Pro-cycling information-aholics could spend 24 hours a day exploring the cornucopia that is Twitter: 140 character tweets, attached photos, and links to blogs or other reporting which tempt like chocolate to yet more links and blogs and reporting, all of which are extremely interesting. It’s easy to find fans, experts, and pro-cyclists who offer insightful and sometimes downright funny commentary that competes with live TV coverage for your attention while a stage race like the Tour de France is underway. Here’s an example, in reaction to Alberto Contador’s premature arm pump to signal he had won today’s Tour stage:
@inrng: You know those films where a someone has a gun that jams at the crucial moment with an empty click? Reminds me of El Pistolero at the finish
(Shooting an invisible gun is Contador’s, a.k.a. El Pistolero’s, signature gesture as he crosses the finish line a winner.)
There’s so much tweeting, I decided to count the number of tweets my favorite cycling blogger / reporter-types launched during two hours today after the stage had concluded. I suspected @velochrono24h would exceed the others. While the minority of tweeps I follow are French, it’s feeling like the majority of the tweets in my timeline are in French.
@velochrono24h (in French): 9 tweets
@inrng: 3 tweets
@cyclingnewsfeed: 1 tweet
@velonews: 2 tweets
During the 2011 Tour de Suisse, @velochrono24h posted a link to video of the last few minutes of one of the stages; I copied the link and tweeted it so my followers could enjoy some live coverage. @velohrono24h replied to my tweet and thanked me in English for sharing the link. I replied in French, “You’re welcome. I would like more Americans to understand the French point of view on pro-cycling.” Does this explain why I’m taking French lessons, watching coverage of the Tour on a French cable TV channel, and so excited when French twittos reply to me?
I suspect, while this is a vast over-generalization, that American pro-cycling fans aren’t very familiar with many French coureurs (riders). I feel compelled to help them become more interested. The history of cycling in France runs so much deeper and longer than in the U.S. Of course the same can be said for probably all of the European countries, but French was the only foreign language I studied in high school and college.
Madame Petritis, our high school French teacher, always prim in a skirt and red lipstick, used to enliven vowel sound repetition with slideshows of her trips to France. The Eiffel Tower, the chateaux of the Loire Valley, Mont St. Michel – these slid one in front of the other on the white screen and I knew I wanted to see them in person. If it was this desire that made me continue to study French in college, I don’t know. I think I continued in part because it was fun to be able to express myself another way; it felt elevating. It’s kind of like having a secret code and participating in a universe others cannot see.
Of course that doesn’t mean I feel very confident when I’m practicing the language in class or on the occasions when I visit France. I’m often at a loss for words. My current teacher forbids English in our advanced French conversation class. When I can’t come up with a word, I’ll say, “um, um,” while staring desperately at classmates for help. During my Twitter expeditions I encounter many French pro-cycling expressions I need to learn. I am grateful to Alexandre Philippon, Chief Editor of @velochrono24h, who graciously replies to my questions and explains the meaning of words like “numéro,” which is not what it might seem.
I haven’t figured out yet how I want to share the French point of view on pro-cycling with Americans. Is it to study the twittos’ and French reporters’ commentary for what they notice and question? Or maybe what I really want to accomplish is sharing my love for pro-cycling in a French way. I’ve often felt I should have been born a European.
“Most opposite of a pro-cyclist: a Colorado cowboy. Both ride, but whoa, Wranglers way different from bike shorts.”
I tweeted this while thinking about a lunch with Gene, who lives in La Veta in south-central Colorado. I’m interviewing him and getting to know the area around La Veta as part of a series of essays I’m writing about small Colorado towns. Gene, an octogenarian, has worked as a cowboy; now he writes about cowboys.
When I visited Gene last week we ate in Gene’s favorite Huerfano county café, George’s Drive-Inn. It’s in nearby Walsenburg, holding up the middle of a gritty strip of shops and motels catering to travelers just off I-25. Opening the door to this breakfast and lunch eatery was like stepping into a sunrise; shiny orange Formica tables and booths reflected the late morning light. The waitresses wore cotton tops similar to 1950’s housedresses, and patrolled the tables every two minutes with full pitchers of iced-tea.
