"There are few sensations in cycling more pleasurable than rounding a perfect hairpin"

The Doc's Spanish sojourn leaves him with glowing surface impressions

- Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week

I rode down a hill a few weeks ago.

I live in Cambridge, so this is quite a landmark event. However, this wasn’t the motorway flyover where I usually perfect my aero tuck. This was a sweet, flowing series of switchbacks in Alicante. There are few sensations in cycling more viscerally pleasurable than rounding a perfectly radiused hairpin, with a road that cambers just-so and sightlines clear enough to let you sweep in, clip an apex, and feel the bike accelerate below you onto the next straight. In the sorts of places where they have this sort of hairpin, they often string three or four of them together in a way that makes you feel like a god.

Then, of course, they chuck in a bend that's like the wonky trip-step that they used to put in medieval castle staircases to catch out attackers. You think it’s like the others, you fly into it at 60kph, and you exit with white knuckles, a foot scraping on the crash barrier, a gratitude to still be alive and a resolution never to exceed 40kph on a descent ever again.

For the most thrilling descents, the road surface is key. This descent was so smooth. It had no gravel or holes. It had a few of those long black gaffer-tape lookalike repairs, but in the moderate temperatures of autumn, they provided no extra danger to my best Tom Pidcock impression. It was almost perfect.