Stand Up For Your DNA!

In cycling, as in all sports, modern training techniques and media money have professionalized the approach of riders at the top of the sport's pyramid (and those trying to ascend it), allowing cyclists to target their peak fitness for the right parts of the season. This is a good thing. However, it also raises the stakes for every endeavor they engage in, because any injury can mean rehab time, lost revenue, and a potentially shortened or diminished career. Today's cyclists are better than their predecessors, but at a smaller number of things. Why didn't Lance Armstrong ever try to set the hour record? Why doesn't Fabian Cancellara?¹ I've spent an inordinate amount of time recently thinking about how great it would be if someone were to put on an elite two-man time trial. Who would team up? Would Spartacus and Tony Martin blow up the field? Would partnerships be on nationality, team, or just friendship? Whatever happened to motor-paced races? Cycling has decided that it's highest ranks should compete in peloton-based road races, with a few individual time trials, and team time trials in long stage races, and nothing else. That is thoroughly understandable, but also a shame.

1: To be fair, he has stated his intention to do so several times over the past couple years. But the fact that he hasn't despite wanting to for some time shows how strong the incentives are to occupy himself in other ways.

Which is why I'm so heartened that not one but two of the men who etched their names in this year's Tour de France have taken up the mantle not of their team or nation, but of their race. Both Thomas Voeckler and Johnny Hoogerland raced trotting horses to fight for the racing honor of the human race.



Voeckler, who clung to the maillot jaune for ten days through skill, cunning, grit, and grind, followed his glorious July with his horse race in August. He took on thoroughbred Othello Bourbon² in a best of three challenge. The race was a 380 meter straight shot, with each racer being allowed a flying start. Voeckler pipped his opponent in the first leg, but was unable to hold off his foe in the other two.

2: Somebody, anybody please name your son Othello Bourbon. With a name like that, he is destined to find fame and fortune, though perhaps also an unhappy end...

Johnny Hoogerland, whose TdF heroism was largely thrust upon him in the guise of a car accident, engaged in a similar contest this week. As part of some manner of Dutch fundraiser to combat some form of children's cancer³, he raced trotter Unforgettable in an identical best-of-three fight. As if these things were scripted, he too won the first leg, but then was trounced in the next two.

3: Come to No Fours for all your hard-hitting, translated-from-the-Dutch-by-Google news!

Voeckler and Hoogerland, of course, are not the right men to win such a race. If you were earnestly trying to give homo sapiens a fighting chance, you'd pick a Mark Cavendish or an Andre Greipel to churn out the watts over that short distance. But anyone who gets overearnest about a man racing a horse is perhaps missing the point. The point is that it's happening, and that is far more important than who wins. I want cyclists racing horses. I want derny-led street racing. Get a little kooky every now and then, cycling; the sport is richer for it.

The Fist

The fist clenched round my heart
loosens a little, and I gasp
brightness; but it tightens
again. When have I ever not loved
the pain of love? But this has moved

past love to mania. This has the strong
clench of the madman, this is
gripping the ledge of unreason, before
plunging howling into the abyss.

Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.
--Derek Walcott

Variation #2: Johnny Hoogerland

"When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real being - dynamic figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior. Since the spectacle's job is to use various specialized mediations in order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates the sense of sight to the special pre-eminence once occupied by touch: the most abstract and easily deceived sense is the most readily adaptable to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. But the spectacle is not merely a matter of images, nor even of images plus sounds. It is whatever escapes people's activity, whatever eludes their practical reconsideration and correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation becomes independent, the spectacle regenerates itself."

Thesis 18, "Society of the Spectacle", by Guy DeBord

There is one thing I've been avoiding in all my discussion of heroism, and that is other people. To be a hero, you don't just have to go through hell, you also have to go through Sartre's hell.

Johnny Hoogerland had heroism thrust upon him, which is to say he is very unlucky indeed. When he and Juan Antonio Flecha were sideswiped by a mishandled car, he was flung upside down at about 30 mph through a barbed wire fence. Not for the squeamish:



He untangled himself, replaced his tattered bib and jersey, and was given some gauze and a functional bike, which he pedaled another 36.5 km to the finish line on shredded legs. From the finish line he went to the podium: in the course of the breakaway leading up to the crash, he had earned enough points to take the lead in the king of the mountains classification. From the podium he went to the hospital, where he was given 33 stitches and quite a lot of painkillers. He hardly slept. As Red Kite Prayer so nicely put it, "Not that climbing out of barbed wire and riding our bike even five miles is impossible—no, the point is that to most of us such an act is unthinkable.... no bike race I might conceivably win has the power to redefine me so completely as a person that getting back on the bike becomes a reasonable sacrifice. After all, that’s what we’re talking about. Getting back on the bike is a sacrifice; in doing so, you are giving up a level of wound care and pain relief that are the first priority to the rest of us."



This disconnect and the striking image of Hoogerland falling over a startling horizontal distance into the barbed wire are what turned Johnny Hoogerland into an icon, and thus into a hero. Heroism is socially mediated: without press, a hero is only another brave person. Ultimately, it's not about what they do, it's about what we do with what they do. Though two men were struck by that car and both continued the race, no one wrote "it doesn’t matter whether you are you – average, anonymous you – or Juan Antonio Fucking Flecha"; cycling websites didn't publish hospital photos of Flecha. I'm not ignoring the gap in the severity of their injuries, but if that were the only metric, Flecha would be getting at least some coverage too. The dude got hit by a car too, after all, and landed hard on the road. But Hoogerland fucking flew into that fence, and where the practical impact their respective injuries had on their joints and muscles is unknowable, the blood dripping down Johnny's calves was unmistakable. The tearful podium presentation to cap it off was so dramatic and so neat a conclusion that even the slightest whiff of artifice would have spoiled it. But who could be so crass? There's nothing cheesy about a real person getting really hurt.



And this is where Johnny Hoogerland's story eludes DeBord's broader critiques. There is certainly an element of the consumerist spectacle in the crash and its conceptual fallout: the passive, entranced crowd on "Society of the Spectacle's" cover, their goggles united in a flat, single angle of perspective could easily be watching that crash footage. But for all its mesmeric imagistic power, there is some buffer for social reality underlying this particular spectacle. Because this isn't about his cycling style, or anything anyone said or wrote or planned. This is about getting hurt and that is the most universal thing of all. In that sense, the crux of Johnny Hoogerland's story is the simple, irreducible fact that he is a man.

Chapeau

The Atlantic's In Focus blog has two posts up of photos from the Tour de France that I can only describe as lush. Whatever your opinion of the competition, there are few sporting events that can hold a candle to the scenery of the TdF. Do you like bike racing? Do you like beautiful pictures? You won't regret clicking through.

Part I:

Part II: