I once bought a house from a man who made his living as an Elvis impersonator. This made sense, since he looked and sounded a lot like Elvis. As I was poking around in his kitchen he asked me what I did for a living. “I’m a professional cyclist,” I said.
“You must have a very low resting pulse,” he said.
“It’s about 42 beats per minute,” I said.
“That’s, ah, mighty impressive,” he said.
This was quite a result. It’s one of the sad things about cycling – no matter how much effort you put into it, no matter what skill, it’s hard to impress people. I don’t just mean non-cyclists, I mean anyone. For Elvis to concede that my resting pulse was “impressive” was as good as I think it’s ever got.
I appreciate that we shouldn’t be riding bikes to impress people, and I often feel it’s just as well. I’m a half-decent rider. I’ve won a few things, at a reasonable if not stellar level, in the admittedly narrow specialism of time trialling. All the same, I don’t think I’m Wout van Aert. And to prove no one else thinks I am either, here is a conversation with a reporter that I had immediately after finishing a Commonwealth Games event.
“You’re current National Champion, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Have you won anything else?”
“Well, I’ve won the nationals several times.”
“I meant proper races.”
In a similar vein, I was entertained when a friend told me about a fan he overheard talking to Geraint Thomas on a stand at a bike show:
“Hey, G, nice to meet you, I’m a big fan. I was cheering you on at the Tour in 2018 – boy did you get lucky there, but honestly it’s always nice to see one of the more average riders getting their day in the limelight.”
Thomas asked him if he did much riding himself. Apparently he’d done the Etape, and was very happy to talk about it.
My theory on this is simple – either someone is into cycling sufficiently to already know your palmares, in which case they’ll have recovered from any initial sense of awe and be much more interested in demonstrating their own insight. Or they don’t know much about cycling in the first place, and nothing short of winning the Tour de France five times is going to achieve much cut-through.
My experience is that people are more taken with anecdotal things. I’ve raced against Sir Bradley Wiggins several times. The head-to-head record is 19-1 (to Wiggins, lest you were wondering). If I focus on the odd “1”, people are quite taken with it. Even when I subsequently confess to the 19, they still see me in a glowing light, and often continue to do so when I mention his puncture and the fact it was a teeny-tiny criterium in Hillingdon.
The odder the better is usually the rule. My friend Bernard attracts more attention than anything I (or probably Geraint) have ever managed with his story of having warm urine squirted into his right ear out of a bidon by a drunk fan on Dutch Corner as he rode up Alpe d’Huez on the morning of a Tour stage.
“Wow,” they say. “And you kept going after that? Did you make it to the top? That’s amazing, you must be an extraordinarily determined personality.”
He doesn’t generally explain that he only continued to the top so he didn’t have to ride back down past the squirty man. (No cyclist has ever asked why the fan did this to him in the first place. They all understand Dutch Corner.)
Of course, for the better-adjusted rider, impressing people is not the aim. Cycling is its own reward – you do it for the simple joy and companionship, not to attract admiration. Many of us find this modest attitude irritatingly impressive.
