There is an episode of The Simpsons (episode 238, “The Mansion Family) where Mr Burns, the oldest resident of Springfield, goes to a doctor for a check-up. The upshot is that he has every disease known to man. The only reason he’s not dead is “Three Stooges Syndrome” – all the diseases are trying to get through the “door” to kill him simultaneously, so they get wedged against each other. The slightest disturbance in this equilibrium would be fatal.
I’d argue that the sport of professional cycling is in a similar position. There are a simply awesome number of things wrong with it, yet it still works. This has been the case for as long as I’ve been interested or involved. For a business worth millions, employing thousands of people, and run by people who at the very least aren’t obviously morons, it’s wildly unstable.
Teams vanish every season, and they always have done. Sometimes they do it in an orderly manner that lets everyone try to find another job, like the Arkea-B&B Hotels teams last year. And sometimes they just point their propellers at the sky and thunder to the seabed mid-race, like ANC-Halfords, which imploded in the middle of the 1987 Tour de France.
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Races come and go too. Even things that looked fairly permanent like the Criterium International, the Tour of Yorkshire, or the Ride London events. One press release and they can blink out of existence.
The sport is ludicrously dangerous. If you invented pro cycling today, your idea wouldn’t survive the risk assessment for the first race. “Risk: catastrophically unstable vehicles being raced at high speeds in close proximity to each other, surrounded by hard objects. Mitigation: polystyrene hats.”
It’s run by an often-opaque organisation based in the Swiss mountains like a Bond villain. Large parts of cycling are kept afloat by questionable money from iffy government regimes and industries.
It should all fall apart at any moment, but it does not. In fact, the shambles is a lot of how it works. We’ve just finished with the spring classics. The thrill of the classics can easily blind you to their weirdness.
Imagine, again, that you’re inventing this from the start: “We start in Milan, we ride down 300 km of flat road, we have a couple of really short, easy climbs, and we finish in San Remo. It’s going to be amazing.” Or “We’re going to get everyone to ride their road-race bikes over the worst roads in Northern France. Half of them will fall off, and the other half will get punctures. You’ll love it.”
They’re like that because they weren’t primarily intended to be bike races. They were publicity operations – having a race to Roubaix was mainly about publicising the not totally prepossessing settlement of Roubaix. The Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia were just selling papers by means of a terrible trial of endurance – 50% of their DNA is in common with the worst excesses of reality TV.
A lot of cycling’s glory is that it’s not a modern sport. It’s evolved, and barely, from a nineteenth-century freak-show.
This is why I’m always concerned about the calls to modernise it. They’re almost always well-meaning and sincere – most people in pro cycling want to make the sport more financially stable, and above all they want to make it safer.
But I also know that, for example, a properly safe sport would be on shorter laps of a carefully designed circuit. And that a really financially-sustainable sport would almost certainly mean fans paying to watch it from the roadside. And while I don’t want to see riders injured, and I don’t want to see riders getting raked over by dodgy sponsors, I also worry about the beautiful equilibrium of impending disasters that got us here.
