Sports are simple. That is perhaps their most crucial property, the attribute that makes sports interesting to write and read about yet simultaneously makes doing so depend, to greater or lesser degrees, on mistranslation. The French Open final, an afternoon Golden State Valkyries game, Stage 20 of the Giro d'Italia: These are all rich texts that can be mined for pathos, meaning, and critical perspectives on gender, pan-European identity in the 21st century, or whatever, but at their core, none of them are "about" anything larger than their competitive structure. The games happen on their own terms and are projected outward for us, the non-competing public, to contextualize them as we see fit. But what is lost in any such act of projection?
That's one of the questions raised and dealt with in Tim Krabbe's The Rider, a work that achieves transcendence via fidelity. Krabbe's semi-autobiographical novel, translated from Dutch by Sam Garrett, is extremely simple. He tells the story of the Tour du Mont Aigoual, "the sweetest, toughest race of the season," taking the reader kilometer-by-kilometer through the race, using its climbs, weather systems, and intrapeloton dynamics as entry points to write about the theory, practice, and what could fairly be characterized as the esoteric mysticism of road cycling. Krabbe is a somewhat tragic figure, a chess player who only became a rider in his early 30s, someone who had the talent to win more frequently and at a higher level than he ever was able to but started too late to be anything more than a very good amateur.
The important part is that he became a rider. What is that? Per Jacques Anquetil via Krabbe, "A rider is made up of two parts, a person and a bike." Later on that same page, Krabbe hones his taxonomy. "People are made up of two parts: a mind and a body. Of the two, the mind, of course, is the rider." For a book about sports, The Rider is remarkably light on physical language. Suffering is described in metaphors, and Krabbe shies away from conceiving of bike racing in terms of anything as cold as heart rates or cadences. His theory of racing is that it is largely a matter of psychology, a competitive endeavor where things like faith and bravery matter as much as legs.
If this sounds saccharine and overblown, do not worry. Krabbe is unsparing, especially when writing about his own performance. That is the trick, the thing that makes The Rider so good. He resists, with every turn of the page and of the pedals, the temptation to dilate the lessons of the road outward, to make the race itself a metaphor for anything. There is certainly a fair reading of The Rider and of the Tour du Mont Aigoual as Krabbe grappling with his own mortality, especially given how the race ends, with Reilhan the golden boy beating him in a two-up sprint. But Krabbe never gives into that temptation.
Roughly two-thirds into the race, he contends with and inverts a familiar koan. Why does the alpinist climb the mountain? Because it's there. Krabbe says this is baloney. "The alpinist's will is not so petty that it needs something as random as the shape of the earth's crust in order to exist." There is something both liberating and imposing here. Achievement is not the thing that matters, which should be relieving, because it's not really possible. He writes with a sense of awe at the best riders in the world, men and women of alien talent who he will never come close to equaling. The point is to ride. He boldly lays out the stakes in the first paragraph of the book:
Meyruies, Lozere, June 26, 1977. Hot and overcast. I take my gear out of the car and put my bike together. Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafes. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.
This is why I find the book so magnetic. Krabbe threads an impossibly small needle: finding a way to simultaneously sanctify bike racing while keeping it in perspective. Every sportswriter, myself included, falls into the trap of mistranslation, of reading something into a sporting event or athlete or result that is only there if you squint your eyes the right way. This is an understandable and sometimes even necessary inaccuracy, but an inaccuracy all the same. Krabbe writes that when he first withdrew to his "first period of cyclo-literary hermitry," he expected to be struck with all manner of brilliant insights, thinking that the act of riding would serve as a door to something outside of itself. Instead, "while cycling I thought of nothing at all." The race is nothing more than itself, and it is this lack of outside context that makes it so special, so worth turning one's guts inside out to win.
Krabbe wants to win the race so badly, but he is trapped, doomed from the beginning to lose. If he works hard enough to stay in contention for a sprint, he will tow Reilhan to the line and burn too much of his energy to win the sprint. If he sits up, he'll keep Reilhan from winning, but at the cost of having any chance himself. It's a game of chicken, rigged against Krabbe from the start.
You could universalize this and attempt to apply Krabbe's theories to other sports, but it'd be adulterated. So what is it about cycling in particular that makes it such rich soil? It is the sport's lack of refuge. No result lies, every first-, second- or 175th-place finish an honest indication of who was the strongest, the smartest, and the bravest, and who failed. In other exercise-contest sports, like swimming or running, fitness marginalizes tactics, and therefore marginalizes the need for intelligence or bravery. Cycling is a beautiful, gutting amalgamation of both. It is the person and the bike, the mind and the body.
I read The Rider every few years at the start of cycling season, to remind myself of these truths, and this year, I timed my read around the end of the Giro d'Italia. It was a spectacular race, right up to its brutal, stunning denouement. Isaac Del Toro, the 21-year-old Mexican rider, nursed a slim lead over Richard Carapaz and Simon Yates into the 20th and final competitive stage, which would be decided by an ascent of the legendary Colle Delle Finestre. The last time the peloton took to its slopes, Yates was leading the Giro, riding off to a career-defining win until his body betrayed him. The British rider lost over 30 minutes, pedaling squares up the gravelly mountain.
This time around, he attacked first, and Del Toro did what Krabbe couldn't: He let Yates ride away, staring instead at Carapaz, willing to sacrifice his own victory in order not to help Carapaz go win the maglia rosa. It was one of the most painful things I've ever seen in the sport, right up there with Yates's exsanguination. Maybe Del Toro didn't have the legs. In that reading, he was not strong enough to affirmatively fight for and win the race, but he was canny enough to take Carapaz down with him. Maybe he could have ridden with Yates yet chose not to. That version of events is harder to take. Would someone so young and hungry really sacrifice his country's first ever Giro win for something as petty as pride?
Trick question; in either case, Del Toro loses the Giro, just as Krabbe loses the Tour du Mont Aigoual. That is what matters. He, Carapaz, and Yates are all riders. One of them won, and the others didn't. It is that simple, just as The Rider is. It's the only book about sports that captures the nerve-shredding feeling of competition without resorting to the urge to universalize it. When Reilhan celebrates his win, Krabbe doesn't clap along. Reilhan, he writes, "has beaten all of me." The greatest honor he can do his rival is resist the crutch of politesse. "He who applauds his victor denies that, and belittles him. Being a good loser is a despicable evasion, an insult to the sporting spirit."
When they get to Rome, Carapaz does not shake Del Toro's hand.
Check back tomorrow for our roundtable discussion of The Rider, where Brandy plans to disregard everything Patrick just said and turn this race into a metaphor.
