t’s an overcast spring day in the middle of Basque Country, Spain, and a thirty-year-old British Columbian named Ryder Hesjedal is near the head of a convoy. Behind him: forty European station wagons, three ambulances, two helicopters, eight cop cars, twelve sedans, nine motorcycles, and 125 bicycles. Of particular concern to my companion in one of the station wagons — a Belgian former cycling champion named Eric Van Lancker, once bigger in his home country than weissebier — is the fact that there are twenty-six bicycles, nineteen sweep motorcycles, and a pace car ahead of Ryder Hesjedal.On the station wagon’s dash, Van Lancker has tacked two sheets of paper. They differ in content, but are linked thematically. The first is the list of the day’s teams and riders, a compendium of professional cycling’s elite: Leipheimer, Horner, Vinokourov, Klöden, Sánchez, and the Schleck brothers, Andy and Fränk. The second is an expressionist representation of human trauma, which is in fact a herky-jerky profile of the day’s 150-kilometre course. The biggest topographical spike, rising at a 25 percent gradient, is the one Ryder Hesjedal happens to be negotiating right now.
Hesjedal is on the verge of becoming one of cycling’s Brahmins. In 2009, he won a stage of a Grand Tour, the Vuelta a España, something no Canadian has managed for more than twenty years. In 2010, he came second in the Amstel Gold one-day classic, and finished an unexpected (and astonishing) seventh in the Tour de France. Much is expected of him here in Basque Country, or Euskadi, as the local terrorist group calls it.
He is now at the climax of the first stage of the six-day 2011 Vuelta al País Vasco. It is a major event, and a prelude to July’s big show in France. Van Lancker, piloting the station wagon with one hand, watches the race broadcast on a GPS unit mounted on the dash. Hesjedal decides to make a statement: Twenty-fifth place. Then, magically, tenth. Then eighth. Then fifth. He slithers like a tasered garter snake through the knot of cyclists at the top of the hill, hurls himself over the lip, flings his handlebars forward. It’s a minor act of heroism that nevertheless leaves Van Lancker baffled: “Yes,” he says, “but why not start the hill fifth?”
Moments later, we pull up to the mess of the finish line, in the medieval town of Zumárraga. Somewhere amid a gaggle of cyclists, I catch sight of Hesjedal. He lifts his leg over his bike, hands the machine over to an assistant — and shrugs.
The gesture startles me, because I’ve seen it before. I’m almost physically yanked into a Grand Guignol memory from my childhood, in which I walk into my parents’ sun-dappled bedroom, brought there by screaming. My father lies on a bloody sheet, so badly ripped up that bone glistens white through his skin. Leaning over him, my mother vainly tries to patch the wounds with gauze. Earlier, during a bike race, he had reached for a water bottle. He had misjudged the move, lost control at speed, and slid along the tarmac, tearing up his left flank. For one brilliant moment, he stops wailing, looks over at me, and hitches his shoulders in a ridiculous, inscrutable shrug.
A circle closes. Everything about cycling is contained in that gesture, including its reigning truism: to race bicycles is to drink greedily from a bottomless chalice of agony. The sport and its heroes are only knowable, and then just barely, once you come to understand that suffering is cycling’s currency. And what that currency buys is the occasional — the very, very occasional — moment of exquisite glory. Mostly, it purchases tough breaks and tougher questions. Much like the one Eric Van Lancker asks of the rider before him. And by “Why not start the hill fifth?” he is really asking, “Is Ryder Hesjedal willing to suffer completely?”
man from British Columbia finishes top ten in the Tour de France, he should automatically be in the running for Canadian athlete of the year and all the other “best of” accolades handed out to bobsledders and ice dancers and Sidney Crosby. Currently, maddeningly, Ryder Hesjedal is not a star. Cycling, when it isn’t about doping, is SportsCentre filler, something to show right before the Frisbee-catching seal, or the lawn bowling carp. Canada has had bicycling royalty before (Steve Bauer, who finished fourth in the 1988 Tour de France), and we have a stable of excellent riders now: Svein Tuft, Michael Barry, and Andrew Randell. And yet Canucks Zamboni drivers enjoy greater name recognition.I first properly meet Hesjedal on the day after his hill-climbing caper, at the start of stage two in Zumárraga. He is leaving a camper belonging to Garmin-Cervélo, the American race team managed by former Lance Armstrong teammate and anti-doping crusader Jonathan Vaughters. Ordinarily, Garmin would be travelling with a decal-covered tour bus, the likes of which the nineteen other teams have parked pell-mell across Zumárraga’s tight centrum. The bus, however, is in the shop, and the camper gives Garmin an aw-shucks, underdog mien — misleading, considering the team’s status as one of cycling’s most successful outfits.
If you didn’t know that Ryder Hesjedal’s name was Ryder Hesjedal, you’d call him something similarly Nordic, like Sven Järgvesson or Bjorn Flüghorn. It’s easy to imagine him with braids, wearing elk fur. If you didn’t know he was from British Columbia, you’d probably assume he was from the West Coast. Even in cycling cleats, he lopes, surfer-style. In his racing kit, he is lean and tall and comes to a point at his extremities, like Jack Kirby’s early illustrations of Mr. Fantastic. His torso is absurdly long, and a lifetime spent on bicycles has warped his body to the point that he is no longer capable of standing upright. In profile, his body forms a subtle, curving S, while his shoulders look wide and mock strong. (Cyclists, like velociraptors, are unburdened by upper body strength.)
I ask how he’s doing. “I’m feeling good,” he says. “The sun is shining in Basque Country.” He swirls a dark liquid around in a small plastic cup: “Just a little caffeine. And then a bike race.”
The first thing you notice about professional cyclists is that, with few exceptions, they appear to live their internal lives in a heavily padlocked tomb of mental anguish. They are at once astonishingly young and improbably ancient, a result of the fact that they are paid for their agony. They are modern-day ascetics, working in the open-air monastery of the mountains of Europe, with helmets as tonsures, spandex as robes.
There is thus a detachment in their manner that suggests the real world — our world — exists to them only as storybook legend, trapped as they are in another realm, with no corollaries, no points of contact, no common ground. They experience their lives through the tiny aperture of cycling; the aperture is so small because the light is so fierce. They have felt and done things on the farthest shore of the possible.
Professional cycling is the toughest sport legally practised in the developed world — and by a long shot. It’s tempting to bevel that statement by acknowledging the very real hardships of the NHL, the NFL, or the UFC, but that just seems pointless, especially after observing a routine Grand Tour crash, in which an athlete wearing little more than a leotard hits asphalt at sixty kilometres an hour, leaving a slick of epidermis in his wake. (As I write this, the cycling world is mourning the young Belgian Wouter Weylandt, who died in a crash on May 9 during the third stage of the 2011 Giro d’Italia.) Concussions, paralysis, lower back pain, saddle sores, mouth dryness, chafing — all of the above. And while this puts cycling at least on par with contact sports in terms of violent physical duress, it is resolutely not what makes cycling exponentially more difficult.
No other sport demands the same time, pain, and work ethic. You cannot race a Grand Tour without being in supreme physical shape, so fit that you are actually eating yourself, and must consume the same amount of food and liquid as nearly three grown men — which amounts to about 6,000 calories a day — to stay alive. During a warm weather race, a cyclist will lose three kilograms, and must chug five litres of restorative liquid, or it’s game over. (Try that twenty-one days in a row.) Cycling doesn’t have a bench. It doesn’t have time outs. The boys don’t celebrate a good day’s racing at a Hennessy-sponsored nightclub.
