Cycling

The ground is shifting.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Life’s busy, eh? Sometimes so busy that the MASSIVE ISSUES that sprung up either through SENSATIONAL BOOKS or profound, deep conversations have just wafted around in the ether like smoke – or like smoke that teases, or threatens to draw you in – rather than being ‘addressed’. (Whatever that means). I kinda like that life can be chock-full of undeniably seminal stuff that somehow contrives to drop down low, low in the list of priorities because the allegedly everyday swamps it. That’s both appalling and charming somehow, right? Can’t sort out the meaning of such-and-such, despite it’s marvellous heft because the bed-linen needs sorting, or the ailing dog just may need checking on, or the team for Sunday needs bunging up on the Whatsapp. Hang on: what about the revelatory import of that, or the mind-boggling measure of this?

I need to be specific but that may also undermine the very abstract (or abstracted?) nature of the mad-wonderness of what goes on. Let’s start with a book, briefly.

Top Raging Intellect and buddy of mine points me at ‘A Death in the Family’, Knaussgaard. My own family baggage may be in play but wow what a blast (of something, of everything) that was! Traumatically compelling but also deeply fortifying; probably on account of the undeniable brilliance *of the writing*, (whatever that means). Dark and deeeep and relentless but also pulling us through, yes? To a place where we are enriched, despite being bloody and exhausted, probably having devoured the 400 pages in the minimum possible time-frame. Emerging to nearly think excoriatingly deeply about x or y, but then yaknow, the washing got in the way.

But great book: surely, truly a great book? May go at it again within a day or two; domestic shite permitting.

So there was that, impinging deeply and then not, and there was also sporty stuff – there always is.

Look we need to light a fire under the loony impostor that is X; we know that. But I’ve always maintained that the Twitters can be tremendously uplifting (and even civilising) because if you offer good energy and make intelligent choices then fabulous, interesting people reveal themselves to you. Amongst the absolute donkeys. That happened again.

Cycling. Tour then Vuelta. Immersed and also dipping in there. Love the wild scenery, the filmic drama, the bewildering strategising, the ridicu-effort. Almost yearn (if that’s a thing) for untramelled belief in the sport of it – the who won, the who dug impossibly deep and found something special. But the buts are big, yes?

I’m not close to this – meaning I’m not even a club-level rider – so *being sure* has been at issue. For years. Watching Roglic and Evenepoel and Pogacar and Vingegaard perform to a superhuman level and wondering. Being unable to trust it, despite a lifetime of loving and believing in sport – despite being culturally behind the power of spinning legs and bursting hearts. Godammit. Feel the effort, here. Can we not just ignore that doubt? Just pretend?

Nope. Not after reading ‘The Art of Cycling’ and exchanging tweets (I know, I know!!) with James Hibbard, author and philosopher and (oh), former elite-level cyclist.

*Inserts: the bloke’s prob’ly getting some zeds in CaliforNIAAY as I write. I’ve messaged him to see how comfortable he might be with being outed as an authority and Man of Ideas around this. Typically I’m blasting on regardless before hearing back*. (Later heard back. he’s cool with this).

Firstly I loved Jimmy Lad’s book. Strongly recommend to anybody with an interest in thinking, never mind cycling/philosophy/psychology/soulfulness/ethics and the other wee corners of humanity that the fella digs into. Secondly, the twittering.

Muskrat’s enclave is still a place where decent people can quietly revolt… by exchanging perdy decent ideas in an agreeable way. By discoursing. We did that and I learned. (For fairness and to avoid litigation – lols – let me say here that not all of the following arose from conversations with James. But some new knowledge certainly did: and some of the rest was extrapolated out, or results from Yours F Truly stretching his cranial wotsits or curiosity towards other sources). It’s been good… and challenging… and may not have unmuddied the waters entirely. But healthy. On.

James was a pro rider and on the US track cycling team, back in the days when (says he as if those days are over) use of EPO and/or similar was widespread. Hibbard, alongside Paul Kimmage went public with fears and truths that remain relevant – not just in theoretical/moral/ethical terms but in relation to how cycling actually is now. In short, JH is clear that recent performances by leading riders have been ‘physiologically impossible’ without doping. He is similarly clear, much to our mutual regret, that the culture of lying persists. Cycling is still not just unclean but brazen. Hibbard argues that because this has gone on for decades – anti-doping technology (or will to prosecute?) being so-o far behind the use and masking of performance enhancement – that the whole eco-system is damaged. Specifically, there is no way that young riders entering the elite arena can expect to remain clean and succeed. (Or vice-versa).

