Builder’s Yard
June 2, 2007
Even in a small, friendly community like the British pro peloton, it can be hard being new.
There’s a story going around I’ve heard three or four times now, about a rider who was riding a race right up at the front, maybe sixth in line, so in a position to take turns driving the peloton, but at this point kind of enveloped with other riders overlapping his back wheel on either side. He’s riding along and he starts to not feel that great. He’s got gas, his stomach’s making rumbling sounds. So he’s there, and he goes to push a fart out, real delicately, like, just squeeze a small one out just for a bit of relief, and suddenly his stomach feels like a brick’s just landed in it. The story goes the unnamed rider swears afterwards he felt the force pull him down toward his top tube.
The explanations for his sudden onset of sickness are varied depending who’s telling the story. They say he was lactose-intolerant and absent-mindedly ate an omelette for breakfast, or he drank too much coffee, or it was the combination of energy gels he’d eaten.
Whatever caused it, what happens next is, when he’s delicately pushing this tiny pocket of air out and, recall, his stomach suddenly becomes a builder’s yard, what comes out isn’t a light puff of air at all, a fragrant deposit into the atmosphere, but instead a liquid that dribbles down his smelly bridge and onto his chamois. It’s the tiniest bit of liquid, but in his head it feels huge, like a river of sewage is in his shorts and the peloton and the TV cameras and his family are going to see. With the seal broken he knows he’s in for an explosive and frighteningly imminent case of the blacknells, and he clenches his hoop as tight as he can and he can feel the moisture against his cheeks and he tries to get out of there, out of this paceline and off the back of the group where he can take off his shorts and spray some unfortunate farmer’s field with this likely toxic human manure.
But what happens is as he moves to the outside of the peloton, the floodgates open in front of everybody, and he finishes the race wearing brown shorts.
They tell the story to you while you’re riding, and it’s told so similarly every time, like a folk tale that’s been perfected. There’s never enough detail about the final explosion. I find myself considering the position of my anus and my chamois. Would it absorb into the chamois before seeping through? Or is my position too bum-high? Would it spray through the lycra?
We all fear getting caught short in a race. And even though the man in the story isn’t real, it alarms us because he could be any one of us, with our coffees, and our diets, and our energy gels. Any time we could get caught short and have to drop off the back of the peloton, or worse, have to try to defend a jersey while clenching our cheeks and ignoring the growls from our bowels. Our digestive systems are put to great use and at any moment could decide to punish as retribution.
But there’s another thing about the vagueness of this rider’s digestive vagary, because it reminds us of the elephant in the room: we spend most of our time with our faces pointed directly into some other guy’s ass. What happened to the other guys when he exploded? Because I’m sure for those guys it wasn’t all fun and games and thinking up new nicknames to call Djamoladine Shatmepantsov. What if that ass right in front, pointing up in your face right now, is the one that goes off? Will there be spray? There’ll be a smell.
And like the emperor’s new clothes, I see the almost-naked man in front of me for what he is, a bobbing anus that at any moment could do what anuses do. That’s the glamour of pro bike racing. For the next decade I’ll be staring at men’s asses. I’ll be panting, struggling, and now, always, hoping they never have their moment directly in front of me. I have been hazed.
Music: endless natsuyasumi – never-ending daydream