What I Did To Avoid A Race Today

Yesterday I said I love sports.  Let me qualify that:  I love most sports.  Among the exceptions is horse racing.  Fortunately, I never had to write about it. 

I also have never been keen on dog racing.  In fact, I don't care much for anything that involves training animals to put themselves at risk to entertain humans.  Making animals fight each other simply disgusts me:  I fail to see what is entertaining or even thrilling about bullfighting, cockfighting, dog fighting or camel wrestling. 

Believe it or not, that last abomination exists:  I saw a match when I was in Turkey.  During camel mating season, males are tied up and left in a dark room.  Then, just before they're walked out into the ring, they're adorned with embroidered capes and such.  By the time they get into the ring, at least one of them is foaming at the mouth.  If I were an animal-rights activist rather than the mere animal-lover that I am, I probably would have been foaming at the mouth, too.

Seeing that camel wrestling match was the only thing I hated in Turkey.  I don't get quite that worked up over horse racing; I simply don't care for it.  And, if you are here in the US, you probably know that the Belmont Stakes was run today.  There was a lot of buzz about it because of American Pharaoh, who had the opportunity to become the first horse in thirty-seven years to win the Triple Crown.  He did not disappoint those who bet on him.

What that means is crowds and lots of traffic on the roads leading to the Belmont Park race track, which is 25 to 30 kilometers from my apartment, depending on which route I were to take.  Once I rode in the direction of the track on the day of the Belmont Stakes, and even the side roads and some residential streets were clogged with SUVs piloted by testy, impatient drivers.

So, of course, I made it a point of avoiding all of that today.  Instead of a horse race, I saw another kind of sport:

No, it's not baseball.  It's one of its forerunners:  cricket.  I wish I could have gotten a bit closer, or that I had my camera with me.  I was relegated to taking that photo with my cell phone.  I also had to push my limited skills to the limit to capture this image:

OK.  So now you're thinking, "She went all the way to England to get away from a horse race?"  If only...

Actually, I rode in the opposite direction of the race track and found myself riding through the Bronx and Westchester County.  Believe it or not, both of those photos were taken in the Bronx.

Van Cortlandt Park is the second-largest park in the Bronx and the fourth-largest in New York City.  Its northern boundary is the city line with Westchester County.  To its south and east are longtime Irish enclaves  Norwood and Bedford Park.  That is where the players in the photo live, or have lived.

On a nearby field, there was another game of cricket in progress:

Adjoining Norwood and Bedford Park is one of the city's largest enclaves of immigrants from the Anglophone West Indies, centered along Gun Hill Road.  The players in this photo probably live there, or possibly in one of the West Indian neighborhoods of Brooklyn.  Although there is no Jim Crow policy in place in Van Cortlandt (or anyplace else in New York) and, from what I understand, the players were not segregating themselves by race (they were merely playing with friends and family), it was still a bit jarring to see white players on one field and blacks on another.

The house in the photo is in a nearby neighborhood almost no one would associate with the Bronx.  The street on which I found the house is private, as are the streets surrounding it.  A couple of blocks away is the Fieldston School, where the tuition is higher than the salary I earned in any of the first twenty or so years I worked. 

Anyway...I saw the cricket games on my way up to Westchester County and the house on my way back.  In Westchester, I rode as close as I could to the Hudson River and was treated to a vista of the Palisades:

What most people don't realize about the Hudson is that south of the Tappan Zee, it's not really a river:  It's actually a tidal basin.  And I could tell, by the way the water was churning, that the tide was coming in. It turns brownish-green then and looks more like a river when the tide is out.

I pedaled against the wind going upriver, so the wind blew me back into the Bronx and to my place.  And I avoided the throngs of gas-guzzlers people drove to watch little men drive horses in the service of bettors.
 

Why Should Cyclists Care About The FIFA Scandal?

In a previous post, I mentioned that the worlds of cycling and what most of the world calls “football” (but most Americans call “soccer”) are so close but never quite meet.  Some of the world’s most cycling-intensive nations also happen to be football powerhouses and some countries in the Americas are emerging in both.  (The US has elite athletes and teams in both sports but, on the whole, isn’t quite on the level of, say, Belgium, Italy, Spain, France or England in either one.)  I got to thinking about the relationship between the two sports again in light of FIFA’s current troubles.

Although I'm not as avid about them as I once was, I still love sports.  I have competed in three (wrestling, soccer and, of course, cycling) and have been a cyclist in one form or another for most of my life.  I even wrote about sports for a small local newspaper.  To this day, some of the things of which I’m most proud are things I’ve done in athletic pursuits. 

I must also point out that I have never participated in any athletic endeavor for money.  That doesn’t make me more virtuous or prove my love of sports or much of anything else.  However, I also realize that having always been an amateur—and having participated in sports that, at the times I was involved with them, offered few opportunities for scholarships, let alone professional careers—I never had an incentive to cheat.  Nor did most of those I competed with and against.  Likewise, my coaches and others involved in officiating contests or administering programs in which I was involved were not tempted by the prospect of payoffs or bribes of one kind or another.

