What Were They Riding From?

 

Some elite racers continue to ride after retiring from competition.  Then there others—like Jacques Anquetil, the first five-time winner of the Tour de France—all but stopped cycling. From the time he retired in 1969 until his death in 1987, he mounted his bike only three times. “I have done enough cycling,” he declared.

Following in his footsteps or tire tracks, it seems, is Sir Bradley Wiggins, who won the 2012 Tour.  He says he no longer rides a bicycle, although his reason is different and he coaches his son in his racing career.

That last fact is very interesting when you consider the first British TdF winner’s reasons for hanging up his bike.  “A lot of my cycling career was about running from my past,” he explains. “It was a distraction.”

That past included a father—who just happened to be a six-day race champion in Australia—who was absent until Bradley, at 19, was beginning his career. The elder Wiggins showed up in Belgium, where the young rider was racing. 

Bradley described it as “probably the hardest day of his life” even though spectators at the track in Ghent were cheering him.  His father, broke and broken, regaled him with stories of how he “beat everybody in Europe.” Then, while, squeezing his newly-found son’s arm, he delivered a verbal coup de grâce: “Just don’t forget, you’ll never be as good as your old man.”

(Is that the start of an Oedipal conflict, or what?)

Reading that reminded me of someone I knew who ran for the track teams of her high school and college. She told me that one day, she was out for her daily training run—a ritual she continued after she graduated and no longer was competing—when she stopped in her tracks and wondered aloud, “Why am I doing this?” She realized that she, like Sir Bradley, was running from a traumatic past—which, in her case, included sexual abuse from her brothers.

Speaking of which:  before the “reunion” with his father, he had been sexually abused—at age 12, by a youth cycling coach.

In a strange, terrible way, Sir Bradley Wiggins has—besides his Tour de France victories and World Championships—something in common with Anquetil and other cyclists who rode little or not at all after retiring from competition.  Jacques and other riders—almost none of whom attained anything near his level of success—grew up poor or working-class. For them, the bicycle was a vehicle of escape from the farm or factory.  Once they could afford a nice house and car, the bicycle became a symbol of a past from which they were trying to ride away—just as it was for Sir Bradley Wiggins.

Stopped In My Tire Tracks

 Has something ever stopped you in your tire tracks?

While commuting, touring, day-tripping or doing just about every other kind of riding except racing, I have stopped when I’ve seen something unusual or interesting. I more or less expect to make such stops when I’m somewhere I’ve never been before:  Whether I was seeing the chateau at Amboise or an elephant in the wild for the first time, I knew that such sights—or a marketplace that only the locals know—is as much a reason for my ride as, well, pedaling on unfamiliar terrain.

Perhaps nothing is quite as surprising, however, as pedaling through a part of my neighborhood I hadn’t seen in months and encountering something that not only differs from its immediate surroundings, but would stand out almost anywhere.

While spinning the pedals on Tosca, my Mercian fixed-gear bike, along 36th Avenue, I couldn’t have missed a house with such a paint job.  I know it had to have been built recently because, while the stoop and other fittings seemed to match those of adjacent houses—at least at first glance—they didn’t have the nooks and crannies (like Thomas’s English Muffins) of bricks that have weathered seasons and been painted over.

I saw a name plate by the front door.  Looking it up, however, was fruitless because it’s a name common to the Indian-Bengali community in that part of the neighborhood. My guess is that it’s the name of the person or family who built it. Whoever they are, they’re probably rich and eccentric.

At first glance, it reminded me of a Buddhist temple. Perhaps the nearby spice shop and Punjab restaurant and bakery had something to do with that. (I know: Punjabi people are as likely to be Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims or even Christians. My Eurocentricity is showing!) Then, for a moment, I thought of San Francisco about 35 years ago, before tech money remade it: Victorian houses were painted in colors you never would see on similarly-styled houses in Brooklyn, Boston or Montréal.

I believe that if I’d seen that house anywhere, it would have stopped me in my tire tracks.

The Lesser Offense?

 A few years ago, one of my students disappeared a couple of weeks into the semester.  She re-appeared near the end of semester, begging me to allow her to make up the work she missed.  I relented.  She submitted the essays and research paper a week before the final exam. 

I didn’t have to read much to confirm my suspicion:  She hadn’t written those essays or the paper. On the day of the final exam, I returned her work with red “F”s scrawled across them, along with the web addresses where I found “her” work.

“I didn’t plagiarize.”

“So why did I find these papers on the web?”

“I didn’t plagiarize them.  My friend did it for me!”

This week’s “Sunday funny” reminded me of that episode. Just as my former student thought she was not violating the college’s academic integrity policy because she hadn’t done the plagiarism herself, a public official tried to save face by claiming that he was behaving more responsibly by riding his bicycle rather than driving after a night of drinking.

Ty Ross, a Fernandina Beach (Florida) City Manager, had been in his post for only two weeks when police found him lying beside his bike on a roadside. 

Whether or not getting on two wheels instead of four is more responsible behavior after drinking, the officers decided he hadn’t committed a citeable offense and offered him a ride home, which he accepted.

If I recall correctly, my former student failed my class but the college didn’t expel her. That didn’t upset me. But I wonder whether she refined her sense of what is right or wrong—or whether Ross will.

Had he caused or suffered any harm, he would’ve been a candidate for a Darwin Award.