Milking it

With the afternoon sun’s final heating rays having long dissipated, thick misty clouds had been buffeted in atop the rolling Dorset hills. The damp surrounding pastures were collectively waving like a hilltop grassy sea, each individual strand bent double by the howling, briny coastal winds. The scene was set but empty of actors; all the south coast holidaymakers had retreated to the relative warmth of the lower cities, and it looked like the hillside was to be deserted for the remainder of the evening.

That was until slowly, when the wind allowed, a distant intermittent sound of tortured metal drifted up from the valleys below. The crunching sound soon accompanied by the ugly noise of a wheezing man; occasionally groaning and cursing his legs. Eventually, the noisy distant figure emerges, weaving from the gloom. Although it is early August, he is wrapped up heavily against the cold and is jagging this way and that as an overladen baker’s boy would whilst climbing up from the vale. Only when he reaches the gravelled layby at the summit does he afford himself a desperate look around at this sorry landscape. His jaw opens slightly as his eyes fix on the horizon to his left, where he knows he should be, his backside drops firmly down onto the crossbar and his head falls ungainly to his hands.

To understand the journey that led me to this dour predicament we must delve deep into the pools of history, back to a time when men wore hats and photographs were monochrome. But, before we dive straight in, let us test the water slightly by first going back only a few months to last autumn.

Another Covid restricted lockdown afternoon loomed as I sat at the table for lunch and, as had become my recent habit, switched the TV to the curious spectacle of a delayed Giro d’Italia. La Corsa Rosa, as it is known, is one of cycling’s biggest challenges. In prestige stakes, it finds itself only in second place to the famous Tour de France yet arguably pips it to the line in terms of raw relentless difficulty. It comprises of a physical slog for three weeks, over mountains and thousands of (you guessed it) Italian kilometres. It pushes through all adverse conditions and is only ever stopped by World Wars. Yet, as I flicked it on my telly for an afternoon viewing, with the world in the grips of a catastrophic pandemic, what I saw made me inextricably mad; professional cyclists refusing to ride.

A giant wave of frustration suddenly slushed down over me. They were not striking for some well-founded political reason, or even a poorly founded one, the reason they were not taking to the line was the weather was a bit cold and wet. This was meant to be one of the last bastions of professional endurance sport, yet, huddled under a bursting gazebo, they typified the health-and-safety wishy-washy everybody-is-a-winner well-done-for-trying mentality of a primary school sports day. Yes, they were tired; yes, it was raining and yes, they had 258km to ride, but these blokes are paid to ride their bikes. Cycling is one of the only sports that pitches the gargantuan efforts of man against nature. It would be understandable for tennis players to be pansies; their job is to hit a lightweight bit of rubber over a meter high net, stopping sporadically to eat cucumber sandwiches when it rains, but cyclists are supposed to be hard nuts. Yet, these riders comfortably wrapped up in their expensive Gore-Tex shells, found some water all a bit too much.

Surely this couldn’t be the epitome of bike racing. How had it deteriorated this much so quickly? It wasn’t that long ago that Hampstead magically appeared through a snow banked blizzard as he crested the Gavia in his summer shorts. Or when Hinault battling frostbite and nearly lost his fingers to win Liege-Batstone-Liege. Those were the type of exploits that sets hearts aflutter, men putting their necks on the line for a shot at the eternal glory victory brings. And somehow in the years that followed the professional ranks had swiftly detreated to this cowering modern peloton of hydrophobic softies.

I munched on in a cheese and pickle fuelled rage and started to franticly Google. In less than a second, a greasy fingered search gave me a plethora of different races that all tried to lay claim to being cycling’s hardest. Predominantly these were lists of races such as the Transcontinental, the Race Across America, and other not-quite-there-in-the-head ultra-endurance races that do a good job of removing some of societies fittest lunatics for months at a time. The realisation that these endurance fanatics still existed started to subdue me somewhat. But even still, all these races are tackled by amateurs and get nowhere near the publicity of the major pro events. What does it say for a sport if its hardest versions are completed Steve who works in the local butchers, not the professionals on 7 figure salaries?

The reasoning behind this, of course, is the usual: money. The cold hard cash brought in by a televisual ordinance is and was impossible for major bike races to ignore. And when that is coupled with the ever-decreasing attention span of the 21st Century populous, the pivotal sections of each day must all be crammed into an action-packed explosive 30-minute finale each day. Every race is the same, teams of supporting domestiques form several orderly ques on the front protecting their leaders until the very last second when they finally, and seemingly begrudgingly, jump around for the last fleeting second to go for the line.

Yet it wasn’t always thus, in the late 19th Century, when races first started popping up across western Europe there was no set regime for how to win and equally no governance in how they should be reported upon afterwards. When Le Petit Journal, spurred on by their ever-so-slightly bonkers editor Pierre Giffard, concocted the balmy 1200-kilometre non-stop race from Paris to Brest then back to Paris in 1891. The event was an instant hit. But with it taking 3 days of continuous sleep-deprived pedalling to win no one really knew what happened. Not that that stopped the newspaper writers, with their article deadlines approaching they sat about explaining in vast detail the events of the race with particulars mainly fabricated from their own imagination. The blissfully unaware public devoured these reports daily and this half-factual, half-fictional manor continued unchallenged until at least halfway through the 20th Century.

Back in the poetic land of Italy this was especially true. When the Giro began, the country itself was still to reach its 50th birthday, so over the following years, as the race's popularity grew and national literacy rates rose, it formed a fundamental role in how the Italian population understood their nation and its geography. Sizable chunks of the papers’ available column inches were dedicated to describing the race’s local area, its customs, wine, and food. It was how people from the large Po valley flatlands were introduced to the Apennine mountains and where Sicilians first learned of the high passes of the Dolomites.

Yet my mind kept drifting back to the riders that were going through unimaginable daily pain just to complete each gruellingly long stage. Fuelled mainly on a diet of amphetamines, cocaine, wine, red meat, and raw eggs they churned the cranks for sometimes over 17 hours a day. If it rained their itchy woollen jerseys would do little except become increasingly heavy and when it was hot, they would boil in the summer’s sun. Thinking of these heroic exploits whilst sitting on my sofa, I looked back to the telly to see the increasingly sorry sight of riders climbing from their gazebo shelter back into their warm team busses.

I may not be physically capable of riding the Giro, but the least I could do is show that this generation still has some backbone, some grit. That we too, given the chance, could emulate a Hampstead or a Hinault. There and then I had made up my mind, I was going on an adventure. Doing a proper ride. Something that had meaning and that would need hard work to achieve but kept in step with the original ethos of these past races, using it as a means of understanding the surrounding country. Already feeling increasingly proud of myself, I flopped down on the sofa and tucked into my second chocolate bar.