Here's what became of that Gold Charge Plug

You'll need to take a deep breath and finish your mouthful of cereal first. Maybe close the windows and shoo the kids out.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2075065/The-celebrity--present-a-bicy%20cle---at-andpound9,500.html

? I read the article, but nothing's actually happened with the bike other than they plan to sell it.

I've got on this one late, but has anyone notice the irony of an insurance company building a bike with no brakes?

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The latest celebrity present: a bicycle - with a price tag of £9,500
**

The bike, the most expensive in Britain, is too expensive to be insured - so it comes with its own personal body guard.
I can't imagine £9,500 makes this the "most expensive" bicycle in Britain. I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem like that much (too much for me, but not that much)...

most expensive fully built bike?

i dunno, some of those full carbon TT bikes must be close

I can't imagine £9,500 makes this the "most expensive" bicycle in Britain. I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem like that much (too much for me, but not [i]that[/] much)...

No way a custom serotta fully tricked out could easy beat that.

For fuck sack in another article the other day the press were on about the gb track frames cost 1/2 mil to develop.

The journalist must have plucked the most expensive bike line out of thin air.

No way a custom serotta fully tricked out could easy beat that.

For fuck sack in another article the other day the press were on about the gb track frames cost 1/2 mil to develop.

The journalist must have plucked the most expensive bike line out of thin air.

that's what the type of journalists who write this kind of useless filler articles do.

anyway, it is shit.

LET ME have a gold-plated bike.

"a model that common London cycle couriers have"

So what do posh London messengers ride?

fred, I think my point was it started out as this magical celebration-of-those-wonderful-fixed-gear-riders prize but now is revealed to be a gimmick to garner business for the insurance company, which I think some of us suspected at the outset.

The article is so badly written I'd go one further and say no journalist had more than a scant readover of copy sent in by someone connected to the product - maybe someone in the insurance company's marketing department.

Total guff. "common courier" cracked me up too. The Telegraph, one of Britain's oldest and sniffiest papers........

of course it was a marketing gimmick designed to drum up business. there wouldn't be much point in spending all that money on building a gold-plated bike for nothing.

i think it's quite a good gimmick, though.

for the love of god get those stickers off the rims...

for the love of god get those stickers off the rims...

no leave them! otherwise it'll only be worth 9,499 ;)

I think it's a really cunty gimmick. Yet another bandwagonload of square tossers trying to cash in on something that's nothing to do with them, appropriating it and rendering it shit. Ooh, aren't we funny cooking up a bike we wouldn't actually insure when we're an insurance company? Well of course really we're just marketing.

Charge have had to be involved in this at some point though they are barely mentioned - but at least they make the frickin bike. But it's all about the insurance company, who even appropriate not-for-profit status and the environment in order to market themselves.

If this bike were a human it would be a twelve-year-old virgin being paraded round naked on a silver tray at a society orgy.

The article is written so badly and so lazily that I feel like emailing someone. Noone has had time to spend three minutes checking over all the mistakes and yet an entire morning has been wasted cobbling together a photoshoot involving a grown man wearing a sticker.

There must be a thousand out-of-work writers who could come up better copy but Sophia Diogos gets the gig cos she's so far up her arse she thinks she's actually got talent enough to be a hack. Go back to your trust fund, Sophia, and stop butchering the English language in public.

I haven't gone on the Oxford ride today due to neck and knee problems and I guess it's coming out. Feel genuinely sorry for the mug being the security guard, though, either he's massively down on his luck or he's one of the ETA marketing bell-ends and thinks it's all a big wheeze.

This country.

Which means that the pedals keep on turning as long as the bicycle does.

So, it can't freewheel around corners?

I think it's a really cunty gimmick. Yet another bandwagonload of square tossers trying to cash in on something that's nothing to do with them, appropriating it and rendering it shit. Ooh, aren't we funny cooking up a bike we wouldn't actually insure when we're an insurance company? Well of course really we're just marketing.

well, they do insure bikes. Accusing a company of "cashing in", well I thought that "cashing in" was what companies do... they make money and advertise their services. i don't think there's any reason to get on your square tossers vs alternative heroes high horse, you don't know the interests of the people designing the campaign or running the company. would you rather that no non-cycling companies ever had anything to do with cycling? come on, this is a gimmick, but at least it makes cycling seem glamorous which might actually make some more people interested in riding a bike.

Charge have had to be involved in this at some point though they are barely mentioned - but at least they make the frickin bike. But it's all about the insurance company, who even appropriate not-for-profit status and the environment in order to market themselves.

well, they probably paid for it, so they deserve the PR benefit.

If this bike were a human it would be a twelve-year-old virgin being paraded round naked on a silver tray at a society orgy.

this analogy is completely broken.

The article is written so badly and so lazily that I feel like emailing someone. Noone has had time to spend three minutes checking over all the mistakes and yet an entire morning has been wasted cobbling together a photoshoot involving a grown man wearing a sticker.

There must be a thousand out-of-work writers who could come up better copy but Sophia Diogos gets the gig cos she's so far up her arse she thinks she's actually got talent enough to be a hack. Go back to your trust fund, Sophia, and stop butchering the English language in public.

i'll grant that it's not the greatest work of investigative journalism ever penned, but i don't think this is justification for such a strong personal attack. and accusing someone else of being lazy and then demonstratively "feeling like" emailing someone but not actually bothering does make me wonder.

I haven't gone on the Oxford ride today due to neck and knee problems and I guess it's coming out. Feel genuinely sorry for the mug being the security guard, though, either he's massively down on his luck or he's one of the ETA marketing bell-ends and thinks it's all a big wheeze.

