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Friday's foaming rant:
Nuts to you, Doc
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“The theory is there; the proof I’m still looking for.”
– Dr. Sangili Chandran, a sports-medicine specialist, quoted in an Associated Press story about yet another study linking biking and infertility
“Men who are dedicated mountain bikers may be risking their fertility if they fail to equip the bikes with protective gear, researchers report,” said the story in the December 3 New York Times.“Johnny, quit picking on your little sister, and tell the twins to set the table for seven - your big brother’s coming home from college for the weekend,” said thousands of mountain bikers nationwide, half-wishing the story were true.
Where do these limp-wick tales keep coming from? The Times piece is just the most recent in a round of stories that started a few years ago with Doctor Irwin Goldstein’s never-actually-published research, which concluded that any guy who rode a bicycle for more than 10 feet could only get wood if he bought it from Home Depot.
This latest bit of science fiction came from Austria by way of Dr. Ferdinand Frauscher, an Innsbruck uro-radiologist, but like its predecessors, it’s otherworldly enough to have come from the planet Vulcan, where thanks to an unhealthy preoccupation with science, males rise to the occasion only once every seven years (you will recall that Spock, the Enterprise’s science officer, couldn’t even get it up for a hot nurse).
Addressing the Radiological Society of North America, Frauscher - himself a mountain biker, according to the Times – said researchers studied 40 cyclists ages 18 to 44 who rode for more than two hours a day, six days a week, and found that on average they produced only a third as much sperm as non-cyclists. Perhaps that’s because they spent less time spanking the monkey.
Jesus wept. Austrian laboratory studies notwithstanding, the empirical, real-world evidence would seem to indicate that cyclists of all breeds reproduce like Brooklyn roaches in a coldwater flat, when they’re not busy logging miles, downloading power-meter data into the Dell or begging for schwag, their wide, wistful eyes recalling the oil-on-velvet paintings of Elvis, children and poker-playing dogs sold roadside in the Deep South. If indeed we do produce fewer squiggly wigglers, it would seem they’re Olympic-class swimmers, no doubt because Dad spends a lot of quality time honing his cardio’ on that nasty, ball-busting bike.
Look around you: How many saddle-straddlers do you know with healthy offspring crowding day-care centers, public schools and correctional institutions? One racing buddy of mine is celebrating the birth of his third child, though I suspect he will not get the same sort of enjoyment out of expanding his tiny house that he did out of expanding his tiny wife. Another is a radiologist, like Frauscher, and he too is blessed with functional bicycles, testes and children.
Christ, even Inside Communications honch’ Felix Magowan has a couple of rug monkeys, and he didn’t even start liking girls until a couple of years ago. Show him a picture of Rebecca Twigg in a skinsuit and he’d flinch, squealing, “Eeewww, cooties!” then dash out for a long ride to flush the steamy, confusing thoughts from his overheated brain..
Which brings up another point: Women ride bikes too, and many of them look a lot better in tight Lycra than men do. You spend a few hours toiling sweatily along behind Mari Holden, Heather Szabo or Shonny Vanlandingham on a Sunday training ride and you’ll provide more than an adequate refutation to all of the Goldsteins and Frauschers of the world.You notice how these soft-on sob stories never say who funded the studies? If I were the paranoid sort, given Bush the Lesser’s mania for war with a certain oil-producing nation, I might suspect the petroleum industry, which surely longs to keep the fat and happy operators of Ford Excretions, Dodge Dementias and Chevy Catastrophes from joining the 0.6 percent of Americans who get around via bicycle.“Sure, after a few months of cycling you might be able to finally see your weenie for the first time in 20 years, but you won’t be able to do anything with it except take a leak,” the oil barons hiss, with weenie doctors singing a slightly off-key harmony.Well, anything that harelips Dubya, Cheney and the coneheads is okay with me, so I plan to keep riding my bikes and traumatizing my testicles. Still, a wise cyclist should consider some form of insurance – say, administering a swift kick in the nuts to any uro-radiologist seen wandering about with clipboard in hand, squinting at his tackle. If there’s even a chance it’ll stop the whitecoats from breeding more Brainiacs who will then grow up to continue this tradition of slipshod science, I’d say it’s worth a shot.
It goes without saying that views of the authorare his own and are not necessarily the views of VeloNews, VeloNews.com,the editors, the publisher, the owner, our attorneys, the guy running thepress in Wisconsin, the web geek putting this stuff up, the people staffingthe phones or anyone else remotely associated with the Inside Communicationspublishing empire. Still, we would be happy to hear from you if you havea complaint and we will gladly forward your comments to the author. So dropus a line at WebLetters@7Dogs.com. (By sending mail to this address, you are implicitly consenting to having your letter published on our letters page.)
