Lyn And Lyn Win



As I've mentioned in earlier posts, I have riddent a tandem twice in my life.  Both times, I was the "captain" or "pilot":  That is to say, I was in front. 



On my first tandem ride, my "stoker" was a blind woman.  She wanted to ride with a group that, at that time, toured various ethnic neighborhoods in New York to sample their foods and restaurants.   The Light House called the group with that request, and I volunteered to pilot a bike Light House supplied.



I soon realized that she needed a tourguide as much as she needed someone to steer the bike.  She was blind from birth, so she had no idea of what, say, a terra cotta-hued cornice looked like.  Unfortunately, perhaps, for her, I was (at least at that point in my life) better at spinning wheels than at spinning narratives.



Someone named Lynette Nixon also piloted a tandem for a blind (or, at least, visually impaired) cyclist.  That is about where the similarities between her experience and mine end.



I don't think Ms. Nixon was as much of a tourguide as I was.  You see, she and her stoker Lyn Lepore were riding on a velodrome--in Sydney, Australia to be exact.  They won the silver medal  in the women's 1km time trial event of the 2000 Paralympics.  Their compatriots, Sarnya Parker and Tania Modra, took the gold in their home country.

L-to-R:  Silver medalist tandem duo Lyn Lepore and Lynette Nixon with Gold medalists Sarnya Parker and Tania Modra at the 2000 Paralympic Games.


Nixon and Lepore also accomplished something else I never will:  They may have been the only tandem whose first names were "Lyn".  I would have loved to hear the crowd cheering for them:  Lyn! Lyn! 


(Hearing such a chant but not seeing them might lead someone to think they were Chinese. )

Cycling, Football And Sociology

In an earlier post, I noted that some of the best teams in the World Cup football (soccer, to Yanks) tournament represent some of the world's top cycling nations--and that the US is in ascendancy in both sports.

In following the tournament and the opening stages of the Tour de France, I realized another striking parallel between the two sports.  In the traditional powerhouses of cycling and football, the top players and riders come from the ranks of the poor or working class.  Much of the peloton could just as easily have been working in a factory or farm had their cycling talents not been discovered and developed.  In fact, at the beginning of his professional career, at least one journalist wondered whether Eddy Mercx had the desire or discipline to win because he was "bourgeois"?  How bourgeois was he?  His father owned a grocery store and had just acquired another.  In purely Marxist terms that indeed made Mercx pere "bourgeois", but hardly made his son a "rich kid."

Adonia Lugo, a bike advocate and anthropologist in Los Angeles

Football players have traditionally come from backgrounds similar to those of cyclists, although there is a greater presence of immigrants, or children of immigrants, on the pitch than one finds in the peloton. Still, one rarely finds someone in football or cycling team kit who had the opportunity to do other things.

Here in the US, things are different.  Both sports are seen as suburban and middle-class.  It's true that not many of our cyclists or footballers have come from the inner cities or farmlands.  Rather, the hotbeds of both sports are found mainly in middle-to-upper class suburbs on the two coasts rather than in the Rust Belt.

Ironically, the teams that represented the US in the three prewar World Cup tournametns were primarily blue-collar industrial workers.  They were immigrants, or the children of them, who lived in the sooty enclaves of New Jersey and New England factory towns.  Their last hurrah came in the first postwar tournament when they pulled off one of the biggest upsets in the history of sport:  They beat the mighty British team in the tournament's opening game.