Having read ‘The Art of Cycling’, I am in no doubt that Hibbard is a good man: a student of philosophy; a Proper Athlete and a man of reason. His arguments are compelling – even when they run on towards solutions that he himself admits are challenging. There’s a danger when reducing BIG ARGUMENTS but he is on record as saying that because the generational culture of deceit has been so meretricious, so tawdry and so subversive of all sporting values, we may need to re-set, to get real. Whilst it may feel better and maybe more comforting to up the ante (yet again) on prevention, this is simply not gonna work. So maybe (yes, with a heavy heart) opt for what Hibbard calls an F1-style regulated environment, where doping is tolerated and monitored – in order to keep athletes safe.

Your distaste for this may be the same as mine was. But cop this:

I think the interesting part is just how to go about making sports as beautiful and culturally useful as possible for young athletes.

(This from a message, on the Twitters).

In other words, we are both power-of-sport lovers and romantics: not guys looking to capitulate around our defence of ‘purity’. Hibbard is reluctantly driven there because the reality is so poisoned and the remedies will be corrupted in the same old ways of old. The tradition for what us Brits call diabolical porkies runs too strong, is too resistant to our goddam decency.

Look. The Vuelta and the Tour de France are getting bigger in every sense. Stages are massive and arguably more painful – what with monumental distances and intermediate sprints etc etc. The window of possibility for clean sport is closing as the conspiracy gets deeper and darker and more relentlessly obdurate. We’re all already perverted. To move on, we may need to think the unthinkable – or just do it.

Hibbard again:

I think I weigh the harms like this: sport as an F1 like operation with an athlete and responsible medical staff is not ideal, but athletes/teams doing all of it in dangerous ways to avoid detection with poor psychological consequences for both PED users and clean riders is worse.

Finally, zoom out, because we’re not just talking about cycling here. Other sports have dopers. What about this idea that we the sentient universe *actually might* host a kind of enhanced games, where events are open to performance-enhanced athletes? (Blimey: another worrying lurch on the god-forbid-ometer, surely? Automatic recoil mode engaged). And yet, if medically overseen, is this not where we’re moving – or being shifted?

I’m just about the daftest sports-romantic I know. But I hear the arguments.

Remember this… before you get on yer bike. Nicole Cooke.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ 1 Comment

Nicole Cooke is relatively unknown, which slightly troubles me. Or if I stop to think about it, it does. Because then I/we have to consider just why a recent World Road Race and Olympic Champion at a sport which is now megatastically at the heart of TeamGB’s New Model Army is so… unrespected; generally.

Cooke was not as likely as (say) Pendleton to attract the adjective ‘lush’, perhaps. Could that be it? Is this key to her escape from our role-call of stars? Or (bizarrely?) the fact she is Welsh born? Or perhaps she simply but foolishly got her dates mixed up; being a real, majestic and irresistible force in her sport just a year or two before that sport – cycling, if you really hadn’t sorted that – landed so explosively in our family-sized bowl of Dorito’s.

In 2008, in one of the most remarkable and, for me, full-on blood-from-heart-drainingly poignant moments in recent sporting memory, an exhausted Cooke hoiked and blasted to victory in the Beijing rain. Rarely has the deep been so dug. She then followed up her olympian Olympic Gold with a World Road Race victory just a few weeks later. Now that may all trip rather glibly off the tongue but it does, nevertheless, represent something really special. As does the fact that she won 3 different World Junior titles – mountain bike/time trial/road race in the same year (2001.) But the accumulation of those two most senior of the senior titles seven years later constitutes a unique achievement in the history of cycling – men or women’s. And given that the pressures around these racing monuments – never mind the sheer physical effort – are utterly World-Cuply/Masters-final-greenly massive, we have to respect this athlete. Properly.

Anyone who saw and felt the quality of these two victories, encompassing as they did that stunning and defining range of champion grit and sublime athletic prowess, would already be fully on-side with my own adulation here. She gave everything, she showed us everything – she won out. Cooke was then, in every sense, a genuine world-beater.

However, many amongst The Great Un-oiled really might legitimately have missed either these or other(s) of Cooke’s serial triumphs on account of their absence from the primest of prime-time television. Cycling – in particular road racing – being a bona fide minority sport right up until a certain mod cruised his Vespa-replacement Module down the Champs- Elysees last year. Prior to that we did have gods on wheels-without-engines but the likes of Hoy and Pendleton tended to flash in and out of our consciousness on a weird, non-populist and only semi-registering basis, largely coincident with that five ring extravaganza. And is it just me, or is it somehow easier to get all steamed up and passionate about something happening in a noisy, nerve-janglacious velodrome? Open roads are different.

