturer at Brighton University’s School of Education, believes some of the imagery attached to London 2012 only reinforced its whiteness. “There were links with colonialism and cultural imperialism, with Victoria Pendleton dressed as Britannia and Bradley Wiggins as the English Mod,” said Moncrieffe, who, after 2012, created an exhibition devoted to Britain’s handful of mostly forgotten black champion cyclists.

Diversity is only slightly better away from racing. The statistical picture is also incomplete, and most research has taken place in London. In a 2017 “analysis of cycling potential”, Transport for London found that black, Asian and minority ethnic groups accounted for only 15% of cycle trips, despite making up almost 40% of the city’s population.

Arthur largely blames a lack of role models. For many would-be riders, cycling looks as if it’s not for them. Henry Boateng, a 22-year-old electrician, had come to Regent’s Park from Hackney in east London. “Where I live, the area isn’t really white but the people riding bikes are,” he said.

Many people I spoke to also cite economic factors in a society where income inequality is tied to race. The potential costs of cycling, including maintenance and storage, have mounted during the past 15 years as the sport and industry has moved away from its working class roots. “The gap wasn’t as huge as it is now, with carbon [frames] and all these things,” said Maurice Burton, the former track and road champion, who features in Moncrieffe’s exhibition.

Burton, now 64, was one of Britain’s best riders in the 1970s and early 1980s. He is aware that he has become part of the problem. When he qualified for the Commonwealth Games in 1974, he rode the same knackered bike he’d found and repaired aged 12. Today, he owns De Ver Cycles, a shop in Streatham in south London, where most of his customers are white men who are able to spend anything up to £10,000 on a bike.

It is still possible to cycle cheaply, not least when you factor in the savings on public transport. “But too often the message out there is that it’s now a rich man’s sport,” says Jools Walker, a cycling advocate known as Lady Velo, and the author of Back in the Frame, a cycling memoir.

Walker, 37, agrees that imagery, including in marketing, is vital. She was dismayed in 2019 when RideLondon, cycling’s answer to the London Marathon, Photoshopped a black woman into a picture to make the event look more diverse. That summer, 94% of participants in the event’s longest ride, from London to Surrey and back, had been white. Hugh Brasher, director of RideLondon, said he regretted “the unfortunate error made by a temporary member of staff”, adding that the event was working hard to improve diversity.

Walker says other barriers exist in minority communities. “Once upon a time, and maybe in some places still, if you had a bike the whole thing was to get a car,” she told me. “The perception was that you were poor if you were riding around on a bike.”

And then there is racism. Burton says he experienced it when he was overlooked for selection at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. He was booed when he won a race in Leicester. Decades later, Arthur faced it on his first club ride, after which he nearly quit the sport he had come to love again.

Arthur went back to cycling alone until, months later, he made friends with a member of another north London group, Finsbury Park Cycling Club. “They restored my faith in cycling,” he said. He became an amateur racer, and remembers fighting to stay in contention in his first event in Milton Keynes. “I was hanging on for dear life but I needed to close the gap out of sheer embarrassment, knowing I was the only black person there,” he said.

Arthur quickly got better, and met other riders of colour on similar journeys. By 2018, he had about 20 numbers on his phone, and formed the Black Cyclists Network. Then, in November last year, Arthur was cycling home to north London after a Sunday ride to the Surrey Hills. It was a big day for the network; they were riding with Team De Ver, the club attached to Maurice Burton’s shop. Burton was also on the ride.

Afterwards, Arthur gave Burton a hug and headed home with two other BCN members in their all-black kit. As he waited at some central London traffic lights, a police officer crossing the road in front of Arthur told him he had stopped too far forward. Arthur politely explained he was staying out of the blind spot of the truck behind him.

When the lights went green, the officer stopped Arthur, claiming to have smelled cannabis. On a busy pavement, the officer searched and sniffed Arthur’s shoes and wallet. He then frisked Arthur, despite the fact his Lycra kit left little room to conceal anything. “At that point I had to laugh,” Arthur said. He rode home with his friends, one of whom had filmed the search, feeling humiliated. He believes it was a petty show of force, and that it would be inconceivable for a white rider to be treated the same way.

The clip went viral, and the Independent Office for Police Conduct investigated the case. It found that the grounds for Arthur’s search “were not reasonable”. But it did not uphold a complaint that the stop was discriminatory because the officer “used the same unreasonable grounds to stop and search people of all ethnicities and genders”, a statement reads. The Office recommended that the officer receive “reflective practice”.

Initially, Arthur had hoped the BCN would be a group of like-minded amateurs. “Then the George Floyd incident happened,” he says of Floyd’s death under a Minneapolis police officer’s knee in May last year. “The whole Black Lives Matter movement galvanised us to really try and see if we could make a bigger impact than we had planned.”

The racism Arthur had already experienced added rocket fuel to a mission to tackle the diversity gap at all levels of cycling. BCN launched a fundraising campaign to raise its profile and to finance what Arthur hoped would become an official racing team. He ultimately wants to help improve diversity at the elite level.

That cause became prominent during last year’s Tour de France, which started in August as protests against racism gripped the planet. Kevin Reza, a French pro and the only black rider in the 2020 peloton, spoke out about the sport’s failure to promote diversity and lack of solidarity. He said cycling had “a lot to learn and is really far behind”.