This country.

i'm sure he got paid for it, and therefore probably doesn't mind. really, he only had to stand there for a minute or two - hardly a great hardship/injustice.

so much anger!! this all just sounds like you're being overly precious about your subculture and picking easy targets. LTFU!!

er.....sorry if I cheesed you off dude.. but not all of my post was meant to be taken so completely seriously. I do try to keep my tongue at least partly in my cheek most of the time (sorry if this in itself seems cunty). Yeah i suppose I was feeling a bit cooped up yesterday but I hoped that I'd included enough bollocks to make it a comedy rant rather than a serious one - esp stuff like the "broken analogy" and "I feel like emailing someone". "This country" is an old Alan Partridge quote. Even so yeah maybe it does come across as a bit preachy.

But I did think the whole article stinks, and i do see it as an example of wankers in the media. But there's tons of stuff that gets on my tits in the media, it's just this was specific to fixed gear. Plus the fact this bike started out as some kind of prize but now is "oooh, how expensive".. not really what it should be about. If ETA wanted to market their insurance to fixed gear riders they would do worse than to help subsidise forums like this. I'm not sure how many of us read the Telegraph.

I'm not precious at all about the "subculture", and it's hardly "mine" - having only been drawn into it in the last year and still building my first bike. The subculture for me stretches to wanting to build a beautiful bike (to budget), riding, having a few drinks and laffs and posting here. Well that and hundreds of hours hunched over web pages looking for the right components :)

one thing though - what would be a difficult target?

so has beckam placed his order yet?

nice reply :)

i wasn't pissed off, just thought you went a bit OTT. sure, it's PR-laden journalism, but you can't blame the company for that. and they are still giving one away in the competition, as they said.

it's not about picking difficult targets, but picking appropriate ones. ranting about "the media", "sloppy journo cunts" and "marketing wankers" is like shooting fish in a barrel ;) every time cycling gets mentioned in the media someone seems to want to have a crack at the journo's parentage and integrity, which hardly makes us seem like friendly folk who are deserving of positive media attention. i think we can collectively try harder, is all.

second thing, are they serious about the security guard? i mean how the hell is that supposed to work? is he gonna jog around behind you? sleep on your couch? get his information from the future so he can always be at the right place at the right time? hasn't anyone wondered?
or it just me?

I have indeed been wondering Stef. I came to the conclusion that very quickly he would start to feel "clingy". Soon you'd be having a go at him just for always being there...

@badtmy - nice one dude..yeah I know, the sloppy/wanky journo/media card is a well-thumbed one, but it's one we seem to get dealt constantly and I have to be reminded of it most days. It's troubled me for years, just one of my big beefs I guess. I do genuinely get concerned at how much of a bunch of mugs they take people for and how I come to be affected by them even when I try to avoid them.

See I liked that recent Independent article (even though Minh Ai was less than satisfied and said the guy sort of made a general paraphrasing of their conversation) because it showed people who love cycling and had them explain why. Cycling around is so .. can I use the word "pure"..? that it smells a bit fishy when it's given this treatment. I mean, you want to advertise your wares, buy some ad space, no?

Saying that, the Pope's Colnago remains one of my all time favourites: Colnago, gold bike, or PR stunt...

As one of the handful of hacks that are on this board, could I point out that very often the journalist in question will not' actually have had much choice about the article subject, will very often have been given a line to follow, and to be fair probably wants to get the piece out of the way asap so that they can spend more time crafting something that they think is actually going to advance their career.

From what I can tell about this Sophia Diogo Mateus, she graduated from a journalism MA at some point over the last year and so is probably a trainee at the Telegraph, and as such is probably still full of dreams about writing stories of massive social import rather than writing up puff pieces about gold-plated bikes.

And yes, the chances are that she knows nothing about the subculture beyond a press release sent to her by the insurance company and a quick bit of googling for 'colour'.

Given that average wages for placements at the broadsheets are usually next to nothing (as in, they'll give you a couple of quid for your train fare and a sandwich - maybe £100 a week if you're lucky) - or if she's not on a placement the chances are the wages are sub-£15k for a trainee - that she probably had a bunch of other stuff to write, some prima donna editors to run around after and whatever bureaucratic crap people at the Telegraph had to deal with - to expect her to have spent anything more than an hour or two doing background is completely unrealistic.

Granted, there's a lot of crap that the mainstream media is responsible for, particularly at the red-tops, so I'm not going to claim that every journalist is a saint.

But you all seem to think that we're all investigative journalists, paid to sit around in bars chewing the cud with people until we've got the 'real' story. Maybe some of you have seen All the President's Men and not realised that within that two hours of film they've compressed 7 months of chasing a single story - and that they've cut out the 90% of those 7 months when the two journalists were working on stuff that had nothing to do with Watergate.

The reality is that we're paid to process information very, very quickly and write it up accessibly, not to dig or pontificate (though many of us would like to do much more of the latter, to the extent of working on long features in our spare time in the hope that it'll push our careers to a place where we can do more thinking and less regurgitating).

If any of you were to point out that there was a deep systemic malaise in the industry whereby accuracy, depth and understanding have been forced out in favour of speed, spin and producing content at the lowest possible cost, I'd agree wholeheartedly with you and lament what feels very like the long slow death throes of my industry. I'd deplore the messy, unpleasant and sometimes unethical compromises that tight deadlines and tighter budgets have forced upon us, and I'd share a toast to the long-gone ideal of journalism as the fourth estate, the institution that was supposed to speak truth to power and all that jazz.

But please guys - just lay off the journalists. It's very rarely their fault. Blame their editors, or blame the industry - but these personal attacks on individual journalists are really quite unfair.

This h2o character sure writes a lot of misinformed bollocks..

;-)