The Doc’s friend Bernard’s shameless use of the ‘unfair advantage’ excuse knows no bounds and means he’s never truly beaten
Iwas out for an autumn ride with my friend Bernard a couple of weeks ago. Despite suffering from a bad back, a sore knee and a total lack of decent training – things I was careful to mention as a bit of groundwork – Idropped him up one of South Cambridgeshire’s notorious hills.
I waited for him at the top, gazing down upon the M11 beneath me. “Hardly a gentlemanly way to behave,” he complained when he arrived. “ You know you’ve got advantages that aren’t fair, and you still behave like a d**k.”
Bernard emits allegations of unfairness whenever he’s beaten on a bike in much the same way that a giant squid emits ink when it glimpses a sperm whale.
Over the years, advantages that I’m alleged to have deployed in an unfair manner include having time to train, not having a job, not having children, not having a life, not having any friends, and having “a small, pointy, aerodynamic head”.
On this particular occasion it was, “training history”. Which I’d have thought was as fair an advantage as there is, but I didn’t argue.
Some complaints over the years have been very odd indeed. An encounter with a book on aerodynamics led to the contention that the hair follicles on my legs are an unusually long way apart, producing “optimum boundary layer conditions”. Or the claim, based on many hours of sitting on my wheel feeling resentful, that my chain was “suspiciously clean”.
But it’s worth looking at the whole concept of an unfair advantage. Some of Bernard’s claims are, unsurprisingly, the work of a brain that’s being starved of oxygen. I mean, obviously if you want the most aerodynamic shins, you’re going to want follicles that are closer together than average, not further. An hour in a wind tunnel would have told him that.
There are other advantages that are more complicated. Clearly if you’ve got no social life and no friends, it will indeed free up some time for training and remove quite a lot of temptations (like parties, food or drinks) from your life. But I’m not sure I’d score it as an unequivocal win. There are, perhaps, some people who’d trade their entire social circle and family life for 30 watts on the old FTP, but then again, we’re not all time triallists.
And, yes, there are some things that are an unfair advantage. You might have had the good luck to take up cycling young and be several years ahead of everyone else for the rest of your life. Or you might have advantageous genetics for cycling. However egalitarian you might wish things were, some people clearly do have some sort of natural aptitud
