sportsillustrated.cnn.com . . .
Alberto Contador is a 26-year-old professional bike racer from Spain who in two seasons has won the Tours of France, Italy and his homeland. It's a feat matched by only four other riders in history, and by last fall Contador's performances had depleted the European press of its supply of superlatives. Then, in March, wearing the yellow leader's jersey one week into the Paris-Nice stage race, he did what even the finest racers are occasionally known to do, but Contador since his rise to prominence had not yet done. During a mountain stage, he cracked.
What followed revealed the abiding gulf between the cultures surrounding pro cycling on either side of the Atlantic. European sportswriters spilled liters of ink on this revelation of Contador's humanity. He is one of us! He is plus sympathique! He is ... Sartre on a bike!
Contrast that over-the-top reaction with the off-the-radar response in the U.S.: [Crickets] ... and this terse tweet from Lance Armstrong, Contador's American rival on the same Astana team: Unfortunate day for Alberto. Amazing talent but still a lot to learn.
Even as the U.S. has produced, in Armstrong, the sport's most dominant performer, cycling remains a virtual cipher in the States. When it's consumed at all, it's consumed differently than in Europe. It's framed differently. And as Armstrong returns to the Tour de France after a three-year absence, that ongoing pas de deux of mutual loathing and suspicion, Lance vs. France, is only part of a larger cultural loggerheads.
Here's a stab at what's behind it: Bike racing in Europe is what boxing is in the States -- a poor kid's way out. A chimney sweep won the first Tour de France, and since then honors have gone to carpenters, plumbers, bricklayers, welders, baker's apprentices and metalworking trainees. (One of the greatest, Italy's Fausto Coppi, wasn't even a butcher, but an errand boy for a butcher, which is how he learned his way with a bike.) The European peloton is a clan with a code, a sweatshop on wheels that doubles as a testing lab for designer doping products. Fans make the biggest heroes of those who suffer most; the founder of the Tour, Henri Desgranges, believed that the ideal race would be one survived by a single rider. If these hero-sufferers take drugs, goes the continental line of thinking, it's because no one can be expected to survive such an ordeal without palliatives, and besides, cheating has been woven into the Tour since its second staging in 1904, when the winner of the first, that chimney sweep, hopped a train for part of the route.
The men who plied the roads of Europe a generation ago run the sport today, and why should they begrudge their heirs the pharmaceutical relief they once enjoyed? Even fans see little stigma in a positive test. As the Sixties-era rider Rudi Altig of Germany once put it, "We are professional cyclists, not athletes."
In the U.S., bike racing is a way out too -- a way out of high school hell for geeky middle-class boys blown off by the jocks and cheerleaders. They take up cycling for the romance, for "breaking away," as that Indiana italophile, Dave the Cutter, did in the 1979 movie of the same name. Otherwise a bicycle is either a child's toy or an affluent middle-aged adult's means to health and fitness. In 1981 the first American to ride the Tour, Jonathan Boyer, traveled with a Bible, a blender, and a cache of nuts and dates. California's Bob Roll, who was living in a tent in Switzerland when the U.S. 7-Eleven team picked him up to ride the 1985 Tour of Italy, would inscribe his sidewheels with poetry......
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