I like how right away, in the forward, Thomazeau François is pitting this book against The Rider as the seminal classic of cycling literature. I arched a skeptical eyebrow, and… was in total agreement by like, chapter 3.
Brilliant. Insane. Philosophical. Spiritual. Erotic. I read it during the nearly-hallucinatory six hours of Milan—San Remo and feel like bits of it have embedded in my brain like gravel, because I think of it every time I watch a race.
(Like The Rider, it was also a gift from a fellow cycling-obsessed friend, and aren’t I the luckiest one.)
Our porous bodies ⚭
Thinking of this description of the peloton each time I watch, and… isn’t this a description of our bodies in general? We are holobionts.
Its cohesion is so real that the limits of the individual are porous. Skewered by the marrow, every rider sheds some blood in the melting pot of the peloton’s formidable heart, puts existence and breath at the service of the monster with a hundred mouths. Even when you consider those who ride apart from one another, the effort of a rider is never totally independent from the efforts of all the others.
The hydra has the dimensions of the sea and the fluidity of water.
On Armstrong, Froome, and the gratuitous fascination of doping ⚭
Lance Armstrong, whose arrogance and cruelty I believe were unique.
Froome is a stylistic heresy who contradicts my profession of faith of kalos kagathos or “beauty is efficient,” according to which style is the only thing that matters.
But the fact that professional cyclists struggle to resist the temptations of those scary enhancing manipulations and even that they are often quite ready to use them is also what makes them fascinating. I find their incredible disdain for their own health moving. It pleads in favor of what they should be forgiven for. Basically, it is total innocence. Cyclists do not dope out of calculation or to make a career: those reasons only come afterward. They dope gratuitously, they do it because it is good. Because to ride that fast is such a wonderful experience that it makes caution irrelevant. Such a great experience that you would give your life to go through it again. That is what I forgive them for and even what makes them so pure in my opinion. They are only looking for another taste of singular delights. Nothing was planned. After their first rides, they went from surprise to surprise. Whatever you may think of early vocations, none of these riders had any idea of what was awaiting them. You can dream of results, and work for them, but that is not yet living them.
Pull quotes ⚭
They ride around the area like butterflies around a lamp, briefly turned away from their course by an occasional burn.
Cyclists see their bodies in a very peculiar way. You could be tempted to say that they take care of it with violence, like a talisman from which they magically expect everything, and that they hate because they cannot break free from it.