Brandy: Let me start by saying thank you, Patrick, for picking this book. I enjoyed it enormously. I will also now immediately display ingratitude by ignoring what you said in your lovely introductory essay and say that I read this book as a metaphor. Specifically, it felt to me of a piece with another genre of slim, semi-autobiographical volume from a European writer: an account of a woman being driven to madness by an obsession for which she is willing to suffer, by which I mean, of course, being catastrophically in love with some guy. The way Tim Krabbé is alternately so clear-eyed and willing to lie to himself, the debasement followed by the self-aggrandizement, the devotion unto despair … these all felt quite familiar to me as a fan of that other genre of book!
Kathryn: It’s funny, Brandy, because I also experienced it as a semi–psychological horror, though for the same reasons that Patrick mentions in his essay, in terms of how narrow the focus of the novel is on the act of competition. Absent projection or meaning-making, the emotional extremes of competitiveness wind up being so petty and ugly and ignoble—which is useful to be reminded of as I’ve gotten into more of the fucked-up, suffering-based sports out there (tennis, the concept of Marc Márquez in MotoGP). Though I am also beginning to believe that cycling is just psychological horror.
Patrick: Totally agree on both points there, and I think that is the stuff that keeps me watching and loving professional cycling. The most interesting thing about all sports, to me, is losing, and cycling is so great because almost everyone loses almost every single race they will ever enter, and also the very act of racing is both very fraught—you could just fall and crack your collarbone at any second—and very physically exhausting. Riders must necessarily self-delude and try stuff they know will fail, because what else is there to do but accept it with dignity, which Krabbe writes, at the end of the book, is the only real failure. His prose is so unsparing, to the point that I started to doubt whether this book would actually serve as a good onramp to get you guys into bike stuff. You would be justified to think Damn, you live like this?
Brandy: What is the point of reading a book if not to ask Damn, you live like this? In fairness, I’m not exactly sure I would say I “get” bike racing all that much more than I “get” people who free solo or ride big waves or do anything else that seems to me either utterly alien or the most human a person can possibly be. And on purely the sentence level there was, at first, a bit of alienation with the terminology in here. The book is obviously translated from the Dutch but it’s not translated from the racer, so it took me a minute to decide I should just let that wash over me and try to pick up what I could from the tone of the surrounding words. (I think I did okay.)
David: I would not say that it “got me into” cycling. But I agree that it was a fascinating look into a sport that still seems like unforgivably and unfathomably Dutch to me in a number of ways, just insofar as it illuminated the specific psychosis of the people who commit themselves fully to this sport that I do not really know or care about.
Also just as a feat of sportswriting I thought it was pretty astonishing. I don’t read a lot of sportswriting about sports that I don’t really care about, for the obvious don’t-care reason but also because I feel like I don’t really know how to care about those sports, and so feel like I wouldn’t really know how to process even good writing about it. (The whole not-knowing-how-to-care bit is a fallacy, and something I’m working on.) But all that aside this book really hit for me, because of the aforementioned body-horror aspects and because of the extremely high literary quality. I didn’t understand all of it and I “got” even less, but I was locked in throughout. It is, in the best ways but also in ways that are at times kind of overwhelming and uncomfortable, an incredibly urgent chronicle of an unpleasant experience.
Kathryn: There was a lot of coming across a term or a proper noun—so many proper nouns!—and not being able to immediately grasp the meaning, or knowing if the person being discussed was a real or made-up guy. Which, turns out, some of the guys are real! Though something the book does well, especially with all the names, is not letting you get mired down in all of them. Part of it is how it recalls these people the same way people recall sporting history—name, date, event, anecdote—or Remember Some Guys™. There are some really good “unfathomably Dutch” names in there too. Wout Wagtmans.
Patrick: They don’t want me to talk about Taco van der Hoorn, Pepijn Reinderink, or Roel van Sintmaartensdijk…
Kathryn: I’ve wound up watching some cycling breakdown videos and it was a bit like being slapped every single time I heard a name said after only having read it before. Did not know that Vingegaard and Pogačar were pronounced like that, but now I do.
David: This is a good place to introduce the broader public to one of Patrick’s greatest running workplace bits, which is periodically dropping the name of some outlandish Low Countries cycling guy into Slack. I am talking to you here about men named Snoot Ten Dork or Wout Van Der Throat. I’ve seen, in these messages, things you people wouldn’t believe.
And that was basically the only context I had for it going in, beyond reading Patrick’s blogs and having written some stories about doping and Lance Armstrong years ago. I was waiting, while reading The Rider, for guys with consecutive U’s in their name, but sadly all of the characters—such as they are—have pretty normal European names. But this leads me into something else that impressed me about the book, which is how despite being lodged so deeply in Krabbé’s perspective—every moment of it is either about or springing from the suffering inherent to riding all those miserable kilometers on that day—he manages to kind of bring in the context of not just that race but also the broader sport and the other people and places and things around him while this momentous/inconsequential thing is happening. It has been a long time, but those observational/free-associative passages did kind of remind me of the anguished channel-flipping that went on in my brain during cross-country races. How did you all feel about being so close to this particular narrator and experience?
Brandy: What I loved, and this is something Patrick points out in his essay, is that based on the description going in I assumed I would feel very lodged in this writer’s body, but instead I found myself trapped in his brain. I don’t have any history in competitive sports, really, but the experience of being that exquisitely attuned to every passing thought was far more fun as a reader than it probably would be as an athlete. There is also something about his position as an amateur racer that I think is important to the book, i.e. on some level it’s fandom that made him a racer, and so we are treated to the knowledge of a fan.
