Need for the Bike: Don't Miss It

Biking smells good.

In the Haute-Loire, it smells of pine and moss, with touches of new-mown hay. Here and there, a spot of cow.

Sometimes in hamlets a cowshed makes its presence known. But also the smell of open windows: beef stew, wax, detergent, roast chicken. Thrown over a line, sheets and blankets emit a night odor, quickly lost in the blue of the sky.

The summer itself has a very strong smell. You pass through pockets of sweet-smelling heat, when the road cuts through a wheat or rye field, where you come out of a forest and enter a clearing. The heat activates the smell of the resins, and brings up out of the road the smell of tar, the profound background to all the summer scents.

~ Paul Fournel, Need for the Bike

Velophoriacs are used to reading quotes on this blog from this excellent little book. But I feel the need right now to sing its praises once more. If you love cycling partly for its sophisticated European roots, if you love the aesthetics and the rituals, and how they've descended from a long line of purists before us, if you love thoughtful, crafted prose that is also quite down-to-earth, I beseech you to get hold of this little tome. The small paperback edition is only $15 and 150 pages: Not a towering commitment, but it has paid me back dozens of times. Just the other night, weary and worn from the day to day, I pulled out Need for the Bike and read a few pieces before turning in. (There are no chapters, per se -- the book consists instead of a series of loosely grouped, short essays.) I'd read them before, some recently; no matter. They always refresh me like a ride through a shaded glade in summer heat.

If you like Belgium Knee Warmers because of the charming Euro perspective, you very much owe it to yourself to go to this even purer source. Fournel is part racer, part tourist, part poet... and all French. The best of what it means to be French: Thoughtful, articulate, funny, and, most of all, a gourmet, masterfully savoring the many nuances life dishes up (and by life, I mean cycling).

Oh -- and he has a killer French moustache.

Like the similarly brief Tao te Ching, this book has taught me how to enjoy and experience. Chapeau, Monsieur Fournel!

Doping and Realpolitik

Athletes have doped from day one. When the world was magical, dope was magical; when the world was chemical, dope was chemical; now that the world is biological, dope is biological; when, in the future, the world will be genetic, dope will be genetic…. Competition produces doping, just as taxes produce fraud.
- Paul Fournel, The Need for the Bike

I’m with Fournel.

I don’t support the use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs. I would love to see every sport rid of them forever. Unfortunately, that is a fantasy. A positive fantasy – but it’s important to grasp that, while we should work toward it, it will never happen. Never.

Go ahead -- argue with me. Problem is, I agree with all of your points: It’s bad for athletes. It’s bad for the fans. It’s bad for kids getting into sports. It embodies all that’s wrong with our bigger-stronger-faster, instant gratification, self-absorbed society.

You’re too right.

It’s also as old as sport itself. Endurance athletes in the early 20th century tried anything and everything to get an edge, from cocaine to brandy to doses of strychnine – yes strychine, the pesticide, of which just 5 mg can be lethal. Even athletes in ancient Greece took all sorts of stuff, including stimulants.

Journey with me now, as we turn back the pages of time: Somewhere on an athletic field, thousands of years ago, a trainer was the very first person in history to have this thought: "Hmm... That weird potion that my friend made for my horse to make him run faster… What if I gave that to my runners?’ Of course, the horses collapsed in foaming, bloody convulsions after the race, but our guy wasn’t thinking about afterwards. He was thinking about what he was expected to think about: Winning.
As he walked toward the stables to hide that potion bottle under his toga, he muttered to himself, “Apres moi, le deluge.”

There are parts of this soiled yet beautiful world that will never – never – be as I see them in my heart. I will never be able to admire without reservation the character of a national politician, no matter how much good she or he might do in the world. There will always be parents who raise their children with the most hateful distortions of love imaginable. There will always, until the last day of the world, be motorist who hate us simply because we are riding bicycles.

This isn’t a philosophical post; I’m not saying doping is right or wrong. And it’s not a political post; I really don’t have the answer as to how we should fix this magnificently screwed-up situation. This is a psychological post. It’s about a reality that I’m beginning to grasp.

Now in my mid-forties, I’m just beginning to calm down and simply accept those unchangeable things. They make me sad and frustrated, but letting them make me crazy is a sure road to an impoverished life. I get up every morning and work for positive change, I work toward my ideals of kindness and fairness. The work I do is directly tapped into those ideals. But if I cling to them, I’m doomed. Some days you just have to toss out right and wrong, put on your best kit, and go out and leave a 30-mile streak of melted rubber down the road. Somehow, everything in the world seems in its rightful place when you get back.
I ask you to seriously question, for at least a moment, the likelihood of cycling's governing bodies getting us to where not one person in our sport is doping. The mythical "level playing field," right? I will bet you my left hamstring that there would soon be at least one athlete who thought to himself, “I think I can dope and get away with it. Boy, what an advantage I'll have!”

Human nature has survived in its current form for millions of years. It ain’t gonna be changing a winning game anytime soon.