The one thing all the statistics and studies and scientific assessments can’t deliver is cycling’s great intangible. By this I mean the transformation of agony into fuel, an alchemic process that is supernatural in its properties. For instance, to climb a fifteen-kilometre mountain pass at an average grade of 10 percent and a mean speed of twenty-five kilometres an hour is to sustain almost forty minutes of screaming pain without a second’s respite. The reward for being the best isn’t that one takes less pain; rather that one is able to absorb more. The nature of this process is revealed at the precise instant that we come to know ourselves completely: we learn how far we can push ourselves, and the true mettle of our character. But that knowledge isn’t properly intelligible, nor is it transferable. To mangle Laurie Anderson’s aphorism, writing about cycling’s meta-state is like dancing about architecture. It is a private knowledge, forged in pain’s stables, and belongs to men who are not served by articulating it.
All of which might explain the gravitas that blurs the edges of Ryder Hesjedal’s obviously sunny nature. It might explain why he can, at times, seem like a husk. Outside the Garmin camper, he takes a slow sip of his coffee, swirls the cup a bit more, tosses it into the garbage. I ask if he’s feeling yesterday in his legs.
“Nah, yesterday was fine. Had a good rest.” He slowly swings a leg up and over the frame’s top tube and clicks into his machine. “Be seeing you.” He rides off, and finishes fifth.
day later, I sit across from Hesjedal in my hotel room. He has just enjoyed a massage — which is to say his body has been viciously tenderized — and is on his way to dinner. (Watching food disappear into a cyclist’s maw is hilarious and awe inspiring and slightly nauseating.) I’m looking for something in his features — some flicker of the human. But his face is just sunburn over ashen skin, cold cuts on top of bone. On the third day of a Grand Tour in the Biscayne mountains, a cyclist’s face is not a face. The gentle frissons, those little signs we rely on to navigate our social relationships, are entirely absent.“We grew up the real way,” Hesjedal says, telling me of life in the Highlands, outside Victoria, in the recession-plagued ’80s. “My dad didn’t have it so good at first; he cut and sold firewood. We got by.” When he and his sister were of school age, his father got a job with the municipality, and his mother followed. But those first years were hard: “My dad taught me that work ethic is important. It’s everything.”
Professional cycling has always been a working-class sport. Or, to put it the way the lefties used to, professional cycling has always exploited the working class: the French Red press in the ’20s famously described racers as forçats de la route — forced labourers of the road. Hesjedal very much falls into this working man archetype. (Its opposite, the aristocratic tradition, is exemplified by five-time Tour de France winner Jacques Anquetil, who, despite a humble upbringing, mimicked debauched eighteenth-century courtiers by, among other things, sleeping with his stepdaughter.) Hesjedal is defined by work. By focus. “I remember being in my basement, playing ball sports,” he says. “We had this half-wood, half-concrete wall. I’d take a lacrosse set and just whip the ball against the wall for hours on end. Until it was perfect.”
In the Highlands, everyone rode bicycles. Not like little Ryder Hesjedal did, though. On a heavy Norco Bushpilot, he rode the trails behind his house again and again and again, until he was sure no one in the world could ride them any faster. At thirteen years old, he understood that fun could morph into a vocation: mountain biking was booming; trails and legends were both being carved into the countryside. “That was my ticket,” he says.
“I remember telling my dad, ‘Listen, I need to focus on this.’ ” He was in grade eight at the time, and his father was understandably lukewarm. It didn’t help that his son was displaying some very real aptitude for baseball, a sport that typically pays a rookie second baseman about five times what a mountain biker can expect over the course of his career. Nonetheless Hesjedal and “Team Family” would strap his bike to the car, pack the camping gear, and screech out of the lot after school to make races in Kelowna, in Whistler, all over BC. And then, farther afield. “After World Champs [in Australia], I’d come back to class, and I’d explain what I’d done over the summer,” he says. “Kids were, like, ‘Huh?’ I felt like it was the best thing. As far as I was concerned, by that time I was probably one of the best in the world. It’s important to have that confidence and identity when you’re that young.”
Backed by a local enthusiast named David Smith, Hesjedal landed his first sponsorship deal with Marin bicycles when he was fifteen, and experienced the following decade through the fog of mountain bike racing. No late-night spliffs with the boys. No chasing girls. When two airliners slammed into the Twin Towers, he was at the world championships in Vail, Colorado. He was a fixture on the international circuit by the time he was seventeen, one of the best in the world by the time he was twenty — and burning out by the time he was twenty-three.
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re at the start line of the cross-country race in Athens, for the 2004 Olympics. You’re supremely fit, your entire being focused on this race for months, years. Five minutes in, just as the adrenalin is settling and your legs have started to sing, you feel telltale wheel drag. Flat tire, race over: “I didn’t finish, dropped out of Worlds two weeks later, and I haven’t raced a mountain bike since. For that to become your reality, it was pretty frustrating.”
In 2002, he signed with the road biking team Rabobank as a stagiaire (we’d say “rookie”) for the off-season. Most off-road racers spend a large portion of their time on the road, to build up overall endurance. Only a small few end up making the transition to road racing. Europe, home of the Grand Tours, was now in his blood. The physical demands were so enormous, the commitment so utter, that road racing became a magnet for his unshakable focus. He had suffered on the mountain bike, but he hadn’t suffered ecstatically. It was time to be swallowed whole.
When his Rabobank contract ended, in 2003, he signed with the world’s foremost racing team, US Postal Service. Postal was Lance Armstrong’s outfit, and it basically existed to deliver him a sixth straight Tour de France victory. Hesjedal rode as a domestique, the teammate who must sacrifice himself, race after race, so that the lead rider may win. Prime cannon fodder, the domestique limits the lead rider’s exposure to headwinds; he goes back to the car for bottles or food; he jostles with rivals in the tightly packed field to protect his leader. Hesjedal was now bottom dog on a team jammed with elite cyclists, all of whom had the podium in their crosshairs.
Like every domestique, he’d get late calls after a long day on the bike to race the following day on the other side of Europe. The work was unrelenting, soul breaking, and meanwhile cycling was being rocked by doping scandal after doping scandal, of which Lance Armstrong’s teams were often the fulcrum. Hesjedal’s vaunted focus was meaningless. He was not in control; he was floundering.
here is no proper way to watch a bike race. Not as a spectator along the side of the road, not in a follow car, and certainly not on TV, thrilling as all these may be. Perhaps one day we’ll invent a medium that will do the job, a 4-D mind-melding tech that marries the cyclist’s experience with that of the support team. Until then, it helps to keep in mind that the hundreds of vehicles behind the peloton (the main, regimented bunch of racers) form a shadow peloton, an obbligato that builds, over the course of the race, to its own Wagnerian crescendo. In a major race like the País Vasco, the peloton’s average speed seems only mildly insane — forty-five kilometres an hour or so — but the cyclists descend at speeds in excess of ninety kilometres, down mountain passes that were scraped out in the Dark Ages for mule trains. A professional cyclist will take a switchback at almost seventy kilometres an hour, which is nearly impossible for a car, unless that car happens to be piloted by a former pro cyclist, or a rally driver. Once you’ve sat in one of the hundred or so vehicles descending picturesque European mountain roads in convoy at highway speeds, you begin to grasp the vast, interlocking machinery of a bike race.
