This seems as good a place as any to discuss the likes of Koen de Kort and Luke Durbridge, who have been taking to twitter to tell fans not to boo. Durbridge saying "if you don't like cycling don't come to watch" as if it's impossible to differentiate between a like of the actual sport of cycling and a dislike of the baggage that it carries, and de Kort even stating that, in fact, it is us, the fans, who are ruining cycling, by voicing displeasure. So I thought I'd write an open letter to Koen and Luke.
Koen de Kort said:
On another note. Please respect every and ALL riders. Let us all just do our race and please stop the booing. Enough now. Cycling is such a great sport, don't ruin it.
Luke Durbridge said:
What I sore from the fans on the final climb today towards @TeamSky was disgraceful. We are all human and we are all suffering regardless what jerseys we have on. If you don’t like cycling don’t come to watch!!
Dear Koen, dear Luke.
I have nothing against either of you personally, and never have. You presumably do not have anything against me, since the chances that either of you follow the forum is pretty slim and I don't recall having met either of you at any of the races I've been to. I am not a professional athlete and would never profess to have the talent or the dedication to do what you do, and I appreciate that it must be pretty detrimental to your motivation to travel through a sea of boos and hear what you feel is disrespect for the suffering you and your colleagues go through. But before you start telling the fans how to behave, how about thinking about it from the other side of the fence.
Road cycling is not football, it is not basketball, it is not ice hockey, baseball, or whatever other sport you can care to name which has ticketed revenues. There is no fixed home of cycling where we fans can all congregate almost every week to develop a connection to our home teams and home riders, and we don't get to see the whole event, just a minuscule part. But even if events aren't ticketed, many fans have to sacrifice plenty to follow the sport they love. I've trapsed up the sun-drenched face of a low altitude mountain in 40º heat to stake out a place three hours before the riders arrive, to see a few fleeting seconds of the action. I've been one of a hundred people crowded around a minuscule battery-powered TV unit trying to capture the end of a mountain stage that we'd seen go past minutes earlier on a hand-held aerial. There are people who wait out in freezing rain for hours in the Classics waiting for a chance that maybe, just maybe, their favourite rider will lurch past first, spitting mud into their face from the cobbles his wheels are punching their way along. I spend long hours on cycling forums, following races, assessing CQ ranking, designing races. I have 19.000 posts on this board, so I'd like to think that it's pretty self-evident that I have a passion for this sport. But at the same time, we don't get paid for this. You do. You're the ones with the talent and the aptitude, and you're the ones who are on the inside. We're not. We can't change it, we just get what we're given.
But that doesn't mean we're just faceless cheering automatons, who don't have great love and respect for the sport ourselves. We aren't here because we just want to cheer mindlessly. It's not our job. We're here as fans of the sport, because we want to see it enthrall and excite us the way it was when we became fans in the first place, which is different for all of us. We want to believe that we're watching the best in the world duke it out and wowing us with their strength, their fortitude, their resolve, their talent.
Right now, we cannot do that.
We cannot do that because we have just seen the entire fabric of anti-doping, the only thing that truly protects the integrity of the competition, come crumbling down, and hide in the corner like a startled cat in the face of the lawyers of big money.
We've never pretended cycling was perfect, but we've always loved it despite its flaws, despite its sins. At this point, we fans are like the battered wife, cheated on and abused, who keeps believing this time he's changed, this time he means it, he really does love me and he's sorry for all the pain he's caused me. We stuck with the sport through Festina, through Puerto, through Oil for Drugs, through Humanplasma, through the Reasoned Decision. We're willing to put up with a lot, you'd think. But through all of it, we had that belief that anti-doping's genuine aim was to prevent doping in sport, and even if we had concerns about how they went about their business, we were willing to accept it.
