The Question of Why We Ride
I wrote this article last year, after the UK governing body for bicycle racing, British Cycling, clamped down on its ban on transgender athletes by releasing confusing and pointless new categories and guidelines. While the UK continues to be an ever more toxic place for people to be themselves, I thought it would be apt to revisit the idea that the ban isn’t about cycling at all.
It’s about knowing who we are.
I'm in a pub sitting with my friends. We're catching up, chatting, and laughing. We're sitting with a few drinks as someone is playing live music in the corner. The pub is warmer than our South London flats, our hearts warmer for being together. These are the easy times. The hours here melt away compared to the time spent at work that flows like set concrete.
This feels miles away from the faux seriousness of bike racing. The rigour of structured training, of perfectly fettled bikes, of the fear of crashing and want of glory is covered by only a fine film of humour and friendly smiles. In racing, I have found many friends. People who share a passion that leads them to cross paths and handlebars week in week out, season to season. Friends that feel much closer than the short conversations we have would normally let us build. We have shared hard times, self inflicted yes, but times that build bonds quicker. Type 2 fun: fun when looked back on, so it is said.
Unfortunately though, these worlds I occupy do not cross. The friends from each sphere do not overlap and now due to decisions made by the sport’s governing bodies: they most likely never will.
Maybe I know more than my fair share of non-binary, trans or other gender non conforming people, but I'm not in the habit of counting and quantifying people I know into arbitrary categories. We're simply friends. Really I'm only forced to think about these things due to negative outside forces. Now, so I am told, these people I know are a threat to fairness in sport just by existing as they are. I am yet to understand this.
What I do understand is that myself and the majority of the population have the great benefit of never being able to understand the trauma of not being yourself; let alone the trauma of being chastised (threatened, beaten, expelled, killed) for finally being your true self. We can empathise but we don't have to live with those emotions, we don't have to live with a very real threat to our lives for being ourselves.
That said, I believe there is a link here. A kind of existentialism that both groups share. I think some people's attempt to limit non-gender conforming people from competitive cycling comes from a place of questioning oneself rather than from supposedly protecting the ideals of competition.
Cycling has long been the home of the loner, the obsessed, the mentally complex, staunch individuals seeking out the nth degree of performance - the modern byword for ultimately efficient suffering. Riders seek out something echoing self harm; a way of making sense of internal pain by externalising it, making it a manifest controllable operation. A cyclist lives on the road. If the destination is unclear then what are they trying to ride away from? Cycling's classical poeticism has always pivoted, even if it is unacknowledged, around the image of the tortured artist who only creates perfection at their lowest. Marco Pantani rode down a dead end as the fans and media fed on his performances, unconcerned for the individual. Cycling media and fans are seemingly happier with the idolatry of a saint than with the presence of a mentally healthy individual. It seems we are blind to the immense toll the agreed mentality of our sport has on people.
The act of watching a professional rider suffering provides a viewer with an external catharsis through which said viewer can better understand their own lives, their own suffering: by pushing through great challenges we can achieve greater goals. We have gained through their efforts and we exalt them for this; further scraping away at their human form. They are crystallised to us as a story, a shining marvel, rather than the simple human they are. We are all part of the economy forcing us to the maximum of suffering. The amateur cyclist engages in a replication of this catharsis in their own riding and racing, which can have its positive benefits but it can go too far if we become obsessed over these performances. The benefit must be free from qualification and not from an addictive attachment to achieving set numbers of speed or power.
Must we, then, tear ourselves free of cycling to make sense of it all. To approach riding with a healthy mindset to allow ourselves a true appraisal of why we ride. There has been a rise in the number of high profile riders quitting the sport citing mental health as their reason for departure. This is a good thing, we must prioritise health above all else, no matter the crowds baying for the blood of the gladiator as they refuse to fight. The bicycle race is not worth dying for. For the amateur this counts even more as we are only riding for ourselves in our free time out of our own pockets. There must be a residual base of love for riding first and foremost, surely you cannot race just for a return on investment?