It was easy to pick out the visitors or tourists, especially the women. Their shorts and summery tees looked crisper. They were pale faces. Like me, they ordered sandwiches with vegetables stuffed inside.
Gene has been teaching me about real cowboys. For example, they always wear Wrangler’s, never Levi’s. They won’t touch chicken unless a hostess offers it to them; standard fare is beef and taters.
Gene ordered the green chili burger. I ordered a turkey Reuben. Then I scanned the plates on the other tables; four out of five contained a green chili burger in varying states of demolition.
Immediately I wished I had chosen a green chili burger; the fact that I hadn’t reinforced how different I, who had grown up in the New York City suburbs, was from the cowboy-like local folks enjoying their beef in George’s.
As we waited for our food I glimpsed a road bike on the roof of a car in the parking lot. It struck me that nothing could be further away from the cowboy aura in George’s than one of my passions, professional cycling.
Professional cycling is flashy; the cyclists, the bikes, and the team cars and buses are brightly colored, sometimes screaming neon. The folks enjoying chili burgers at George’s wore cotton, the men in long sleeved shirts and pants for protection against the sun and the brush. They bounce around in pick-ups on dirt roads or on animals who pick their way between candlestick cactus. Pro-cyclists stream along (for the most part) smooth roads on delicate carbon-fibers.
But in the week since I have seen Gene, similarities between pro-cyclists and cowboys have been asking for my attention. Both sit on saddles all day and wear something on their heads when they work. Cowboys and pro-cyclists work outside, traveling over the land, regardless of the weather. And their ability to earn a living doing what they love is under threat: for cowboys, from the breakup of large ranches into 40 acre ranchettes and from potential federal land grabs; for pro-cyclists, from sponsor reticence to support a sport associated with doping scandals. Maybe it’s because they are both in trouble that I’m so fond of both of them and the places where they work.
While I’m starting to get the feeling of Gene and cowboys, I’m still searching for my niche in the world of pro-cycling writing. To succeed, I believe I’ll need to take a cowboy approach: independence and no chicken.
In 2009 my Versus TDF fantasy team finished in the top two-to-three percent of all teams in the game. I began to think Bob Roll could use a female side-kick for TDF television commentary — someone whose main qualification was a respectable knowledge of the sport. Me for example.
The Versus (now NBC) fantasy team is a set of 15 riders you choose from among those competing in the TDF. Points accumulate to your team based on the riders’ placings in each stage; the team with the highest points wins. I believe over 20,000 teams played in the game in 2010.
As I selected my team for 2010, I rode a competence high. But it turned into an entirely different July from the year before. I started my days at work during the TDF by wandering over to a colleague and saying with a sigh, “My fantasy team sucks wind this year.”
Three of my 2010 team picks abandoned the TDF due to injuries sustained in crashes. The rules prohibit replacing riders after the game begins, so I had three less opportunities to gain points than those with fully-manned teams. Even this did not disabuse me of the suspicion that my 2009 performance was a fluke and my knowledge shallower than I had believed.
Each year since I began learning about the sport in 1995, I have absorbed more information about pro-cyclists’ individual and team strengths and weaknesses, and the strategies and tactics of road racing and how these vary by the type of course. One would think this would lead to improvements in fantasy team performance over the years.
Now on July 2nd, 2011, while excited about the TDF and another fantasy team to select, another chance to prove my prowess, I approach this year’s choice of riders with a bit of trepidation. If my team sucks two years in a row, I fear that will validate my deepest doubts about the extent of my pro-cycling knowledge — which of course could be fatal to my developing writing career on the subject.
I recall as I write this that when I worked in process improvement, I met a renowned statistician who demonstrated that all predictions are crap-shoots. So here I am effectively basing my confidence in my competence on a crap-shoot result. I wonder if the same thing happens to pro-cyclists: do they struggle with the same nonsensical assessments of their performance and possibilities based on outcomes that are highly subject to chance?
