Krabbe was born in Amsterdam to an artistic family. His father was a noted painter, his mother a translator. His brother, Jeroen, is a well-known actor (among other roles, the archetypal Bond villain in The Living Daylights). Krabbe had two early passions, writing and chess.
His first novel was published, to some success, when he was 23, even as he was on the competitive chess circuit, playing in the finals of the Dutch championships. Sensing that he wasn’t quite good enough to make it at the very top levels, he gradually began to withdraw from competitive chess.
And besides, something else was beginning to occupy his time, and his mind: cycling. He had always been interested, as a spectator, in racing, but he began, in the early 1970s, to test himself with solo time trials, trying to top a friend’s time on a route. Of course, in the era before GPS and Strava, even figuring out the exact length of a route was a challenge.
In a passage in The Rider (which, like most of it, he says, is true), he describes riding with a bag of matchsticks. Every 100 pedal strokes, he would drop a match. At the end, he counted the leftover matches, multiplied by one hundred, multiplied all that by 5.39 – a figure taken from the gearing ratio and the wheel circumference – and had his exact length. “I’ve always been a numbers guy,” he says, shrugging (small wonder, then, to find him on Strava, with some 39,000 lifetime miles).
He broke his friend’s record on a hybrid bike, wearing tennis shoes, in the early 1970s. “I noticed that I wasn’t that bad.” The training got more serious. A new, not fully elite-level racing category for amateurs was unveiled in the Netherlands. “I think with real top-level amateurs I would have been dropped too many times to start to like it,” he says.
The education came quick. “I didn’t even know what type of race I’d be racing.” He was dreaming, he says, of the Tour de France, climbing Mont Ventoux. Instead, he got brutal Dutch criteriums, 100 laps, 400 corners – “every corner was a sprint!”
But results began to come, 12th or 13th out of fields of 80. “I got in breakaways, I got in decisive breakaways. It was great!” After a few years, he moved to France, with the idea of combining writing and riding. The latter seemed to take over. In 1977, he had the “essential writer’s thought: I experienced something strange and interesting – so let’s write about it!” That something was cycling.
He wrote The Rider in the winter of 1977-78. “The race in the book was my 309th race,” he says (he keeps a diary of all his rides). “I knew I could not win the race, of course,” Krabbe says. “That would have been a disgusting book. But I knew I had to play some important part.” The race in The Rider is, he says, “90 to 95 percent real. If I had to change reality for the sake of a good story, I did,” he says. “With every novel, you’re not a domestique of reality. You’re the boss of the story.”
He sent it to a publishing friend interested in literary sports books. But upon its release, he says, he insisted he did not want to be interviewed in the sports pages of newspapers. He wanted it to be thought of, simply, as a novel. “I did not write it for cyclists,” he says.
“You don’t have to like whaling to like Moby Dick, and you don’t have to like cycling to like my book,” he says. “Of course, it helps!”
Copyright © 2016 Rodale Inc.