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Friday's foaming rant: Politics and bicycle racing

Published: Oct. 29, 2004
Whom would you rather have running your club?
Whom would you rather have running your club?
I could tell you secrets like the government tells lies
Ah, but no one listens anymore.

–Anaïs Mitchell, “Before the Eyes of the Storytelling Girls,"
from "Hymns for the Exiled"

“Keep the politics out of our bike racing!” the letter-writers screech, as if such a thing were possible. Anyone whose participation in the sport extends beyond pinning on a number knows all too well that bicycle racing is about as apolitical as the United Nations General Assembly on an August afternoon with the air conditioning on the fritz and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the agenda.

My own cycling club, Dogs at Large Velo, is only slightly less political than the Italian parliament. We practice a bizarre form of totalitarianism in which some unwary person (usually someone absent from a meeting or too drunk to participate) is appointed president and subsequently exacts his revenge by acting more or less as he pleases until either his patience or the beer runs out. I have no idea who’s in charge these days; I hope it’s not me.

Still, our laissez-faire approach isn’t for everyone, especially those who still entertain lower-case republican delusions. Some folks insist on being allowed “a real choice” when it comes to leadership, however unreal it may be.

So let me place this unreal choice before you: Whom would you pick as president of your cycling club – George W. Bush or John Kerry?

Let’s say George is your club president. An occasional mountain biker, George has neither raced himself nor promoted a race, though his daddy was a racer back in the day, and as club president even ran a modestly successful event (the Tour of Kuwait). His son, however, has done little of note, and his only real talent appears to be wasting the money of other people, many of whom are acquainted with his daddy.

Still, George is president now, and certain he can out-promote the old man. His daddy’s longtime mates, now George’s fellow officers in the club, have never raced, either (hey, it’s an inherently dangerous activity, just like it says on the release form). But one of them caught “American Flyer” on HBO in a hotel somewhere and they tell George it looks like a slam dunk, and naturally George wants a crack at it because he has mostly been nowhere near the hoop, and in fact is a cheerleader at heart, fond of the sidelines, especially when the elbows start flying under the net.

So George sells you on an easy club race, the Taliban Classic, and it goes more or less as planned. But he has had a bigger event in mind all along – an epic event in the old Babylon Landfill, the domain of a legendary junkyard dog, a double Hound of the Baskervilles that snarled at George’s daddy once (George has issues involving his daddy, as you may be noticing).

So George dives right on in, whenever he’s not busy vacationing. He doesn’t bother to file for a permit from the federation – he just pops by the office one day and tells them he’s putting on a race in the landfill, which involves shooting that damn’ dog – a clear and present danger to cyclists in general and to his club in particular – and using the proceeds to build a shining condo on the hill as an inspiration to all the other dumps in the vicinity. And if they don’t like it they can kiss his ass.

George doesn’t really want the federation or any other clubs involved in his plans for what he has taken to calling the Tour of Babylon, especially since by now he and daddy’s pals have rented “Breaking Away” on DVD, and the part where the Cinzano rider sticks the pump in the American’s spokes told them all they need to know about how foreigners can screw up your big race. Nevertheless, he bribes a couple of the smaller outfits into putting their names on the flyer because it’ll make the race look like a real big production.

George also doesn’t send enough of his own club members to the venue because he knows sweet damn’-all about running a bike race and neither do his daddy’s buddies, who want to do it on the cheap. They’ve moved on to “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” by now and it all looks like great fun to them.

And thus, when the starter’s pistol fires for the start of Georgie’s big adventure, the Tour of Babylon takes off in any number of unpleasant directions.

Oh, George gets a muzzle on the junkyard dog all right, which proves fairly painless as the Terror of the Landfill is revealed to be a crotchety, arthritic old bulldog whose fabled jaws are mostly gums. But it seems this once-fearsome beast was the only thing keeping the landfill’s rats under control, and with him out of the way packs of bloodthirsty rodents are running wild, attacking racers, spectators and pretty much anything with a pulse, and their bite is no laughing matter.

Meanwhile, nobody knows where the finish line is, because it seems George never laid the course out much past the start line. The federation is doing exactly jack-you-know-what because George never applied for a permit. His daddy’s pals are getting rich running the concession stand. And the bank calls to say your club’s once-robust account is suddenly, inexplicably and heavily overdrawn, which means no money for jerseys, race-entry fees or indeed much of anything beyond this increasingly messy race of George’s.

So you start talking about replacing George as club president, and John pipes up, says he’d like a crack at the job. An old roadie, he won a few medals racing overseas, though his podium days are many years behind him, and when he came home he was violently opposed to racing, even throwing his medals over the fence at club headquarters.

From the heights of his limited experience some three decades earlier, John is loftily critical of George’s race management, which by this time has devolved to a shrill insistence that the crusade – pardon me, the Tour of Babylon – is going just swell, with the shining condo on the hill going up any day now and the finish line in sight, although what everyone else sees is mostly rats, rats and more rats.

In fact, John proclaims that he wouldn’t have promoted this race in this place at this time, though you seem to remember him being all for it back when George was first pitching it to the club. But by gosh, John continues, this is the race we’ve got, and he is the man to run it the way it should be run.

John’s going to apply for backdated permits from every federation you ever heard of and a few you haven’t, then recruit a bunch of other clubs, the big ones, to contribute members and money, although he’s not specific about exactly how he plans to coax them past the landfill-full-of-rats/money-down-the-porta-john thing and is sort of vague on exactly where he might draw the finish line.

And he’s going to launch a membership drive to expand your own club’s racing roster, because while he welcomes the other clubs’ assistance with this most important event — which is by no means a done deal, because George and his pals derided them as Freds, wankers and old Euro-poofs, which didn’t win the club many friends — he’s not about to let them tell him how to run the race he didn’t want to put on in the first place, except for when he did, which he really didn’t. Frankly, it’s all very confusing.

And while John drones on about his plans and your eyelids start to droop, you begin to get a disquieting impression as you drift off to dreams of better days ahead that even with a change of leadership, you’re still going to be stuck with a race in a rat-infested landfill.

Not what you’d call a real choice, is it? Plenty of us would rather not be in that landfill at all, regardless of who’s in charge. Nobody’s sorry to see the dog gone, but who thinks muzzling a toothless cur was worth even one of the thousand-odd club members we’ve lost to the rats? And meanwhile George just keeps preaching about turning a desert landfill into upscale real estate using just a little blood and oil, a stunt that makes the old water-to-wine switcheroo look like a cheap parlor trick. Cheaper yet is talking tough when you're not the poor sap who's standing in a burning dump, up to your keister in rats.

The guy who had no idea where he was headed when he talked us into this mess, and hasn’t the faintest notion where we are now, is not the guy to show us the way home.

Hell, I wouldn’t want him running my cycling club, much less the whole damn’ country.

What's your vote? Cast your ballot, whether folded into a paper crane or wrapped around a rock, to webletters@insideinc.com.