A pro-cyclist in the best form of his career could be in a great position to win a stage in the TDF, and then one of a number of things could whisk that almost-win away: a fan could take him down by turning a shoulder a few inches too far into the road, his tire could flat four km from the finish line, a cow could trot from a field into the road in front of him. Each time things like this happen the pro-cyclist must not attribute the loss to lack of core competence; he must enter the next race confident in his abilities and potential to win. The mental toughness of these athletes, whose competing ground is perhaps the least controlled among all sports, fascinates me.
Despite the crap-shoot nature of creating a high-scoring TDF fantasy team, I am studying each 2011 TDF stage to determine what type of rider could win it — pure sprinter, attacking-style hilly finisher, GC guy / climber, or break away artist. With the practice fantasy team I have chosen so far, the riders’ finishes in today’s stage 1 placed me #277 in the overall standings of the game. I haven’t figured out yet how many fantasy teams are competing. There are at least 854 because that’s where my husband ranked today.
After he shares his ranking with me, I remind him I’ve learned almost all I know about bike racing from him. I don’t tell him my Thai massage therapist once said I can get psychic “hits” about who is going to win.
It felt like stealing if I asked him for something. And yet this opportunity might never come again.
Over an hour ago, the last rider had crossed the Sacramento finish line of stage 2 in the 2011 Tour of California. Fans spilled from behind barricades into the street to admire the race jersey winners as they raised their arms in victory salutes on stage and received sandwich kisses from two newly-lipsticked podium girls in high heels. Nearly all of the spectators left afterwards to pay attention to the next things in their lives. The streets around the state capitol returned to an empty late afternoon quiet.
On a side street around the corner from the stage, several people stood near a white tent and a long RV with its motor running. A Leopard-Trek team car was parked across the alley. Whenever a group of people lingers an hour after a stage race near a tent, it could mean something interesting, namely, someone worth waiting for. I walked up to a young Asian man and asked, “Who are you waiting for?”
“Andy Schleck is in there,” he said, nodding his head toward the RV. I had found doping control headquarters. Even though he hadn’t won the race today, Andy had apparently been chosen for a random test. I mentioned that I thought 15 minutes ago I had seen Ben Swift here, the race leader on Team Sky. Something had kept me from approaching him. The young man said, “Too bad you missed him. He was there for the taking.”
“It feels odd trying to catch a guy for an autograph after he’s peed in a cup,” I said.
Another guy said, “I know. But they’re probably used to it.”
That’s when I started to question if it was right to wait there to accost Andy Schleck as he exited the doping RV that held him up from a hot shower, dinner, and resting in his hotel room, not to mention talking to family or friends who were preparing for the funeral of one of his Leopard-Trek team members, Wouter Weylandt, who had died after crashing on a descent in the Giro just days before.
After twenty minutes I stepped back from the street for a break from sooty RV exhaust. A blond woman a few feet from the RV held a camera in the same position by her face that I had found her in when I arrived. I asked the Asian guy, “How can she hold that up for so long? Don’t her arms hurt?”
“When you’re used to it,” he said, “it doesn’t hurt. You want to be ready.”
I checked my phone, which was out of power. So much for a photograph. I searched my fanny pack for a piece of blank paper and pulled it out with a pen so I’d be ready.
What was I after, anyway? Was it just an autograph, or to be able to announce when I got back home, “Guess who I met?” Stalkers, that’s what we were.
Maybe I wasn’t that terrible. After all, my presence here was a by-product of someone else’s decision to call Andy for a random test. Maybe you implicitly agreed to packs of fans following you everywhere when you became a professional athlete; maybe it was a good thing, a sign of your popularity and ultimately marketability.
Forty-five minutes after I had arrived, Andy Schleck appeared. The bib portion of his bike shorts hung around his hips. His jersey angled up on the left to reveal a slice of pale skin on those hips, as if he had yanked on a shirt while running out of the house late to see some friends.
