On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 2/1/2004
Is winning everything?
This column should appear around February 1, 2004: just in time for this year's Super Bowl. That being the case, I am inclined to spend a little ink on the subject of football. I'm sure you didn't drop in here to read about football, but bear with me. I think I know where I'm going with this, and I'm fairly confident I can eventually steer the essay back to our familiar, two-wheeled pursuits.
I used to watch a fair amount of football on TV. I have never been enough of a fan to buy tickets to games or to indulge in tailgate parties. But for awhile there in the 70's and 80's--from the comfort of my sofa--I had the pleasure of rooting for both the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders when both teams were doing quite well. I freely admit to being a fair-weather fan, quite willing to switch allegiance to whichever of the two teams was winning at the time. Happily for Bay Area sports fans, both teams won a lot more games than they lost during those decades, including several Super Bowls between them.
What with one thing and another though, my interest in the game has faded in recent years. The fact that neither team has been winning that consistently may have something to do with my wandering away, but it probably has more to do with my finding better things to do with myself on my free days than make a dent in my couch and watch endless beer commercials...going on bike rides with my friends, for one obvious alternative. But there are other factors that contributed to my turning my back on this most popular of American spectator sports, which I will try to explain here...
While taking a lunch break on a recent weekend, I turned on the TV just at the beginning of a playoff game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Tennessee Titans. The game was being played in Baltimore and the home team was just being introduced, amid much sturm und drang. Onto the field, riding a wave of frenzied cheering, pranced their top defensive player, Ray Lewis. He strutted, he primped, he preened. He flexed his muscles like Mr. Olympia. He glowered and grimaced like a kabuki villain. In short, he made a spectacle of himself that was at once repellant and embarrassing...and the crowd--to hear them howl--loved every bit of it.
It was such a boorish display of bully-boy bombast, I was forced to reach for the remote and find something else to watch while I ate my lunch. I found it offensive. It seemed to me, at least for that one moment, that pro football had degenerated to the level of the grotesque, fraudulent vaudeville that is pro wrestling.
Ray Lewis, for all his well-publicized on-field and off-field foibles, is unfortunately not alone in this arena. With his absurd, all-about-me antics, Terrell Owens has just about single-handedly turned me off as a 49er fan, and the whole, sordid grande guignol of Raider Nation has made following that blighted franchise too painful for any but the most obsessive of fan(atic)s.
So football has lost this former fan, thanks to finally taking its underlying gladiatorial premise to its logical conclusion. But what, you may ask, does all this have to do with cycling? It has to do with the notion of winning, the essential nature of competition, and that illusive quality we call "class." Seeing the depths to which football has sunk has caused me to wonder if that same lack of class and sportmanship is becoming pervasive in all sports, including our grand old game of bicycle racing.
I have long been fascinated by the differences between mainstream competitive sports—football, for instance—and bike racing, and further, between real bike racing and that branch of avid, recreational riding that is almost like racing...the sprint for the city limit sign on a club ride, or a bit of half-wheel hell on a climb with your best buds. When does it stop being a true race and become simply a lark? And when is it more important to win--at whatever cost--than just to play the game for the fun of it?
You don't have to be a football fan to know the name Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers of long ago. You have probably heard his famous quote, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." The actual quote comes from a longer speech, and is in fact, "Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all-the-time thing." Here is another excerpt from the same speech: "Running a football team is no different than running any other kind of organization—an army, a political party or a business. The principles are the same. The object is to win—to beat the other guy."
On some levels, I have to agree with that. Certainly nobody sets out with the goal of losing, be it a football game, an election, a war, or market share...or a bike race, for that matter. But taken from a different perspective, I find it one of the most appalling expressions of life's values I have ever encountered. Shouldn't the real object of a political party be to find consensus and work toward solutions to the problems of society? Shouldn't the object of a business be to produce a better product or service for the world...a product that is not only functionally better but socially and environmentally more responsible? If your market share increases as a result, or if your party wins the election because you dealt with the issues intelligently, then fine. But win for the right reasons.
