Road Bike Racing - Jonathon Vaughters tells it like it is...

...in this articles from Cycle Sport magazine. http://www.cyclinghalloffame.com/pdf/csm/Jonathan_Vaughters.pdf

My favorite part:

I was watching one of my riders sit dead
last in a screaming-fast peloton in the
pelting hail. I could not see his face, but I
could feel his legs, and hear his
thoughts: “Do I open my eyes so I don’t
go in the gutter but have the sting of hail,
or do I keep them closed and pray?”
This poor kid had only a week ago
been training in sunny California and
enjoying some good results in the US
National race series there. Sunny,
windless races, tanned participants, and
everyone on sparkling new $5,000 bikes
and eating organic tofu. This is the face
of the millions of new cycling fans in
America who watch Lance in the Tour
and Lance on Oprah. They are inspired
to take up cycling as a fun, healthy,
family activity, and love this “quaint”
European sport.
It is a phenomenon such as I have
never seen. Cycling has become the
sport of the active nouveau-riche in
America, an exotic import from Italy with
an American superhero at the top.
Fueled by an organic food craze and
backlash against our obese society,
cycling has become the fitness darling of
America.

Read this article if you want to know what it takes to succeed as a European cyclist. You have to be prepared to see your blood run by you as you crawl bawling in the mud.

I read that last month and my reaction was 'well so much for the glamorous world of pro bike racing!' Between this article and Overcoming it makes you wonder why anyone would want to suffer that much!

fanstastic read. Thanks for sharing.

Mark

you may want to download the link instead of just clicking on it, its almost 7 megabytes

can anyone here convert that pdf text to regular Word? Id like to print this out larger but still 3 pages or so.

The European peloton is a whole other thing. Many a hotshot Cat 1 from Northern CA has found himself in the same position.

I raced on both sides of the Atlantic...specifically Belgium. It's totally different.

Point...kids in a place like Belgium (and I am going somewhat from memory here) like mid-teens are racing 50 miles. They have the racing mileage by age, and then broken into times of the year...so for example, at 14-16 they can race 40 miles until May, then go 70 miles after that. It's very regulated and controlled. But the issue here is the mileage. They road race, as well. And since this is really the national sport, road closures are not an irritation, but support of the sport. Thus, they get a ton more experience.
It's like a European coming to the US to play baseball. There is baseball in Europe. It's not like our baseball.
Now that many countries over there have figured out basketball, many players are here in the NBA.
US cycling is now really in the early stages of figuring this out.

The other thing is the culture of the cyclists, themselves. In Belgium, most of the greats are Flemish. Flemish tend to be "working class" coming from harder lifestyles. They ride like that. It's like how the NHL used to be. Most of the players were Canadian coming from farms and working class places using hockey to not have to go back. Going back to a factory, or being a successful cyclist gives one more motivation.

The Vaughters article, and he would know, is exactly correct. He even touched on his top guys not used to the mileage and the "day after day" racing. In the US they race on the weekends. Where I was in Belgium you could find a bike race, someplace, every day. Even if it was a short evening race in the summer on a Tuesday. Someplace, there was a race.

Great article thanks.

The other thing is the culture of the cyclists, themselves. In Belgium, most of the greats are Flemish. Flemish tend to be "working class" coming from harder lifestyles. They ride like that. It's like how the NHL used to be. Most of the players were Canadian coming from farms and working class places using hockey to not have to go back. Going back to a factory, or being a successful cyclist gives one more motivation.

Ive heard this compaired to "Inner City" kids here who have some talent and use Basketball as a way out of very poor surroundings. An entirely different motivation than most US Bike racers.

. Where I was in Belgium you could find a bike race, someplace, every day. Even if it was a short evening race in the summer on a Tuesday. Someplace, there was a race.


True.....there are still more than 4000 races a year in Belgium.