Vélo Versitalis

Riding a bike is many things to many people. It is a professional sport, a form of practical transportation and a leisure activity for millions of people around the world. I guess golf and baseball and ice skating and synchronized swimming all double as both sports and leisure time activities… okay, synchronized swimming is really more akin to conceptual art than sport but, you know, tell that to the Olympic Committee… but to my knowledge they aren’t practical forms of transportation. There are sports that share cycling’s versatility, but I maintain that none quite equals the accessibility of cycling. Take cross-country skiing. I presume for the people of Norway, strapping two boards to your feet grabbing some poles and shuffling forward has long constituted a sensible method for getting from Point A to Point B, but you gotta have snow to ski, which will apparently soon be relegated to isolated parts of Great Britain by global climate change. I guess when the snow stops coming you can always roller ski, but I’m going out on a limb and predict that we will not be seeing large numbers of roller ski commuters on the streets of America’s cities any time soon.

Is that you Uncle Bob? 

Likewise, though bobsledding, kayaking, canoeing, sail boating, hang gliding, wind surfing sail boarding may technically qualify as vehicular transportation, none offers quite utility of the simple bicycle. Where, for instance, can you mount panniers on a luge? 

No leisure / sport / transportation type can match cycling for efficiency and convenience; with the possible exception of motor sports, though the internal combustion engine and even electric engines are dependent on large quantities of fuel, whereas the average trip on a bicycle can typically by fueled by an apple and about 16 ounces of water. 

All of which is by way of saying that in these days in which it seems the professional sport of cycling is hell bent on self destruction, we need to remember that the profession of cycling, the sport of cycling, the industry of cycle racing is but the smallest, least consequential aspect of the bicycle. I am a fan of the sport and am deeply troubled by the devastation currently being wreaked on the sport; a sport about which most Americans will never know anything other than what they are reading in the current headlines. The association most people will derive from the current state of the sport is Cycling = Doping. What a shame.

And more’s the shame because the wounds now being suffered are entirely self inflicted. But I take some comfort in the idea that maybe now that professional cycling has decided to debase and demoralize itself and its fans, now that cycling is seen by the general public as the strict province of degenerates and reprobates, maybe the industry that underwrites it, the manufacturers and the cycling press and the event organizers will take the opportunity to reorient away from their intense focus on super humans performing impossible feats toward regular people having fun on bikes and using them for practical purposes.