Vélo moralitas

Yesterday I droned on and on about how cycling is more than a sport and how, even though the sport of professional cycling is currently mired in an agonizing act of self flagellation, there is redemption through the recognition of the value of the bicycle in leisure and transportation. I believe that. But it’s also true that I am somewhat in morning for the sport I love. I’m not saddened by the realization that the heroes of the sport are cheaters, as may be the case with many of my fellow fans. What makes me sad is that the sport has to endure this punishing mea culpa, this melodrama, this masochistic show of faux humility for the benefit of the same type of hypocritical audience for which every witch hunt is enacted.

USADA discovers doping in the pro peloton.

Though we may find it unfortunate, mere mortals are incapable of performing superhuman feats. Period. Sure, the equipment manufacturers would like you to think that their increasingly stiff bottom brackets can give any weekend suburbanite the ability to dance up the Tourmalet without breaking a sweat; likewise the marketers of training systems and nutrition supplements, the shoes with carbon fiber soles and the wind tunnel tested jerseys. But it’s all bullshit. Anybody who has ever spent any time on a bike knows that performance improvements just don’t come in exponential leaps and bounds. And anybody who can make sense of a graph ought to know that athletes long ago far exceeded the limits of human physiology.

But we Americans are eternal virgins; the descendents of Puritans, endlessly capable of re-growing our moral hymens, of regaining our innocence. We forget that the year before Armstrong started winning we had the Festina affair or that the sport has been riddled with cheating from the very beginning. How do we do it? How do we continue to believe in fairy tales despite all evidence to the contrary? And maybe more importantly, why would we want to? How can we be so naïve?

We have the same problem with so many of our societal problems, it blows my mind and makes me think psychosis is an integral part of the American character. And what should disturb us is that our false belief in moral purity, in Plato’s form of the good, causes actual damage. Our righteous moralizing blinds us to the true flawed nature of our species and as we point our accusatory fingers at the Other, we somehow manage to ignore the horrors right in our own houses. 

If we are able to pretend that people can stop wanting to get stoned, we can just spend ridiculous sums of money putting enormous numbers of non-violent citizens in jail, thereby destroying families and whole communities. Yet global pharmaceutical companies make obscene profits keeping the rest of us drugged up and we don’t seem to have a problem with it as long as insurance covers our antidepressants and boner pills.

And if we can pretend that priests and scout masters and coaches and teachers can stop abusing children, that they are some sort of rare aberration, a extraordinary satanic abomination, instead of admitting that such admittedly abhorrent behavior is well within the bounds of common human behavior and then putting processes and policies in place to actually protect children. 

We substitute a desire to pretend we’re not all perverts of one stripe or another while we let the dangerous ones, the real predators continue to diddle the youth. Why? Because we can’t admit to ourselves that wanting to get blasted and have sex is central to the human experience, but that some of us color outside the lines and we have to keep them within the limits of healthy, non-destructive self expression. Instead, we clap the deviants in irons, pretend that good and evil are absolute and wait to be surprised by the next incident.

I just wish we could be honest about the whole thing, rather than burning down the entire village to eradicate the witches and pretending the purge will make us pure again.

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.

Rope-a-dope

In 2004 I went to Belgium to watch a certain man from Texas ride around Europe in his tights. I saw the first five stages of that year’s Tour de France. I watched the prologue in Liege from a bridge over the Meuse river. Do you recall who won that prologue? An obscure young racer called Fabian Cancellara. That’s right - Spartacus hisself! But as we now know, nobody actually won the race that year. Interestingly, nobody won second in the Mountains classification or eighth in the Points classification either.

There has always been cheating in cycling and there always will be. Right from the very first Tour. Hell, doping predates the Tour. It's one of the most venerable traditions in the sport! And the youngsters these days have no imagination at all, what with their vampiric transfusions and the E-P-O. 

Was there a rule against putting your bike on a train?

Now everything in the sport hangs by a thread. Money will abandon the teams (Rabobank already gone!) and the riders will all be suspected of doping. Perhaps professional cycling will somehow rise again from the ashes after several years of mea culpas in the wilderness. I don’t know.

Maybe we will forget again. Maybe we will stop caring. In the coming days of gene doping we will look back on the era of blood doping and EPO as quaint. I don’t know what can be done about it all.

I think I’ll just go ride my bike.

Nobody wins

Well there it is. Nobody won the Tour de France between 1999 and 2005

Lance A Lot

Zulle, Ullrich, Beloki, Basso & Kloeden

Well, Lance Armstrong stepped down as Chairman of his LiveStrong charity. Last week Johan Bruyneel stepped down as Director of Team RadioShack – Nissan – Trek. Apparently a whole host of former riders and teammates dropped the dime on Lance, including George Hincapie, Levi Leipheimer, Frankie Andreu,  Jonathan Vaughters, Christian Vande Velde and Dave Zabriski. He has subsequently been dropped by Nike and most of his other sponsors.

Now, I personally lean toward Malcomb Gladwell’s view of the scandal, but am completely sympathetic to those who feel that rulz is rulz. Whatever you think of Armstrong, it is a sad day for those of us who love the sport of cycling. Contrary to what some may believe, this will not be good for the sport. Levi has already been fired for his admission. Others will probably suffer.

And this won’t make the sport one bit cleaner. Cheating has been part of the sport since the very beginning, and if you think EPO and blood doping are troubling, just wait till you see gene doping. All the cool kids will be doing it. And we should expect them to. It is not in their interest to do otherwise. And with our ever regenerating innocence we will once again express our eternal outrage that athletes would do everything possible to push their bodies past the natural laws of biology simply to become the idols our culture worships. 

Hey, I’ve got an idea – why don’t we teach our children to worship authors, artists, doctors, engineers and teachers and tell them the last thing we would ever want them to grow up to be is a professional athlete. Or we could admit to ourselves that just like investment bankers, athletes will do anything to win, regardless of the consequences.