Every human brain works slightly differently, yet too often we demand bland conformity. Chris Marshall-Bell meets riders unashamed to cherish their uniqueness
Jonathan Vaughters was one of the sport ’s best time triallists in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but the American was always aware that people perceived him differently. “I think ever yone thought I was funny but a little strange,” says the 50-year-old, who is now team manager of EF Education-EasyPost.
“Four guys thought it was cool to be my team-mate, and ever yone else would say they ’d never want to be in the same room as me. I was messy, I was constantly losing my socks, I always had my nose in a book, I never watched TV, and I never talked about anything normal. To put it bluntly, I thought I was just weird.”
For decades, Vaughters didn’t invest too much energ y into thinking about his behavioural quirks. He’d just accepted he was different. But in 2012, he took his young son to be evaluated for ASD – autism spectrum disorder, a neurodevelopmental condition that affects how people communicate, interact and learn. There were a few reasons why: “[My son] has this ability to hyper-concentrate on something he’s interested in, but then forgets about everything else going on around him, and he’s always losing stuff,” Vaughters explains. “During the process of him being evaluated, I started thinking, ‘Woah, hold on a minute – I’m like that too’.”
Six years later, in 2018, Vaughters finally went for his own evaluation and sure enough was diagnosed as having Asperger’s syndrome, a form of ASD that is partly defined by intensely focusing on specific tasks. “When the team’s future was in jeopardy in 2017, I was so focused on my work to the exclusion of everything else that my marriage failed,” he says. “Asperger’s is pretty difficult in a marriage, and the distraction of being busy with my job resulted in us getting divorced.”
His diagnosis marked him as one of an estimated 40 million people worldwide who have Asperger’s. But rather than let it negatively define him, Vaughters believes that he’s been successful in life because of it. “I would partly attribute a failed marriage to Asperger’s, but it’s also the reason why this team has flourished for 20 years, and why as a rider my greatest strength was long, solitary efforts. That fits into the characteristics of someone with Asperger’s.”
Vaughters isn’t the only high-profile retired cyclist with a neurodivergent condition: both three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond and Germany ’s last winner of the race, Jan Ullrich, have ADHD – attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – and it is thought that bet ween 3-5% of the world’s population do, too. According to one 2021 study, neurodiversit y in cycling is “undertreated”, and as many as one in seven cyclists mi
