What makes The Rider so great – beyond the immediate dramatic arc of its sporting narrative – is the way it captures, at such short length, the entirety of the cycling experience.
There are the little Zen koans of wisdom about race tactics: “Always attack as late as you can, but before the others do.” There are the litanies about what goes on (or does not) in a rider’s mind: “On a bike your consciousness is small. The harder you work, the smaller it gets.” There are the quirky rituals riders go through, like new bar tape “for morale”, or how Jacques Anquetil was said to move his bidon to his jersey pocket on climbs so his bike would weigh less.
Suffering is celebrated (“I’m the only rider in the world whose pain I’ve ever felt”), but secrets are also confessed – like silently wishing for a puncture so you could just end the suffering with dignity. There are the brief asides that perfectly illuminate the oft-perverse dynamics of the sport; e.g. the 1976 Tour of Flanders, when Freddy Maertens and Roger de Vlaeminck let a group of escapees go because neither wanted to help his rival win – hence they both lost.
And, lastly, the Nietzschean fulminations about the soft underbelly of modern life. “People have become woolly mice,” Krabbe writes. “They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride.”
The book more than gets under your skin, it gets into your blood. The journalist Max Leonard, author of Lanterne Rouge and Higher Calling, tells me that he read The Rider “pretty early on”, and then, years later, when he reread it, “got really annoyed and disappointed” to find that much of what he considered to be his own original thoughts about cycling were “things I had just assimilated from the book”.
Rereading it myself recently, I found myself nodding in agreement at any number of things I had forgotten from the book, but often experienced in real life. Like how a fellow racer in the Tour de Mont Aigoual tells our rider at the start line how little time he has had to train. “All riders say that, always,” writes Krabbe. “As if they’re afraid to be judged by that part of their ability they can actually take credit for.”
The book has had a wide and profound influence. Laurens ten Dam, the Dutch pro rider with Team Sunweb, recounts via telephone from his team bus at the Tour of the Basque Country this past spring, that when he was growing up, as a fan of racing but not yet a racer, information about cycling, in those pre-internet days, was a bit thin on the ground. He haunted the library.
“There was nothing but books about cycling,” he says. “And everything you could get in your hands was like gold.” One of those books was The Rider, which he says he has “reread like 10 times”. While his younger, non-Dutch teammates may be less aware of it, ten Dam says: “Every Dutch guy who’s a little into cycling knows the first five sentences of the book.”
Copyright © 2016 Rodale Inc.