Nothing seems to boil the blood of the masses quite like hordes of men in Lycra. What should be a rather uncontentious, uncontroversial and ultimately quite boring hobby seems to be treated with unprecedented levels of vitriol in Britain. Motorists hate them, pedestrians hate them, and a large chunk of the press hate them, so why is it that cyclists are so universally hated?
Even if this fury is entirely misplaced, it cannot be said that cyclists really help themselves. In Cardiff, walking down the high street is no easy feat as swarms of delivery cyclists fly past, weaving through crowds on suped up and often dodgy E-bikes. I’ve become all too familiar with the awkward scramble of trying to get out of the way of these bikes as they seem to charge at you, going Mach-10.
Is this a problem of our own creation? Well, if you’ve ordered fast food on any of the various apps, you’ve sort of gotten what you wanted: fast food. It’s not like these cyclists are getting points for nearly clipping as many pedestrians as they can, although sometimes it really feels like it; the faster they get their job done, the sooner they can get onto the next delivery.
Faster deliveries mean faster bikes, and these faster bikes, often used by delivery cyclists, are often the kind that are illegally converted, sometimes from stolen bikes. The perception that cyclists are riding illegal bikes dangerously through pedestrian areas is hard to dispel when cyclists are in fact riding illegal bikes dangerously through pedestrian areas and enraging the public doing so. However, the gig economy has only provided a new outlet for the public’s general disdain for cyclists; Britain’s hatred of cyclists is much older and goes much deeper.
The notion that cyclists flout the rules of the road and that cars have more right to be there seems to be very common; it’s a notion that the media is often all too happy to support. Drivers have to spend a lot of money on lessons and pass their test to be on the road, but any cyclist can just hop on a bike and get straight on the road. This is obviously because one is effectively heavy machinery, and the other is just a bike, but it does create a conflict where drivers think they’ve earned their right to be on the road and cyclists have not.
So when a middle-aged man in neon Lycra blocks up traffic during a school run, a driver doesn’t see a person travelling to work, they see someone who hasn’t earned their right to the road and is flaunting it. The brightly coloured spandex of the cyclist isn’t seen as appropriate sportswear, but a taunt at all the motorists behind them. It should be pretty clear at this point that cyclists have an image problem; their skin-tight neon Lycra has become offensive to large swathes of the British public.
That image problem is largely to do with how cyclists are portrayed in the media. Stories, particularly in the right-wing press, portray cyclists as lycra-clad rule breakers who have no respect for the roads; this takes them from slightly annoying to public enemy number one. You don’t blame narrow roads or inadequate cycle lanes when the cyclist delaying you is seen as an invasive species, whose only purpose is to cause you malice.
This image problem has only compounded in the social media age. Cyclists have garnered a reputation as busybodies who have it out for drivers; the content seen on the pages of people like Cycling-Mikey and Jeremy Vine, recording drivers’ traffic offences, only acts as rage bait to the public. The vitriol directed at Jeremy Vine’s content was so intense that he stopped cycling videos in April 2025.
CyclingMikey, in particular, is an amalgamation of everything wrong with cyclists in the public’s mind: rude, entitled, and invasive. Ultimately, cyclists contribute to less congestion and cleaner air, but to shirk their evil reputation, an effigy of the current cyclist in the public’s mind needs to be burnt and replaced with something new. The public currently sees cyclists as Lance Armstrongs; lycra-clad, self-righteous, road cheats, who treat our streets with contempt.
Instead, the media should try to push new mascots for the hobby, like Ben Foster or Sir Chris Hoy, partly to ease the temptation of motorists running cyclists off the road and also to promote less wasp-like behaviour from the lycra-wearing masses.