In college, I briefly and unsuccessfully raced bikes, a humbling experience that taught me that the dog in me was not of requisite size to hang with anyone who wasn't a middling amateur. Every part of racing was a drain, from being nervously sardine-packed alongside dozens of other gangly 20-year-olds to figuring out when to burn energy and when to chill in the pack so that I actually had energy to burn. I never won anything or even came close, though loving bike racing means loving the draining stuff. That's all you can count on.
This is the right way to think about professional cycling, and really any form of racing. Think about this sort of competitive framework seriously enough, and you rub up against the limits of describing or thinking about racing in cold, analytical language. Easy and forgivable as it is to roll one's eyes at a conception of bike racing rooted in romantic notions like bravery, or the virtues of suffering with dignity, those do form the competitive substrate of the sport. Like most racing sports, cycling is foremost a pain tolerance contest. Strategic thinking is centered on how to trick other people into suffering more than you. How could you not think about guts, in both usages?
Which brings us to this month's Defector Reads a Book Selection: Tim Krabbé's 1978 novel The Rider. Krabbé tells the seemingly simple story of a single, 137-kilometer club bike race, the "sweetest, toughest race of the season." The frame is a first-person retelling of the race, from the climbs to the sounds of his competitor's labored breathings, from the grim-faced farmers watching him suffer to the number of figs he puts in his jersey pocket right before the start of the race. Krabbé's prose, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett, is romantic but completely unsparing, as he dedicates himself to laying bare all the lies people tell themselves about racing, lies told to ameliorate the pain of losing.
I will be honest: Picking this book is a naked attempt to goad my colleagues and this website's readers into paying more attention to cycling. Hopefully, it shakes something loose.
Anyway, to determine the success or failure of that initiative and to get into the book, DRAB will convene back around these parts June 5, which should be plenty of time to read this slim, utterly propulsive novel. You can grab a copy here.
