![]() Whenever that horrible picture of Jani Brajkovič, a cyclist I know quite well, makes the rounds on “hardman Twitter,” it makes me want to throw up. I have the supreme privilege of being a cycling journalist, meaning I know quite a few professional cyclists in real life and have human to human conversations and connections with them. It’s fan entitlement at the expense of people with lives, dreams, and families. There will always be crashes, speedy descents, cobbles, the thrill of the sport-there’s no danger of these elements ever going away, and this pearl clutching that cycling will be ruined forever because riders won’t be allowed to continue to ride while bleeding from their skull is revealed for what it is: a desire to witness human cruelty under the guise of sporting purism. The thing is, these machismo fears are also unfounded. That’s putting a man’s life in danger for money and spectacle. When he crossed the finish line, he did not know where he was. Visibly concussed, Horner was encouraged by his team to continue riding. On the latter, one of the most surreal incidents in recent history came in 2011 when Chris Horner crashed in Stage 7 of the Tour de France. It’s why concussion protocols in cycling didn’t become mandatory until 2021. It’s why it took Fabio Jakobsen’s near-fatal crash in the 2020 Tour of Poland to jolt organizations into making race infrastructure safer. Machismo and a conservative appeal to traditionalism (“things can’t change because they have always been this way, if you don’t like it, leave, don’t ruin my sport”) is part of the reason it took until the early 2000s for helmets to be mandatory in professional cycling despite the track record of severe injury and deaths related to head trauma. The persistent “real hardman” attitude is also indicative of a certain impulse in the sport, one that’s been a barrier to positive change for too long. ![]() The cameras don't show the victims when they limp their way home-they’ve already switched over to the winner’s exit interview. The crash is just an interruption in the flow of things. On television, after a crash, the camera pans back to the peloton after a while. This partially happens because the mediums of film and television detach the viewer from the human subject, who becomes a plaything for the viewer’s amusement, and thus athletes’ bodies are transformed into abstracted objects of debate and consumption. There’s always a slurry of Twitter comments about how cycling has “gone soft” or isn’t as tough as it used to be, how these athletes are overpaid wimps for not voluntarily subjecting themselves to bodily harm for the entertainment of fans. You see it in a certain pushback whenever cyclists leave races early because of injury, band together to protest unsafe conditions, or whenever the CPA steps in to protect cyclists from dangerous situations, such as extreme temperatures and weather. In reality, all they do is fetishize human pain.īut there’s a difference between empathizing with the human narratives and relishing in the physical pain and violence athletes incur. These images-Petersen in the Vuelta, Jani Brajkovič bleeding from a similar gaping wound in his head in Stage 5 of the 2011 Tour de France, Eddy Merckx getting back on the bike with a broken jaw-are celebrated as a macho ideal, a visual testament to the toughness of cycling. Posts consisting of cyclists wounded and maimed-yet continuing to ride their bikes-circulate quite often on Twitter with similar quips: these are real hardmen not like you or me or athletes in other sports like soccer, which are full of pampered weaklings. The tweet’s caption on this picture was a flippant joke: “I’d have probably just asked for the rest of the day off.” The image is violent, Petersen gritting his teeth, the picture of anguish as he continues to ride his bicycle, visibly and gravely wounded. ![]() Photo credit: ANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULAT - Getty ImagesĪ few weeks ago, an image from the 1990 Vuelta a Espana of Danish cyclist Alte Petersen bleeding from the head while having his hair cut from the team car made the rounds on Twitter.
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