Andy signed a couple of photos and headed to the team car. Breathless, I clutched paper and pen but still hadn’t decided what I would say if I got next to him and was about to give up as he placed his hand on the car door. A young woman wearing a Leopard-Trek jersey asked him for a photo. It took a couple of tries for the guy taking the photo to get it right, which afforded me time to move right behind the guy.
Andy now faced me. “Andy,” I said. As I spoke his eyes moved down to my turquoise pendant and cross, then back up to meet my eyes. “I just wanted to say, I’m very sorry about Wouter.”
“Thank you,” he said. “We keep fighting.” I brushed his bicep with my hand as he turned to slide into the car.
I stepped back onto the sidewalk, thinking, oh my God, I just touched Andy Schleck. I regretted not asking for an autograph. But it felt right not ask for something, and in doing so I received a gift I hadn’t conceived of an hour ago, worth way more than a scribble on a piece of paper — an exchange of words I could cradle in my heart and never lose.
Moto cameras zoomed in regularly on Scarponi during the 2011 Giro d‘Italia. “Look at his fuzzies,” I said to my husband, referring to Scarponi’s thick chest hair visible above the lowered zipper of his jersey.
“He’s Italian,” my husband Donald said.
The third time I mentioned Scarponi‘s fuzzies, Donald said, “OK, that’s enough about Scarponi’s chest hair.”
I laughed. Donald was on to me, but he had the wrong man. I said, “I’m just surprised with all that chest hair that he hasn’t shaved his chest.”
It all started with another Italian, Ivan Basso. To advertise my love of pro-cycling I tacked up in my cubicle a poster of Ivan I had pulled out of VeloNews’ Tour de France issue. Of course I placed it where I could admire his hazel eyes. Why Ivan? Yes, it had something to do with him being Italian; I preferred the sound of “Ciao, Bella,” over anything my boss might say. It was also about the time Ivan’s mom had been fighting cancer.
One morning that July I woke up from a dream that featured Ivan. I mentioned it to Donald. Whenever the TDF cameras focused on Ivan after that, Donald referred to him as “your boyfriend.” Since Donald knows things about me before I do, I owned up to the fact that I had a long distance crush. Ivan Basso was my first pro-cyclist fantasy boyfriend.
Until a few months ago, I thought I was the only married woman who hung onto every word of a certain pro-cyclist’s tweets. At the 2011 Tour of California start in Auburn, a woman I met who was also there to study the stage start for one of the towns hosting the first USA Pro Cycling Challenge clasped her hand on my shoulder. “Oh my God, there’s George,” she said. The announcer on the sign-in stage had pulled George Hincapie aside and begun to interview him. “My friend is crazy about him,” she said, “I’ve got to get a photo.”
“You have no idea how relieved I am.” I said. “I thought I was the only one with a pro-cyclist fantasy boyfriend.”
“Oh no,” she said, “all of my friends have one.”
Why is it we swoon at the sight of pro-cyclists who, with 5% body fat, might not be physically appealing to many women? Even if they are tall, they are amazingly thin, their hips extraordinarily narrow, their arms slender stems (look at Jani Brajkovic, whose TT skinsuit flaps in the wind on his bicep).
I think once a female cyclist begins to understand the extreme physical and mental efforts these athletes dish out, their suffering garners a special corner in her heart. Even if you weren’t a cheerleader in high school, even if you aren’t a mother, that mothering cheerleaderish feminine instinct compels you to do everything you can to ensure they get through the ordeal of a stage race. You start to feel protective over their well-being. You want to rescue them from their suffering. You study their tweets to identify their favorite cake.
In 2008 my husband and I traveled to France for the TDF. We stood on the road up Hautacam about three kilometers from the finish line and watched Andy Schleck grind by alone, behind the GC pack, with six inches of saliva hanging from his mouth. This secured his place as my second pro-cyclist fantasy boyfriend.
At this year’s Tour of California, I talked with Andy. I’m beginning to think there’s something wrong with cameras. He’s much cuter in person.
ProVéloPassion 