#tbt – Familiar Faces
The 2010 season started early, with the first races in my schedule taking place before the trees had leaves. Wes Speksnijder and I were reunited, and though he disagreed that our almost season-long separation had been an intentional decision by the team’s management, I was happy with the prospect of being allowed to share a room with him again.
My first race brought me to the middle of freezing cold fucking nowhere in Northern Europe. The journey from Sedgethorpe involved an overnight ferry, which I’d opted for on a whim and then regretted when I discovered how long it would take and that I’d be expected to sleep in a dark, moving room overnight. I was tired and queasy when I eventually arrived.
On the way to the start line, I heard shouting from the crowd. I looked over through the faces, the adults and kids, and saw the familiar figure of John Clarke leaning over a barrier and bellowing my name. It wasn’t what I needed.
I deigned to speak to him, immediately realising I was fulfilling an obligation to a past lifestyle. Straddled across the bike, I leaned against the barrier to chat. The fans beside us watched in excitement. They didn’t know who I was, but I was a competitor in the race and it was exciting to see me so close for long. A little boy asked for my autograph in French, and so I signed his notebook and then, recalling my own childhood of collecting cyclist autographs and the confusion I’d later experienced trying to decipher the scribbles to figure out who I’d met, I wrote my name in block capitals underneath the signature. The smile on his face made me wonder if it would have been kinder to leave my identity ambiguous, so he’d have this moment of meeting a superstar forever.
It was strange how the fans were so keen to see us off the bike. If the appeal of the sport is the action of bicycle racing, it followed the fans were here for the deed and not the doer. They seemed to want more than that, though, they wanted to assign personalities to the narrative, as though what they’d seen was an incomplete sequence of events that could only take meaning when they assigned a few bullet points of background to each action. Perhaps it was simply that what we were doing was so far beyond normal human capacity that they wanted to see us closer, to inspect and gawp and be sure that we were really human, and understand what it takes to be able to push this fragile shell far beyond the point at which you’d expect it to break.
Clarkey was working as a plumber these days, he said. It was probably a better paying gig than what he’d be earning on the bike at his level, but his personality seemed more suited to the world of cycling, with its bright spotlights and its constant networking. Nobody ever got their taps fixed and then tried to find out the backstory of the plumber before they decided they were pleased with the job.
He was in awe of me, speaking as though he was enamoured, flattering me. I wondered if knowing me and Liam was his story now, growing fat in his van on weekdays and spending the weekend telling everybody in his Liverpool cycling club we were best friends.
He brought up the old days repeatedly, but it felt as though I was speaking to a fan rather than an old friend and I was grateful when our conversation began to exhaust. Our paths had diverged too far. He mentioned Liam and I didn’t have anything prepared to say in response. I hadn’t seen Liam much more recently than him, and unlike Clarkey I also hadn’t been checking his results.
“Are you planning to do something today?” He said.
“We’ll see. It doesn’t suit me that well.”
“Come on, show us some of that Dom-estic violence.”
“Right,” I said. “Well look, it’s been great catching up. Maybe I’ll see you after the finish.”
I rode to the start line and he walked back to his group of friends. They’d be drunk on cheap beer, the kind of beer you don’t come to Belgium for, and cheering near the finish. And I’d have to glaze my eyes over and ignore the noise, some cognitive trick where I’d hear it and know it was for me but would pretend there was no pressure and nobody watching. I’d be the deed and I’d finish whatever low placing I’d end up and then I’d get washed and forget about the whole thing.
INTERLUDE
January 31, 2010
Being a family-friendly edit of the boys’ first song on this winter day.
We’ll shout out loud and wave our flag
Let them know what we want
Managed coefficient of drag
And Dom out off the front
(“And it’s”) Oy, oy, oy! (“Yeah!”)
Allez, allez, allez!
We’re drunk and at a bike race,
What a way to spend a day!
(John Clarke gets distracted by one of his friends struggling to push the keg uphill, and misses a verse. He improvises poorly:)
Diligence! Roll the barrel thus
Else you’ll turn it into foam
If you complain like Sisyphus
You’ll make your own way home
(He’s almost lost them here, so he begins to drum on the barriers ready for the next verse. The others join him, banging on whatever they can reach, a raucous cacophony:)
I never trusted Wallonies
And I don’t like the French
If you’re Flemish, Dutch, or Yankee
For sure we can be friends
(“And it’s”) Oy, oy, oy! (“Yeah!”)
Allez, allez, allez!
We’re hammered at a bike race,
What a way to spend a day!
Because we’re sports cognoscenti
We shout for vay-lig-style,
And we never run on empty
We’re drinking all the while!
(“And it’s”) Oy, oy, oy! (“Yeah!”)
Allez, allez, allez!
We’re steaming at a bike race,
What a way to spend a day!