Tied up in the stories of the past.
For more than three decades, I’ve been obsessed with Cycling. Not just the business of being in love with riding and training, but with following Professional Cycling as well. When I was young, I pored over the photos in Winning and other magazines that made their way into my possession; their spines were cracked to pieces with the pages falling out by the time I would retire an issue, and even then, many of the photos were cut out and hung on my bedroom or workshop wall.
The Pros were my muse; they gave me their style, position, and technique queues but they also inspired me to ride more. I would imagine myself racing with them when I was out training, I would envision myself dropping Greg LeMond on the local leg breaker or barely pip Steve Bauer in a two-up sprint to some imaginary finish line. (Poor Steve, the unluckiest rider of his generation, he couldn’t even beat me.) Those heroes retired and new ones emerged; the cycle continued.
They were my heroes, but in many ways they were my riding partners as well. They were role models who mattered to me deeply, more deeply than perhaps they should.
It was some time during the Armstrong Era that it started to change. Being lied to pathologically works like that; you believe the lie because the truth seems so awful. When that awful truth comes out, we want to find a way back to the old, happy story. It was just one rider, one crazy cheater who is ruining it for everyone. Then the lie comes out again, and we believe it again. Slowly, our willingness to believe is damaged, until finally you see the lies in everything, even in the truth.
Motors, TUEs, doping. It all tastes bitterly of the past, and the accused are going back to the same scripts that were used by the previous generation. We’ve heard it all before, and I’ve grown tired of hearing the same denials defiantly made against the same accusations.
I feel a certain amount of shame for not believing that Chris Froome or Brad Wiggins won the Tour de France paniagua; I want to believe in them and I would rather be the naïve hopeful who believes a liar than the cynic who accuses an honest man of cheating. But Sky is not going out of their way to make it easy for me to believe them.
I’ve never gotten myself too tangled up in whether or not a particular rider or team is doping, and in general I haven’t let the truth tarnish the nostalgia I have for my favorite riders and races of the past. And it certainly hasn’t touched how much I love actually riding my bike. But if the all this lying has had a lasting effect, it is that I don’t imagine myself riding with my heroes anymore.
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That's a sad tale Frank.
It's a fucking bummer, innit?
professional sports - all of them, not only cycling - are essentially a circus. in our current culture if you flood a system with huge amounts of money and a shot a celebrity the only possibile outcome is that human beings will do anything and everything in their power to grab it. you watch professional cycling like you go to a cinema to enjoy a good movie. you know it's a show, a temporary escape, it isn't about reality. if movie-going is your kind of thing, kick back and enjoy the show of pro cycling without fooling yourself about what it really is.
i much prefer investing the time in training for my next race. ours really isn't a spectator sport. if you want to find the soul of cycling, i think it's at amateur races. it's the real deal. there are people who cheat here too, but it's a very small minority and they always end up paying the the high cost that DIY doping exacts. the rest of us do glorious and epic battle every weekend (and when we're lucky, during the week too), immersed in the total craziness of juggling impossibile schedules to get in some quality training, inventing the most outlandish excuses to duck social events and work appointments to get to the races and hang out with kindred spirits.
Never read the articles, the photos say it all!
they could all cycle with a blood bag on their back like a camelbak, and i wouldn't give a shit. i realized the world was lies and liars when i was 8. thus, i've never really had the burden of morality to carry around when it came to evaluating reality.
It is fucking miserable to witness how the human spirit can create something so great and then corrupt the shit out of it until it is turned to...well, shit.
Sometimes I wish cycling never went from being enjoyed by a minority of geeks to a worldwide business case managed by an excel sheet. It never turns out well...Just look a Formula 1: thirty years ago you had a bunch of crazy petrol heads driving around bad tracks at ungodly speeds strapped to an engine and a fuel tank. Those were the days. Those were the heroes.These days you have an idiot driver throwing a tantrum because the media didn't give him enough attention...
I swear to The Prophet, the day Sagan gets involved in this shit I am done with the pros.
@pedro
Of course in the good old days of honour and trust without wall to wall media coverage, no one did anything like get on a train........oh wait........
@Teocalli
It's a fair and serious point - there have always been heroes in cycling and always villians. And the same people are different things to different people. And there has always been suspicion - just about every champion in cycling has been accused of cheating in various ways and different times.
The hope I have is the current champions are not generally under suspicion; Sagan, Quintana, Froome (I know Sky have some questions to answer but Froome seems to emerge from the TUE thing with more credit than most, i.e. he's been open and hasn't been caught lying), and the scrutiny they are under will hopefully means this continue.
I've got more concern about what will come out of others sports, to be honest...
@Teocalli
It's not the cheating that gets me. There are cheaters everywhere.
I have no problems from the media coverage in itself.
But there is a reason more and more people are turning to XCO over road cycling. And as soon as enough people (and money) turn into that sport it will become corrupted too...and the next one after that...nothing to do with good old days of people being more trustworthy. It has always been like this and it will still be so until the end of times.
I just wish sports could always be as simple and beautiful as they are when they are in their infancy.
As long as there has been competition, there has been cheating. Just gotta look past the douchebags.