Positive Spin

It's a difficult thing to try to find the upside to things, to put a positive spin on all that happens in life and it's even harder when you decide to take up the sport of bike racing, which is so much more unfair than life.  Maybe that's a good thing (ah ha, the concept arises straight away!)...maybe the fact that you have to deal with the unfair nature of bike racing helps you to better deal with the unfair nature of life.

Like the young, innocent Dave Stoller in "the" cycling film Breaking Away, competitive cyclists learn early on that "everyone cheats."  OK,  lots of folks are generally honest, play by the rules and confine their cheating to simple things that are acceptable in our culture, like exceeding the posted speed limit while driving their cars, not correcting a small error made by a clerk or a computer that gives them a small discount on something.  But in business and in competition, there are many who cut corners and break the rules (whether written or unwritten) on a regular basis. Whether it's pros who dope (in virtually all sports)  to gain advantage or amateurs who sit out a lap but accept a place in the results anyway.  In such cases, the only positive spin you can find is to know that you raced honestly, that you didn't feel any need to cheat.

The unfairness of the sport is simpler than that.  Crashes are part of our sport.  You try to avoid being involved or causing any, but they happen.  So your race can be over because of someone else's f-up. Perhaps the most unfair aspect of this is in our criterium rules - which allow persons who get tangled up in a crash to rejoin the race with no penalty.  But if you manage to avoid hitting the pavement or landing on top of another rider and are simply delayed by a crash, you are left to attempt to catch those who were ahead of the crash or suffer off the back for the rest of the race.  And in the true spirit of competition, those ahead of the crash will often speed up when they hear the clatter of bikes behind them.  What could be more unfair?

So you accept that the sport is unfair and move on because there's an upside to it, a positive spin:  You love to go fast on your bicycle.  You love the challenge of competition.  You love bicycle racing.