22 Stone Cyclist

It’s time for a big of a winge, I’m afraid.

Cycling certainly isn’t a mainstream sport, and it probably never will be. I can’t imagine 45,000 beer drinking hooligans congregating on a saturday afternoon to watch a bunch of skinny lads in lycra riding bicycles up and down hills. It’s not to say there’s anything wrong with mainstream sports such as football or rugby (or dare I say it, cricket *shudders*). It’s just cycling gets a bad rap. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard it described as “boring”, “pointless” or “just people moving their feet up and down”.

If you are one of the many who summarizes cycling in this way, I feel sorry for you. You’re not only completely wrong, you’re missing out.

Granted, to Joe Public (and even to a lot of cycling enthusiasts) watching a 198km flat stage is pretty dull. For the most part a group of 5 or 6 riders will be off the front in a pretty vain attempt to win the stage, whilst the rest of the peleton (the main group of riders) rumbles along waiting until the final 20km to reel the breakaway back in to set up a sprint finish. Most people would probably not be able to sit for that length of time watching TV. Now imagine being on a bike for that long, concentrating on not falling off, not hitting someone else, keeping yourself fed and hydrated, constantly watching your rivals, playing a cat and mouse game, keeping check of your team mates, suffering whatever weather is prevailing, and on top of all that, exerting yourself in a way most of us have never experienced. Yeah, sounds really dull to me.

However, there is so much more to professional cycling than even that, and on so many levels. There’s a good reason it is referred to as the world’s toughest sport. It’s because it really, REALLY is.

You can’t talk about cycling without mentioning Le Tour de France. This year’s race will cover 3,642km over 23 days (2 of which are rest days). It will climb mountains that your average man would struggle to walk up, it will span the length and breadth of one of the most stunning places on earth and will be watched by millions around the world. It will race at speeds that some people find uncomfortable in a car, and on tyres less than a few cm thick. It may look all a little pedestrian at times, but it is far from it. A lot of club cyclists like myself would struggle to complete 1 stage, let alone all 21, and certainly not at the average speeds of the professionals.

Le Tour forces people of the strongest will to give up. It makes healthy men ill. It ends careers. And when we’re really unlucky, it kills men who are in their prime. This isn’t 90 minutes on a Saturday afternoon followed by a ride home in a Ferrari and a 3 course meal in a Chelsea pad with your trophy case wife. This is pure, unadulterated pain, suffering, determination and endurance, with overnight stays in hotels without air conditioning in uncomfortable beds with the constant bedfellow of leg, back and arm pain. Men who have trained all year and peaked for this event will see an entire year’s hard work go up in smoke because someone else had better legs at that one critical moment.

Even at my meager level of the sport, which granted is only a part time deal, I push myself as hard as I possibly can, until such point that I cross the line, exhausted, vomiting, collapsing to the floor and fighting to get my breath and stop the world spinning. And I do it for fun. There’s no cash prize for me. There’s no glory. There’s no million pound contract with RadioShack waiting. There’s no magazine coverage. It’s a pastime. It’s a pastime that I get laughed at for, for shaving my legs, for wearing lycra, for daring to be different.

I’ve done my time as a football fan, screaming and shouting at referees and hoping my team gets promoted / doesn’t get relegated. But after all is said and done, even when the football fan’s team does win - what has he actually done? Nothing. He’s bought a shirt and drank some beer. I’m out, every Wednesday come rain or shine, pushing myself as hard as I can to take precious seconds off my time, for little or no recognition - for the love of the game.

Last night, watching a fantastic battle on the slopes of Le Col de Tourmalet between Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador, Kerry turned to me and said,

“It’s SO exciting! I never knew cycling was so complicated!”

That’s the moment, right there. The light bulb comes on. The realization that this isn’t just legs going up and down, it’s not just blokes on bikes, and there’s no return from that. You’re hooked. You want to know about the bikes. You want to know about the gear ratios. The breathing. The nervous looks. The attacks. The time trial. The sprint. The polka dot jersey. The mountain top finish. The deadly descents. The doping. The fighting. The politics. The scandal. The history. The heroes. The villains. This is a sport of history, a sport of heroes, the sport of the gods. This is a REAL sport, with REAL sporting heroes who’d posters deserve to be on boy’s bedroom walls.

And whilst we’re talking heroes. Let’s compare my hero, Lance Armstrong, a man who came back from death’s door, a cancer survivor who won the world’s toughtest sporting event 7 times in a row, with the likes of Wayne Rooney or John Terry.

There’s some perspective for y’all right there.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 12:53 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.