Kathryn: Even with the narrow focus on the one race, I think something clever happens, where the book still offers context that can give broader narrative meaning to why Krabbé (narrator? author?) might want to win the race, but only as sparing statements that are left for the reader to piece together, the same way a sports spectator constructs a narrative. Krabbé (narrator) doesn’t provide any additional commentary on Stéphan’s declaration that if he had started racing earlier he wouldn’t have been a half-bad pro, despite how easily it could be viewed as tragedy; the closest he gets is the anecdote about the chess clock. But Krabbé (author) introduces this young, pretty girl journalist character who thinks of cycling in narrative heuristics, provides enough information to allow the reader to do so as well, and then makes clear that Krabbé (narrator) obviously views her with some disdain. It’s kind of a trap, but also not really, because it winds up being a part of his reconstruction of this pure sporting event as a novel. It’s just that Krabbé’s preoccupation as a cyclist remains on the suffering of the race, and all the narrative stuff that inevitably comes with it sits on top; the reader is left to take on the role of a narrativizing fan or journalist.
Patrick: I always love a book that implicates the reader. That’s a great point, and I think to Roth’s question and Kathryn’s point, I find it works because it frames the suffering so well and so correctly. It ultimately is for us to overlay nobility or bravery or whatever atop the experience that Krabbe has. But even as non-racers with supposedly empty lives, that is our subjectivity.
David: I found that coming into it without any of that context, like not being familiar with not just Krabbé’s personal idols and reference points but with even the most rudimentary strategic considerations, made that challenge all the more bracing. I did have my own touchstones, in terms of sports I’ve watched and things I’ve read, but I enjoyed how wrong-footed I felt in trying to square that with what Krabbé was providing.
I also have my own favorite kind of short, allusive, often in-translation novels, and it wasn’t just the easily packable size of this book that reminded me of those. Like this is not in any way “like” a Patrick Modiano novel, but there was also something dreamlike about reading it for me, and in roughly the same way. You are just alternately trapped and luxuriating between the temples of someone who is having a peculiar and extremely personal experience, which is not adjacent to any experience I’ve had, and also of no great moment and which will not resolve in a way that makes it especially significant. It could be memoir, it could be sportswriting, it could be a novel. I liked how defiant it was about sticking to that, and not trying to make it more or less than that.
Kathryn: Patrick described it as “propulsive” in his original post, and it really was. There’s so much momentum built in—at some point you are just strapped along for the miserable, miserable ride.
Brandy: Yeah, Kathryn, describing something that grueling, with that much narrative energy, is a kind of magic trick, I think. Speaking of momentum, Patrick how long would it take a normal person to bike this course? Like, I couldn’t quite figure out if I (a person who owns a Peloton and occasionally takes climb classes to the soundtrack of some pop girlie) could possibly do it in two days or if I would die.
Patrick: I do not presume to know the cycling shapes of my colleagues, but my sense is that you guys could do the Tour du Mont Aigoual in two or three sessions, though the uncertainty there gets at a lot of what Krabbe wrote about so beautifully. Racing, let alone riding a bike in a situation like the Tour here is so hard. The main reason that I was a pretty mid (and that might be generous) racer is that getting into cycling shape takes like twice or thrice as long as getting into running shape, but matters half or one-third as much. I convinced myself that I didn’t have the time, but ultimately what I did not have was that dog.
It’s such a dangerous sport, and there is an odd tension in the sports’ extremes. You have to be both a hermit-like watt machine and also a daredevil to be good at cycling, then you have to perform those abilities in this high-stakes game of chicken basically, where you never show anyone what you’ve got until the last second. Like Krabbé wrote, most evocatively in that bit about the criterium where a guy got nailed by a car, your nerve has to be as strong as your legs. I was charmed that he was such a bad descender, because I was and am, too.
I have to ask: did you think he would win?
Brandy: No, then maybe, then no, then yes, then no. It would have been a much different and worse book if he won. Which actually does now make me wonder if it’s at all possible to be as unsparing as he is about failure but about victory? Probably not.
Kathryn: I only started asking myself that question toward the very end, and wound up on “no,” because I couldn’t even picture what the payoff from a win would look like. I didn’t interrogate that knee-jerk instinct too much, but I think part of it stemmed from that unsparing narration.
David: I liked that it wasn’t just “a bad day riding around the countryside in the rain,” and just as a true Sports Idiot I really did find the back-and-forth narrative down the stretch exciting to read, but I didn’t think he’d win for the reason Brandy noted, and also for the one Kathryn noted. The book just did not seem to be building up for a moment of triumph, even a qualified one. Triumph, and this is something I admired about the book very much, really seemed to have nothing to do with the work being described or the context in which this competition was happening. When Krabbé describes actual champions—ones who got hurt and ones who didn’t, or the one he has a beer with in real life—they seem to be characters not just from a different story, but an entirely different reality. They’re not doing the same thing. That resonated with me, just in the sense that my experience of playing and caring about basketball and LeBron James’ have only the presence of the basketball in common.
Brandy: Sort of related to that, David, is something else I appreciated: how essential other people are to what might, at first blush, seem more like a typical story of the athlete having to overcome the limits of himself. The other riders matter terrifically! And some of them are real shits!
Kathryn: Yes! Like Reilhan, that cad!
David: Fuck Reilhan. All my homies hate Reilhan.
Kathryn: Something I think I grasp a bit more about cycling now is the bind it puts you in, having to negotiate with other riders, people, bodies, etc. Reilhan and Krabbé’s detested foe Barthelmy don’t do their work, but there’s also no real way of retaliating without burying yourself. Again: psychological torture chamber–ass sport.
Brandy: Again, account of being driven to madness by some European guy.