Let’s deny the oxygen of publicity to dumbstuff notions of relative ‘attractiveness’, anyway. Cooke was strong; she had a relentlessly powerful cadence on the bike rather than electrifying sprint speed. She had authority, consistency, presence – she absolutely competed. Nicole Cooke won two Tour de France titles and a Giro d’Italia as well as gawd knows how many British titles (10, I think) and World Cup racing events. She could and did dominate. And you buggers really should have noticed. Oh… and she did it clean.

As a travelling pro’ rider, the temptations were there. As a young woman (18/19?) Cooke was dolloped amongst the elite of the Women’s racing posse, an exposed and significant talent, fresh out of school, making her way in a tough and it turns out diabolically cynical world. In her retirement statement, delivered this week (essential read), she details being confronted with the requirement, as a ‘good team member’ to indulge in drug use on more than one occasion. But Cooke is emphatic that she, at least, rode clean throughout her long career.

There is a reflection on a watershed moment when (post a long chat with Dad) dubious bottles were thrown from the team fridge; by her; in a me-or-them stand-off. (The kind of defiance which cost her in an era when using EPO or other stimulants was deemed essential by the team-makers.) Team ethics and team procedures being typically shambolic – up to and including conventions regarding the regular payment of riders – the standard mode amongst the peloton appears to have been one of acquiescence… to just sticking the needles in, to stay competitive. The consequences for those stubborn or bold enough to cut across the conventional wisdoms were brutal. You either got sacked from the team, or you didn’t get paid. There were periods in her illustrious career where this particular, strong-willed World Number One athlete either did not get paid, or had to sue to obtain her daily bread. Partly no doubt, because she was kindof trouble when it came to substance abuse. Or the not doing of it.

During the years of travel, training and competition – even at the most elevated level – money, by comparison with many other sports, was laughably poor. (A moments reflection will not I think bring to mind too many sports where the very best in the world fear that they will actually get paid at all, never mind be remunerated proportionate to their talents.) Nicole Cooke, to repeat, the finest woman rider in the world for part of the mid-to-late nineties, had to fight for her money… and the money was ordinary.

Now, after that cruel zoning out period where invincibility fades, she has signed off. And in what seems likely to be an authentic farewell to her sport, Cooke has spoken out against the cheats. Armstrong, obviously, but also those in the women’s side of the sport that denied her, personally – and it does sounds personal.

Her statement is at once proud and understandably laced with bitterness. Because she knows she pumped those pistons bravely and honestly. She knows that she – very much with her parents help – drove hard, cleared the path for a better, more professional, slightly more equitable women’s tour. In the early days the Cookes seem to have bundled the British Cycling Federation into inventing events where previously there were none; girls events, which Nicole promptly extravagantly won – won with such undeniable force that further events, higher grade events were an absolute necessity. And thus both Nicole Cooke and women’s cycling in Britain grew up.

We’re nearing hagiography here and I don’t want that. Cooke may not have been widely loved; not necessarily because of her stance against doping. Lizzie Armistead (also a truly elite Brit rider) once said something rather biting about her; that (effectively) she never rode for anyone else. (In a sport where the concept of real unity and indeed selflessness is wonderfully expressed, such an opinion might be damning.) However it is likely the comment was meant more as a minor(?) personal slight than – for example – some profound dig at her ‘purity’ re the drugs. Whatever its meaning, if we think of many a stand-out sportsman or woman it’s hardly a killer gripe. Is it too surreal to bring a certain G Boycott into the equation here? And do he and Nicole share a certain slightly spookily brilliant single-mindedness, I wonder? Certainly there were nowt wrong with ‘er applicay-shun, anyroad.

Of course Armstrong may have been similar in this respect. All-consuming, desirous, physically incredible. But he got greedy, or low, or paranoid and… he cheated. As (allegedly) did the Canadian Genevieve Jeanson – named and shamed in Cooke’s retirement statement. The mature 29 year-old from Swansea, formerly of Cardiff Ajax Cycling Club condemns both in her statement, and the culture they went along with. Because they robbed her, because they brought disgrace to her wonderful sport – the one she’d poured seventeen years of her life right into.

In a week where the media have fallen right in behind Armstrong’s choreographed ‘apology’ it seems especially offensive that the retirement of a genuinely world-class British athlete has been so little heard or appreciated. Absurd if you consider how high the profile of our cycling heroes has risen and how much (really) Nicole Cooke did to prepare the way for elite women’s cycling in particular. She was, by a distance, the best in the world. And now if she gets a column inch it will surely be over comments relating to Armstrong and his fellow dope(r)s. She deserves more, she deserved more.