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Too easy
by Tom Southam | 08/07/10

Man, bike races are easy. I know this because I did something I don’t normally do a while back and went and watched one. Ignoring for once the advice of Max Sciandri, who I clearly remember saying in a trash-mag many years ago, that it wasn’t the done thing to be seen at a bike race when you are not racing.

I have always kind of agreed with this advice, but I also suffer from the same affliction that all riders with a sense of dignity seem to harbour somewhere; that it’s just painful and unavoidable to look on at a race and think, ‘I would be there now, in this break, or that group or wherever’, normally, of course, way ahead of where you actually would have been, or not.

I detest thinking like this, not because it hurts to be missing out but I have worked out over the years just how ridiculous the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ of cycling are.

I have been driven almost to distraction after races throughout my career when riders have trotted in absolutely nowhere and claimed post finishing, ‘if I had just been further up’, ‘if I had followed that wheel here’. In places it is unavoidable, it is in essence the verbalised mixture of the rational thought process and the world of hope and insecurity that all bike riders live in. The fact is, though, you didn’t go in that break, didn’t see that move go, and never would have, and what is more you never will.

My good pal Charly Wegelius summed it up most succinctly when, after one race or another in Italy, I was doing exactly what I hate (I am a living contradiction), and explaining how great I would have been if… He cut me dead mid sentence and gave me the gift of one of my now favourite phrases; ‘If my sister was a boy, she would be my brother’.

Simple as that.

So trying not to dwell at all in if’s and buts, I finally dragged myself away from my so far stumbling attempts at starting training again, and headed up to the Smithfield Nocturne, ‘for a look’, but despite surrounding myself with pretty women and champagne by the side of the circuit, it was a difficult thing to look at.

It was difficult because it was frighteningly easy, so easy in fact I could not believe that I have ever struggled in a bike race. I remember from my two starts in the same race, just how hard the circuit is in places, and know full well where I was stood was the only real place for a breather, even so, the guys just drifted past lap after lap and I found myself dragged in to an unavoidable mental chess game, completely oblivious to how hard the race may have actually been.

Standing as I was opposite John, I also had the added dimension of the boss’ ever changing and undisguised facial expressions. Calm and relaxed when things are going well, seconds away from nuclear holocaust when things aren’t.

The champagne was going down rather well, despite the cold. Dad how the hell did you ever do it? That was the centre of London on a good day – I cannot imagine how cold the hillsides you have stood about on must have been.

I really started to get into the race. So much so that I found myself willing the guys on with such force it began to hurt my brain. What’s more in the finale, I had planned out exactly how our two in the break were going to win the thing. It was so easy.

But then they didn’t. They didn’t do any of what I had planned for them and I just couldn’t understand why; it had been a doddle in my brain. They just had to do x, z and… why, why, why?

I was crushed for the briefest of moments when I heard the P.A. on the other side of the course announce the winner. But then, of course, in my simplistic roadside view I had completely forgotten just how much is going on in the mind and body of the guys in the race.

Things are only simple in bike races when you win, up until that point your mind is in a complex melange of emotions, thoughts, doubts, Lady Gaga and tactical decisions. Add this to your depleted brain having to deal with your level’s physical discomfort, and having to work out how much further and when you can push these abstract limits around; not to mention the not so simple task of keeping the bike upright, and all of a sudden I remember each and every guy streaming by is in a different world to the one that I inhabit as a member of the crowd. They are in fact in the race, and that is a complicated and hard place to be.

I have spent race after race envying the happy go lucky boys and girls by the side of the road, the managers, the soigneurs, the people who get to enjoy the races without the exhausting stress of actually trying to win something as difficult as a bike race. Yet as I stood there, trying to understand why things weren’t happening as simply as Rook 1 to Knight 2, I realised that spectating with any kind of vested interest in particular riders, is really damn hard.

The fact of the matter is; it is hard on both sides of the fence. It is a slow and frustrating torment to will your riders on as a spectator, wanting it so much for someone else. Yet it can be a paralysing and difficult job when you are the one sprinting desperately out of corners, trying to do it not just for yourself, but for everyone else too.

The good news for me, at least, is that I have no doubt as to which side of the crash barriers I want to be on, and I hope the next bicycle race I am at I will be on that other side; frustrating those who have come to see me do my thing, and very (very – that extra one is for you Kristian) occasionally actually getting it all right and making it really look that easy.

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