That perspective—and my experience writing about sports—helped me to understand that when money, especially large sums of it, are involved, the attitude of everyone involved with sport changes.  It’s almost trite to say that money corrupts, and large sums corrupt in major ways.  To be more exact, the prospect of a large payoff exposes avarice that might lay dormant in the absence of lucre.

What I find ironic is that nearly every fan of any professional sport acknowledges that corruption exists, at whatever level, but he or she is almost invariably shocked when that corruption is exposed.  For all the whispers that Lance Armstrong, the Festina team and any number of other riders and teams were doping, when that doping was exposed or confessed, fans expressed a sense of betrayal.  Likewise, nearly every soccer/football fan believes that the sport’s officials and governing bodies are corrupt. (Most people also have the same sense about Olympic organizations.)  But some still said the equivalent of “no…really” when Sepp Blatter and others were implicated in various kinds of graft related to the awarding of the World Cup to the countries that hosted the tournament.

 

One interesting difference I’ve noticed between cycling and football/soccer is that in cycling, the investigations, accusations and crackdowns have focused on individual cyclists and teams, while in football, prosecutors’ sights have been set on the governing bodies and top-level officials.  Of course, one reason for that is that the scandals in cycling have had mainly to do with doping, or allegations thereof, while those in football have had to do with kickbacks and awarding tournaments to countries. 

Why has relatively little attention been paid to cycling’s governing bodies?  Surely, their officials must have known about doping, or the rumors of it.  It’s also hard not to imagine that in the administration of cycling, there are money scandals and nepotism similar to what is found in FIFA and football’s governing bodies in individual countries.  I mean, if corrupt officials can take bribes to allow Russia or Qatar or some other country to host the World Cup, it’s hard not to believe that similar (though smaller-scale) deals are made so that cities can host stages of multi-day races or for facilities to be built for cycling.  Likewise, if cyclists are doping and their teams and sponsors are pressuring them to do so, who’s to say that something similar isn’t happening in football?  After all, as in cycling, the world’s best athletes are competing in it, and the difference between victory or relegation could be laid to something as seemingly trivial as whether a key performer drank one glass too many or too few of water on the day of the competition.

And, as I have mentioned, there is a lot of money riding on the siting as well as the outcomes of competitions in both sports.  The incentives exist for cheating and corruption, and are so similar in so many ways in cycling and football.  But, in that regard, as in so many other aspects, the worlds of the two sports are so close but somehow manage not to meet. 

When Does "Parked" Turn Into "Abandoned"?

Whenever I see a bike locked in the same place for a long time, I wonder:  Did its owner suddenly have to attend to some urgent matter in some far-off place? (One commonly finds bikes locked up in and around military bases for months, even years, under such circumstances.)  Did he or she fall ill or get hurt?  Or did he or she simply abandon—or forget—the bike?

I’m not thinking, now, about those bikes that are parked in the same spot every day while their owners are at work, in school or performing some other daily ritual.  Even if the bike is locked to the same signpost, parking meter, fence or rack every day, you can see signs, however slight, of its having been moved.  Also, you can tell that the bike has been ridden, whether because of dirt, scrapes, fading or just the normal wear one sees on tires and other bike parts.

Rather, I am thinking about those bikes that have moved no more than the Pyramids have since they were parked (all right, built) in Egypt.  You can tell that they haven’t been unlocked, ridden and returned:  Everything on them looks the same, day after day, until—if the bike is left long enough—parts start to rust and paint starts to fade.  I’m thinking now of bikes that were parked outside the Cooper Square post office so long that locals joked the decaying skeletons of steel and carcasses of rotting rubber were part of the building’s design.

The Cannondale in the photo has been parked around the corner from my place for a couple of weeks, at least.  It looks just as you see it:  It stands in the same position, and it’s had its seat and seatpost missing all of that time.  I assume—or, at least, hope—the bike’s owner took them off after locking up the bike.  I hope someone else didn’t take them off:  It’s not fun to come out and find your seat missing even if that’s not quite as bad as finding your bike missing.

Since it’s a modern bike==a fairly-late-model (I say this because it was made in the USA.) Cannondale—I can safely assume that the bottom bracket is a sealed cartridge.  Even if it weren’t, there would probably be an “accordion” sleeve between the bottom bracket cups to shield the axle and bearings.

But protection doesn’t last forever.  Neither does lubrication.  But the results of either failing do.  (Remember:  I’m talking about bicycles here, oh you of dirty mind!)  Of course, the bike would have to be parked for a long time for the seals or shields, and the grease, to break down.  We had heavy, flooding rains on Sunday and Monday, and on-and-off rain ever since.  So, even if the bottom bracket isn’t affected, you have to wonder whether the rest of the frame would be affected.  

The Cannondale is made of aluminum, so it won’t rust. But that metal oxidizes and corrodes.  Perhaps those of you who are more knowledgeable than I am about metallurgy can tell whether or not there is a point at which aluminum will start to deteriorate from corrosion the way iron or steel does from rust.

Anyway, I’m sure that sooner or later the bike’s owner will come for it.  Something interesting has happened, though, in the last few days:  another bike in exactly the same color has been locked next to it.   Was that Trek recognize the Cannondale’s dark blue color the way leopards supposedly recognize each other by their spots?