Call me naive, but haven't we had enough of winning at all costs by now? Isn't the world in the sorry state it's in because too many powerful people think winning at all costs is the only answer? Richard Nixon, in his bizarre, self-serving autobiography, said he learned more from his football coach at Whittier College than from anyone else, and his favorite epigram from that coach was, "Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser." I guess we all know how well that philosophy worked for Tricky Dick!
So anyway--after all this hand-wringing angst--my question is this: is the world of bicycle racing free of these polarizing, atavistic tendencies? Does good sportsmanship and showing some class still count for anything in the peloton?
My short answer is, no, bicycle racing hasn't yet sunk to the nadir of football or pro wrestling, and yes, showing some class still counts for something in the peloton. I have no doubt there is a lot of trash talk in the peloton and am sure there always has been...lots of ways to mess with a guy's head and put him off his stroke. What you don't see is much in the way of public grand opera: high profile tiffs between the divas. When it does happen, it's usually a tempest in a teapot, for example, when Armstrong "allowed" Pantani to win Ventoux, and then Pantani took exception to being patronized (literally, by the patron), and so Armstrong lost patience and called him Elefantino. Much ado about nothing: for the most part just a little flicker of flame fanned into something of substance by journalists hungry for copy.
More recently, we had the endless debate about whether Ulrich waited when Armstrong indulged in his acrobatic bout of purse snatching on Luz Ardidden last year. I thought it was clear that he did wait, and that Hamilton went to the front to control not Ulrich, but some of the other riders...Zubeldia or Mayo perhaps. I believe Ulrich in this matter, and I confess I lost a little respect for Armstrong when he continued to question Ulrich's credibility. He should have either believed him or kept his mouth shut.
I was disappointed in that little display of petty sniping on Armstrong's part because I have been a firm defender of him over the years against accusations that he has no class...that he's just a brassy Texas redneck. In my recaps of past Tours, I cite any number of incidents where he waited for a downed rider or allowed another rider to have a place where it mattered to that rider, but not to him. I liked it last year when he patted Sylvain Chavanel on the back as he went by him on his Luz attack. That was a nice gesture of respect for the long break the young rider had been on. He doesn't have to do things like that, and yet he usually does them, which I think shows not only respect for his peers but respect for the traditions of the sport.
Others disagree with me, vehemently. They point to the "look" he gave Ulrich on l'Alpe du Huez or to some overly flamboyant bit of fist pumping when crossing a finish line as clear signs of no class. Ah well...we're never going to settle that one! But I do feel comfortable in asserting that whatever little celebratory antics riders get up to as they cross the finish line, they are still a long, long way from the boorish posturing that has become the norm in so many other major sports events...chest thumping and trash talking; taunting and humiliating an opponent.
What did we see in last year's Tour? Juan Antonio Flecha's archer pose as he crossed the line in Toulouse was cute. (Flecha means arrow in Spanish.) Carlos Sastre sucking on a binky in honor of his infant child at the top of Plateau de Bonascre was maybe a bit silly, but harmless. (But I have to wonder: did he carry that pacifier throughout the Tour as a good luck charm, or did he just have it handy on the off chance he might win a stage and get to do his binky biting bit?) Jakob Piil and Fabio Sacchi shaking hands before their sprint in Marseilles was especially classy. Robbie McEwen's perpetual, petulant puling about the sprints was definitely not classy, but Alessandro Petacchi's grace and charm more than made up for the Aussie's lapses.
Call me naive again, but I remain convinced that the sport of bicycle racing still shows us more examples of classy sportsmanship than the obverse. I know we all can point to examples of bad behavior, both in the pro ranks and in your average Cat III or IV field--from elbow banging to name calling--but on balance, the classy gestures and honorable moments are more common and are what we remember best. Well, what I remember best anyway.
But aside from our antics--classy or not--when we win, how do we all feel about the actual need to win? I mean, you and you, and me, and that guy over there: how badly does it matter to us if we cross the line first? Would we be just as happy to finish dead even with our friends or even a bit behind, knowing we had done our best? Or better yet, knowing we had done the ride or the climb or the sprint in some sort of synergy with our riding companions? Right away, from the way I've phrased it, you can tell I'm talking more now about recreational riding than actual racing, but there are parallels in real racing too.
