Playing "The Game" - Commuter Road Racing

Just like Fight Club, the first rule in what London’s cyclist commuters secretly call “The Game” is - you don't talk about The Game. You never address your rival or refer to the unspoken bouts of competition when you try to race each other as far as the next set of traffic lights.
To some people, The Game may seem reckless, over-competitive and probably the best reason ban the consumption of caffeine before 10am. But some cyclists say that playing for minor victories on the road to work is a safe, exhilarating and fun way to liven up the daily commute that also keeps you fit and gets you home quicker.
Some 500,000 cycle journeys are taken in the capital every day, and many cyclist can't fail to have noticed that today, a certain contingent of cyclo-commuters tend to ride as if they’re attempting to win the Tour De France instead of merely get to the office on time.
Stand at a big junction on any arterial route at 8.00am, and you’ll spot the serious Game players among the riders massing beneath the red lights. They might be atop fancy Italian road bikes, slick fixed-wheel builds or matt-black hybrids, but could just as easily be on Brompton foldaways or knobbly-tyred MTBs, because as Lance Armstrong said, it's not about the bike - it's about how fast the rider turns the pedals.
Twitchy, caffeinated and ready to roll, the riders surge away in a blur of black lycra and hi-viz nylon when red phases to green. They never acknowledge one another, show that they’re out of breath and above all that they’re even trying to compete, but players know the game is on when they look back to see someone riding in their slipstream – what professional riders call “draughting” - or when they’re overtaken at a serious clip along straight stretches of open road. Pride is at stake when a rider gets “scalped” or “dropped” (overtaken). But if he gets seriously scalped on the way to work – well, that can be rectified on the way back home by scalping someone else.
The capital’s cyclists have probably raced each other ever since the invention of the penny farthing, but the rules of The Game were only codified earlier this year by IT engineer Mark Skrzypczyk.
“There was a thread on a cycling forum called Silly Commuter Racing,” says Skrzypczyk, who rides into central London from Crystal Palace every day. “People were saying, has anyone else realised you end up overtaking the same people on your commute? It snowballed from there and we set up a Facebook group. What we have in common is that we don’t like just pootling along – we always try to overtake riders who are faster.”
For dedicated players of The Game, simply overtaking what Skrzypczyk calls the “flotsam and jetsam” of everyday cyclists just doesn’t count. Included on the Facebook page is a “Food Chain” hierarchy of riders from the fastest to the slowest which enables players to calculate their own “Food Chain Number” (FCN) – a kind of gold handicap for cyclists.
Here's the thing: a scalp is only won by overtaking or dropping a rider further up the food chain. The reverse also applies: when someone further down the Food Chain overtake you, you’re scalped.
The Game’s Facebook group now boasts over two hundred members, and it may or may not be true, as Skrzypczyk’s rules suggest, that “dropping anyone higher in the Food Chain Number makes more attractive to birds” (plenty of players, incidentally, are themselves “birds”). What’s certain is that The Game has put a name and code to a thriving, idiosyncratic sport that exists deep in the London commuter system.
“You can tell who the good riders are,” Skrzypczyk says. “Nice smooth pedalling action, not trying to hard and never out of breath. You shouldn’t show you're actually trying.”
Aspiring Gamers can browse popular routes on www.bikely.com, though simpler way of playing is to get on your bike at 7.30am or 5.45pm and drift around London’s big arterial routes until the racing finds you. The long west-west corridor of the Embankment from Chelsea to the City is the one central battleground, while heading east along Cable Street and Hackney road, north along Kingsland Road and south between London Bridge and Clapham are similarly busy each morning and evening.
Nevertheless, like the Alleycat races popular among the courier, part of The Game’s appeal is that it inevitably skirts the edges of both safety and legality.
Riders stress that they play well within the law, always wear helmets, and don't cut up cars, ride on the pavement or run red lights.
“Safety is paramount, but people can get a bit carried away,” Skrzypczyk says adds. “Often people don't know they have a rider draughting them, and I’ve seen a few collisions because the rider in front has done an emergency stop.”
The legality of this kind of racing, particularly when riders never vocally agree that they're actually racing one another, is also open to question.
“In theory, it's not quite legal,” says Richard Truman or British Cycling. “Regulations say that police must be informed about any bike race 28 days before it’s held. But the police would find it hard to prosecute an activity like this.” And although it is very difficult to break the 30mph speed limit on a pushbike, the Metropolitan police point out that Cycling Dangerously and Cycling without Due Care And Attention are offences punishable with fines of up to £2,500 and £1,000 respectively.
Plus, says Buffalo Bill, author of the influential bicycle messenger blog movingtargetzine.com, “racing on public roads isn't very clever. I wouldn't advise it. The road is a public environment, whereas if you’re racing on a track, you know other riders will have consented and will know what the risks are. My experience is that people pay too much attention to other people and not enough to the road itself.”
But in any case, says “Jamie”, a player who asked not to be named, when it comes to good Gamesmanship, there’s only thing that’s as bad as endangering yourself or others is taking The Game too seriously. “It works because people want to enjoy their commute as much as they can,” he says. “It's really not about taking it seriously. If you really want to race, go and join a road racing club.”
But so much for theory. It’s time for Game practice.
After calculated my FCN at a reasonable 5 (I ride a Bianchi fixed-wheel bike, but I draw the line at shaving my legs ) I hit the A3 at Clapham Common on Monday morning. The lights change and I lock onto the back wheel of steely-looking man in head-to-toe lycra riding a matt-black Cervélo road bike machine that probably cost more than my last car. We cat-and-mouse in a thrilling duel as far the churning Elephant & Castle roundabout without so much as a word between us. But just as I’m about to go in for the final scalp, Mr Cervélo promptly peels off towards Lambeth.
Undeterred, I head east onto the breezy Victoria Embankment, whereupon I’m in danger of getting scalped by a tubby chap riding a Brompton foldaway at surprisingly speedy pace. I claw my way back so we’re neck and neck, but is FCN is considerably lower than mine and scalping him is hardly a victory.
Back on the A3 that evening, I attempt to scalp an extremely fit-looking rider whose FCN can’t be more than 2. With a gleaming Trek road bike, lycra shorts and shaved legs, he looks like an elite Gamer, and so he proves to be. We ride fast down the empty bus lanes on the choking stretch back to Clapham, but he explodes out of the lights after every time we stop and it's much as I can do to stay on his wheel for a couple of miles.
After a blistering burst of speed up Clapham High Street, Trek Man finally drops me – conveniently, right outside KFC. I limp the final sixty yards to the lights where he’s waiting and, blue in the face, decide break the code of silence.
“What are you mate?” I say. “Triathlete? Ironman? Bradley Wiggins in disguise?”
“Nah mate,” a broad Sydney accent tells me. “Just trying to get home to see me son. Good Luck.”
Then he’s off into the vanishing point. The Game is a fast, anonymous but oddly meaningless kind of fun where you learn that there’s always someone fitter on the road than you are. You also learn that some things in life shouldn’t be taken too seriously - in particular a game like this.
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Commissioned by The London Paper
© Kevin Braddock 2008