Author: Harold Dalton

Mark Cavendish remains one of the greatest sprinters ever to grace the sport. But he’s equally famous for his temperament, with a remarkable predilection toward kicking off in interviews because he refuses to suffer fools gladly. I’ve always admired that aspect of his personality. Here’s the time I fell foul of it:

Part Three: Case Study. The body, with all its gendered and racialized associations, became the concept through which cycling as a sport and France as a state realigned their notions of the natural, the medical, and the illicit.

Around four years ago I read an article written by Carlton Reid suggesting that companies that make money from cycling should throw their weight behind cycle campaigning. As with pretty much everything in the world of campaigning, it hasn’t happened. We are still around the 2% mark for the share of journeys that are cycled in the UK every day, compared to around a third of journeys in the Netherlands.

The Tour has the prestige, and the Giro has the veritas. The Vuelta has… a bunch of mad bastards. It’s the Grand Tour for people who don’t take themselves too seriously, and that’s what I love about it.

Part Two: Background. The history of drug testing in sports is specifically a history of regulating physical bodies.

Thomas De Gendt is the only man left standing! He famously (?) gave up sausages (??) to improve his chances of victory (???) early in his career, so we’re excited to see him on the cusp of a historic victory.

“Which Vuelta Champion Am I?” It’s the question that plagued Kierkegaard through The Sickness Unto Death, it’s the question that prompted Lacan to devise his objet petit a, and it is the eternal différance to which Derrida, sick with deferred answers to this elusive question, alluded. Well, we’ve solved it for all those dead guys.

Part One: Introduction. Modern illicit performance-enhancing techniques serve to reify the idea of a “natural” body.