PCR’s aim is to promote urban cycling in all its forms. We graduated from fixies to road bikes, the usual progression: on fixies you end up suffering from bad knees, and if you live on the Montmartre hill you soon develop an interest in gears – and you realise the stupidity of riding brakeless if you’re not on the track or racing a crit, etc. These days on the Wednesday ride only about 10 per cent ride fixed. I’d say that really it’s urban or commuter bikes – by which I mean guys who ride every day to get around. It’s not weekend warriors, the guys who do 100km every Sunday, although there are some of those too.
In the end, the only detail that links us to classic clubs is the PCR jerseys. When we were riding fixed, we used to say we didn’t want to do normal riding, but lots of time in the saddle meant we had to swap our jeans for bib shorts. As there are lots of graphic designers in the club, everyone wanted to make their own. This is how our multi-motif jersey was born.
There’s even guys in Austin and Dallas who’ve ordered the jerseys, but we’re not a brand and don’t make anything from them. We’re a sort of partnership under a different name, which means that PCR belongs to no one, there’s no leader. In fact, it’s so much of a movement without barriers or borders that people don’t know who PCR is or who it isn’t, which event is PCR and which isn’t. Journalists don’t understand where it starts or stops. We don’t either.