But following the Froome decision, we've seen WADA wilfully backtrack its own rules to exonerate a man whose physical and medical backstory now has more inconsistencies and contradictions than Kane, and are asked to believe that the greatest physical specimen in the history of cycling is a man who has dozens of ailments which, like Mr. Burns on the Simpsons, are perfectly in balance with one another so none of them actually detract from his cycling performance; it feels like we have literally seen "justice" being bought before our eyes, by a team which represents everything that is wrong with the sport - cold, calculating and reducing everything to watt numbers, lacking in the passion and the flair and the grit that has always attracted the fans; with a colossal budget that means they can not only purchase top 10 candidate riders and set them to work as middling domestiques in a colossally strong mountain train, but can also raid and steal riders that other teams have had in their developmental wings, profiting off others' hard work too; a racing style which tightly controls and stifles any of the kind of attractive racing that helps attract fans to the sport; perceived favour from the UCI and WADA which both happened for periods of the last few years to be run by people who have a level of connection to the organisation; the ability to filibuster or obfuscate any hardship while lying through your teeth (and easily provable lies, too, such as Cope visiting Pooley, buses that go before riders do interviews with them, and Rowe claiming not to have thrown down that guy's banner); bullying (both internal and external, via the likes of Sutton, and via the likes of Kennaugh belittling Pooley and Phil Deignan airing Pauline Ferrand-Prévot's private life in retribution for her being critical of Armitstead's pre-Olympic reprieve for missing doping tests); the implication of the press being bought off (Brailsford trying to sell "a more positive story" and trying to buy off Matt Lawton with group rides and free gear); and the generation out of thin air of super talents and transformations that, in prior generations, could only be explicable with doping. I know that, in the current péloton, you cannot make those implications without repercussion, and I get that. Even George Bennett issued a climb-down from his post-stage comments on Jafferau after they were taken to mean something other than what was apparently intended. But in Team Sky, fans see a boogeyman: a ruthless, undefeatable, suffocating beast that takes away all that is fun about the sport, and whose success is built on the back of nepotism, vulgar waving of the chequebook, and then served with an almighty dollop of unbearable smugness and hypocrisy.
Luke: perhaps you're right, we should be voting with our feet. At many races, that's fine. But the biggest races of the year are ones that fans have planned out months in advance, long before the latest issues - that are why Sky are drawing this hostile reaction - became public. Certainly Sky were not popular beforehand, and we've all heard the stories about the 2015 Tour too. But some fans have travelled across countries, across continents, even from distant parts of the world to watch the Tour de France. They'll have spent hundreds, thousands, of Euros, of US, Canadian, Australian dollars, pounds, kroner, rials, rubles, lira, whatever, to get flights, to hire motorhomes, to drive hundreds of kilometres to remote distant French countryside, up treacherous roads and down again. When you've made that commitment - which, remember, we aren't being paid to do - just for the pleasure of seeing some of your heroes pass by for a few fleeting seconds, without the joy of necessarily seeing the triumph of the end of it, it's pretty hard to vote with your feet and just not turn up. And besides, who would miss a few hundred people on the Alpe d'Huez among the thousands? It's not like ASO will see a drop in ticketed income. So how is a fan to voice their disapproval? So long as they only
voice their disapproval, then why is that a bad thing? I certainly do not condone the idiot who tried to slap or shove Froome, any more than I condone the idiot who allegedly threw urine at him a few years ago. But giving riders an open thumbs down or booing the riders, the team, that represents everything that is hurting the sport in the public's eye, it doesn't physically harm anybody. Footballers routinely go through worse, often from their own fans.
And remember, Koen: those same fans you are admonishing as the people who are ruining cycling are the ones whose enthusiasm and positivity reduced Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig to tears of happiness, as she was so overcome with joy at the support and the love she was feeling from fans, chanting her name and cheering her on as she made her attack over the Romme and Colombière. So there's still plenty of room for positivity and support among the fans of the sport; the fans were still plenty willing to cheer, to celebrate, to love and to respect the riders during La Course, and nobody seemed to have any problem with Omar Fraile today even as he relegated the patriotic favourite to 2nd place. The fans aren't just cheering indiscriminately; they are showing support and respect for the riders they support and respect, and are not showing support and respect for riders that they do not support or respect.
Neither of you are fools, and I'd like to think that, unlike Dave Brailsford, you don't think that all of us fans are fools either. Neither of you really ought to feel like you're part of the part of the péloton that is getting the negative reaction either. But if you do feel like you are, instead of wondering why the audience isn't clapping on command like a dancing bear, maybe wonder why it was that part of the péloton lost the respect of its audience before you accuse that audience of ruining the sport.
With kindest regards.