What are the ultimate goals of the race? Yes, there is winning, but what really pushes us there; what is the necessity of extracting the performance. Are you still giving your all if your British Cycling coach tells you to take prescription strength painkillers in order to win? Were you not trying hard enough, is there a maximum that you would never reach without it? If our honest selves are not good enough then are we striving for a theoretical engineering maximum, a perfect human bicycle hybrid? Is winning so much of a necessity that a rider must forgo the real living of life for the brief moments of excellence in competition? The act of racing itself seems to become nullified unless a physical absolute is not reached prior. The execution as opposed to the experience of racing. The quantitative as opposed to the qualitative. Racing is boiled down to numbers while feelings and emotions are seen as unwanted byproducts of a rigid process. The human element is seen as something that needs to be controlled and overcome.
If a race is stripped back to an equation of training, skills, nutrition, equipment and competition then an outcome can be estimated. The race run, outcome finalised and worth given to the competitors. Someone feels more secure in their own sense of place for a while because combining A+B+C has given them X. But if someone races who does not fit into the rigid regime then they have ruined the calculation, and by extension the calculating person’s understanding of their own self worth. The outlying person has brought down the curtain on the wizard of Oz to reveal the people beneath. The certainty of an outcome is not the reason we're here, it is the experience of being alive.
To me, humanity is not quantifiable. No number will state who I am; the digits are unable to classify me into a rigid box. The more we try to reduce our world to numbers the less of ourselves we find and so on we are compressed into this state of searching for something we can never find. We chase our tails to the point where a small group of individuals become the enemy because they do not rigidly comply, because they make us question why we are even involved in the madness.
The argument that forms solely around groups that are now excluded from the sport only incites infighting. "You, person, have made me question myself and the structure therefore you must be barred from bicycles" is screamed while ignoring the fact that their inclusion is not detracting from the experience. We are so individualistic that the other is seen as the detractor from the experience as opposed to being crucial in its occurrence. A race has to be against other people. People are all different, we are all individuals that do not fit into rigid boxes of classification in any area. Our differences are what make racing interesting. The beauty of cycling is that it is open to people of all body types and tactics unfurl around riders' individual strengths and weaknesses.
What I believe has happened is that cycling has finally had to face up to people who have already been forced to truly question the fabric of themselves: trans people. They have had to find their own reasons to be themselves completely separate from any outside crutch to give them purpose. They don't need cycling to tell them who they are as they know that already or are trying to figure that out regardless. They want to be part of the sport because they want to be there for the joy of the competition. They don’t need the false validation of racing to be happy, to have their own sense of self worth1.
Cycling needs people who want to be there for the cycling itself separate from any other dynamics or internal pressure. Cycling needs happy, healthy people who are there for the joy of it. Cycling shouldn't feed off people who are secretly unhappy inside. We all need to think long and hard about what we want from the sport. Do we want the sport to be for everyone or do we want it to be a vehicle for our own self-flagellation, at the expense of everyone who doesn't fit an approved mould? If someone who is being their authentic self is supposedly cheating you out of a result are they really the issue.
Racing opens up a unique kind of personal vulnerability. There is no hiding in the result, it is final. You can give your best and still not achieve what you wanted to. The path that leads each of us to a race result is individual as ourselves, the factors nearly innumerable but the outcomes so limited. There is no hard and fast recipe for success however you define that. No one thing, no one other person, can definitively change the outcome of your own race (crashes excepted). Blaming other people or your equipment for being disappointed in your own result is simply a way of brushing the negative feelings off yourself and onto someone else. The spreading of personal negative feelings only harms others. It is truly unfair to cause more harm to a marginalised group due to not having dealt with your own internal battles first.
The doper has already lost. They only know of winning and care so little about anything else, even their own health. The tragedy is that when they win it will never be enough; they are missing something much deeper inside and have been since they started riding. The trans rider’s story is different. They have already had to find themselves before the race begins; their story continues past the bicycle.
All of this pales into insignificance when I’m away from cycling, with my friends. I don't have to justify who I am friends with here. Like many other people looking into cycling, and other sports now, we simply will not gather in spaces that are rife with anxiety and suspicion. The places that are always looking for someone or something to blame will eat themselves alive. While the glass houses shatter, I’ll be with my friends, we’ll ride our bikes for fun, and in the evening we’ll be sat in a pub and laugh at the thought of taking it all too seriously.
These are generalisations of a singular group and may not be representative of all trans athletes. In my anecdotal experience, it is a truth.