Arthur’s and Reza’s activism coincided with lockdown and surging demand at bike shops. Cities were adding miles of new bike lanes to meet demand among new riders. By July last year, the relaxation in social distancing rules permitted group cycling again. Yet Arthur was still stunned by the turnout at Regent’s Park. “It’s fantastic and proves what we’re trying to do — that there is a community out there,” he said.

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Peter Kerre is a 40-year-old DJ and activist who grew up in Kenya and lives in New York City. He began cycling to Black Lives Matter marches in June last year. Others did the same, creating a rolling vanguard that prevented police from determining the route of the marches. Soon there were so many cyclists that they came together to form Street Riders, and began organising separate protests. More than 1,000 people joined their first ride on 1 July 2020.

Within weeks, the group’s “Justice Rides” were attracting 15,000 cyclists. Kerre told me the addition of two wheels had added a new energy and mobility to activism in the city. “I’ve been an activist for years and if you say we’re gonna march two miles from Brooklyn to Manhattan, everyone’s exhausted,” he said. “But with a bike, in the same three hours you can cover a whole borough.”

Kerre said the rides, which are still happening, had encountered racial slurs and aggression in wealthier neighbourhoods, and warm welcomes in poorer areas. This had been an education for the white protesters joining the rides. “Many are from privileged areas and we’re taking them to parts of Harlem and Brooklyn they’ve probably never seen before,” he said. “We’re destroying stereotypes.”

Smaller protest rides sprung up across the US. They carried historical echoes. Bicycles have long been machines of emancipation, mobilising the oppressed. Suffragettes used early bicycles — the “people’s nag” — to organise and protest. Hitler banned cycling unions in Germany in 1933, confiscating bikes that were being used by early anti-Nazi movements. In China, pro-democracy demonstrators arrived at Tiananmen Square by bicycle.

But the Suffragettes also just really loved cycling. There is a desire among contemporary activists to celebrate bikes as vehicles for “black joy”, as well as emblems of freedom, at a time when joy can feel scarce. “It’s about not having only to be defined by our grief, our pain and our struggles,” said Jools Walker, who resents only being asked to talk about cycling in the context of colour. “It’s traumatic opening up your inbox and hoping that one email is going to be about something positive or not related to race at all,” she explained.

Walker’s most joyful moment on a bike came when, after a stressful few months, her boyfriend gave her a fold-up bike as a Christmas present. “I was still in my Disney pyjamas riding it around the housing estate where I live, not caring how cold it was or how ridiculous I looked,” she said. “No grief, no pain, no politics — I was just that kid who got their dream gift and had to play with it.”

Joy is central to other groups gathering in cities all over the world. Legion of Los Angeles is a US professional team devoted to promoting diversity. Chapters of the group Black Girls Do Bike have spread across the US from its base in Pittsburgh. In the UK, Reece Watt, a cyclist and graphic designer, launched the Black Cyclists Collective in Leeds in 2019, with a mission similar to Arthur’s. And in London, in 2018, My Choice, a social enterprise with links to Nigeria, launched the Black Riders Association to improve access to cycling for adults and children.

Brothers on Bikes, which started as a charity ride between London mosques in 2015 (they called it “Tour de Salah” or Tour of Prayer), has become a national network of cyclists of mainly Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani descent. “We want to push cycling for health, and discipline for young people,” said Usman Malik, 38, who leads a 40-strong “BOB” group in Leicester.

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In Regent’s Park, Arthur had assigned groups of eight riders to a ride captain taken from the core members of the network. He took the beginner group to the Inner Circle, a quieter, shorter loop deeper inside the park. They included Jo McLean, Arthur’s girlfriend of 15 years. McLean had only really started riding herself in lockdown after being furloughed from her job as a flight attendant. She had begun to help run the network, and had a hand in designing the kit.

As well as the stripes, the uniform includes a pattern based on an Adinkra symbol from Ghana’s Ashanti culture. The symbol means “Ese Ne Tekrema”, which translates as “the teeth and the tongue”. “You need your teeth and tongue to work together so you can eat,” Arthur explained. “Cycling is about collaboration.”

Brands were soon attracted to Arthur and his network, chapters of which he is now planning to open across the country. Wiggle, the online sports store, now provides the customised kit using its dhb range, and Science in Sport, the sports nutrition company, is also a sponsor. Trek and Zwit soon joined the network as cycling brands themselves woke up to the demand for better representation in the sport.

In the middle of June this year, Arthur led a team of five BCN riders to Colchester for their first race as a domestic cycling team. “Tonight is a proud moment for the squad,” he said in an Instagram post the next day. “It’s a dream come true and an opportunity to inspire current and future generations of Black and Brown riders.”

It is the mission to engage new riders that has fuelled Arthur’s mission — to share the joy and adventure he discovered as a boy on a pink bike in Kumasi.

The BCN logo contains a silhouette of a woman holding up a bicycle wheel. Arthur and McLean told me they wanted to include a black woman to represent what they saw as the sport’s most marginalised demographic. “If this whole project was going to be judged a success, it had to be based on how many women of colour we could attract,” Arthur told me.

Elaine Swaby, who is in her 40s, had come to Regent’s Park from Crystal Palace in south east London. She too had only taken up cycling in lockdown and heard about the ride on Facebook. She wanted to gain more skills and confidence. “But I also liked it because it was for people who look like me,” she told me as she rode a simple hybrid. “People aren’t looking at me wondering what I’m doing here… when you’re my colour you get to know that look. But this feels fantastic! This feels like I’m home!” She stretches the “o” in “home” as we freewheel down a slight hill.