Cycling is a funny sport with respect to winning. It's a team sport, but when you think about who won a race, you don't think of a team; you think of an individual. It's the individual who gets top billing in the record books too, not the team. If you go check the records for who won the Super Bowl in 1975 for instance, you will see that it says,"Oakland Raiders." Not Kenny Stabler or Fred Biletnikoff or any of the other 50 members of the team. Team sport, right? But if you look to see who won the Tour de France in 1975, it will say, "Bernard Thevenet." Not his team. Can you remember his team? I can't, and it would take a dedicated search through the records to find that team's name. I know: I tried. But cycling was and is a team sport too, and Thevenet's domestiques and lieutenants supposedly shared in the glory and the prize money.
We look at the careers of some of those domestiques, and we say: he never won a major race in his entire pro career. He may have been an important member of a winning team, but that is seldom reflected in his own palmares.
I have talked with some fairly accomplished racers about this, and they say they get just as much satisfaction from engineering a good leadout to a winning sprint as they might if they had won the sprint themselves. Nice sentiments, to be sure, but who can remember Alesandro Petacchi's lead out men from just last year? Who can remember Bernard Thevenet's supporting cast?
I think it can be safely said that crossing the finish line--or the summit or the city limit--first is not absolutely essential for having had a satisfactory ride, even when the ride is up-tempo and ostensibly competitive. Being part of a group that works well together so that the performance of everyone in the group goes up a notch or two...that can be as rewarding as winning, seems to me.
I am keenly aware that not everyone agrees with this. The world is full of folks who wholeheartedly embrace the Vince Lombardi philosophy of winning being an all-the-time thing. I have ridden with people who absolutely hate to lose, and it's almost unpleasant and even sort of embarrassing to duke it out for a hill prime with them, as they become so ferociously savage about it. It's kind of creepy to be exposed to that level of primal rage up close. I tend to back away and say, "Okay, pal...calm down. It's not that important!" But I'm not so filled with sweetness and light myself that I haven't had my moments of gleeful satisfaction at beating the crap out of somebody on a ride. I have to admit to just a few episodes of being a furious, raging maniac on rides. But those are rare occasions, and they're becoming increasingly rare as I grow older.
Maybe aging has something to do with it. Maybe mellowing out about winning or beating the crap out of the other guy is a dignified way of acknowledging that our bodies can no longer perform well enough to beat the crap out of too many people anymore. Maybe our hormones aren't boiling over the way they did when we were younger. Like old bulls culled from the herd, we cede the primacy to some other alpha bikers and find new ways to make our rides rewarding than just by winning.
I'd like to think it's more than just aging though...more than simply bowing to the inevitable. I would like to think there is something inherent in the sport of cycling that values cooperation and teamwork just as much as it rewards the single person who eventually crosses the line first. And I like to think that it is an appreciation of this cooperative ethos that prevents most race winners from acting too gratuitously stupid when they do cross the finish line. They understand that they could never have made it to the line first without the help of their team members--including soigneurs and wrenches and chefs--and also, in many cases, without the help of other teams in the peloton.
There nothing like being reeled in by the group--after a long, solo breakaway--to humble a rider and remind him how little we can accomplish on our own in bike racing. At a watered down level, the same laws of cooperation and teamwork apply on century rides and fast club rides. That doesn't mean we can't have fun trying to pip our pals at the county line or drop them on a climb, but it ought to forestall us from taking ourselves too seriously when we do so...from thinking that winning should be an all-the-time thing, or that our own little egos are burnished by having won some little contest. For the sake of our peace of mind, I hope so anyway.
This year, my wife and I have been invited to a Super Bowl party. I'm going riding that morning, and will meet my wife at the party at the end of my ride. (Fortunately, the party hosts are serious cyclists--former racers--who won't mind my showing up in sweaty bike clothes.) I thank heaven for small favors: that neither Ray Lewis nor Terrell Owens made it to the Super Bowl this year, so we can be spared their semi-psychotic capers. I hope the players who did win that trip to the big show will comport themselves in something approaching an honorable, classy way. And I especially hope our favorite sport of bicycle racing will continue to show the world an honorable, classy image, and that we will take the gentlemanly behavior of an Alessandro Petacchi as the inspiration for our club ride etiquette, rather than the banty-rooster strutting and crowing of some other sprinters I might mention.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net