His strength on the bike is evident on the harder Thursday Windjammers ride. After a long winter on the indoor trainer, I find it unnerving to be barreling down narrow Dutch lanes, my sight obscured, the warnings called out in Dutch, the group packed tight as canned mackerel, half-wheeling and all, fighting the savage headwind blowing in from the North Sea. As Krabbe writes in The Rider, “If there’s one thing Dutchmen know how to do, it’s form a paceline.”
At some point, we turn onto another broad, flat road, this time attacked by a merciless scything crosswind. The group slips instantly, silently into an echelon formation; unprepared for the shift, I find myself isolated, and then spit out the back, dropped by this cagey grandfather and his mates.
Back at his apartment, I challenge the master to a few games of chess. Again I fall to a strategic blunder. “The queen can also go backwards,” he says, sighing, as he captures a key piece. There is a well-worn saying in chess, “the winner of the game is the person who makes the next-to-last-mistake.”
I tell him it sounds like something from bike racing – like someone attacking too early on a big climb. Does he see a comparison? He wrinkles his face and makes a guttural “bah” noise that signals an oncoming blast of invective. “Once you start explaining things you degrade them. They’re only what they are in themselves.”
Chess, he thunders, is “absolutely not a sign of intelligence!” It is not a metaphor. What makes it interesting are the discrete moves that can hardly be explained to people who do not play.
Similarly, the Krabbe of The Rider is always lamenting the inability of the outsider to comprehend the tactics, or motivations, of riders. Why risk a mass sprint for seventh place, he wonders.
“How long before I run into someone who knows how good that was?” When a man watching the race shouts “Faster!” Krabbe responds with pity: “Probably thinks bicycle racing is about going fast.” A girl who shouts “Allez!” triggers a rant about how racing has become just another cliche.
“Never will I be able to make it clear to her that I don’t race because I wanted to lose weight, because turning 30 horrified me, because I was dissatisfied with cafe life, because I wanted to write this book, or because of anything else at all,” he wrote. Why, then, does he do it? “Purely and simply because it’s road racing.”
That same fierce purity animates The Rider. “That’s what makes it a good book,” he says, pounding the table. “If I’m allowed to say that. It’s not an excuse for something else, it does not have a social background, it does not try to say anything about humanity. It’s just about a race.”
The way Moby Dick was just about a whale.
Copyright © 2016 Rodale Inc.