When it comes to impressing people with his cycling exploits, the Doc finds that anecdotes trump achievements every time
Ionce bought a house from a man who made his living as an Elvis impersonator. This made sense, since he looked and sounded a lot like Elvis. As I was poking around in his kitchen he asked me what I did for a living. “I’m a professional cyclist,” I said.
“You must have a very low resting pulse,” he said.
“It’s about 42 beats per minute,” I said. “That’s, ah, mighty impressive,” he said. This was quite a result. It’s one of the sad things about cycling – no matter how much effort you put into it, no matter what skill, it’s hard to impress people. I don’t just mean non-cyclists, I mean anyone. For Elvis to concede that my resting pulse was “impressive” was as good as I think it’s ever got.
I appreciate that we shouldn’t be riding bikes to impress people, and I often feel it’s just as well. I’m a half-decent rider. I’ve won a few things, at a reasonable if not stellar level, in the admittedly narrow specialism of time trialling. All the same, I don’t think I’m Wout van Aert. And to prove no one else thinks I am either, here is a conversation with a reporter that I had immediately after finishing a Commonwealth Games event.
“You’re current national champion, yes?” “ Yes.”
“Have you won anything else?”
“Well, I’ve won the Nationals several times.”
“I meant proper races.”
In a similar vein, I was entertained when a friend told me about a fan he overheard talking to Geraint Thomas on a stand at a bike show:
“Hey, G, nice to meet you, I’m a big fan. I was cheering you on at the Tour in 2018 – boy did you get lucky there, but honestly it’s always nice to see one of the more average riders getting their day in the limelight.”
Thomas asked him if he did much riding himself. Apparently he’d done the Etape, and was happy to talk about it at some length.
My theory on this is simple: either someone is into cycling sufficiently to already know your palmarès, in which case they’ll have recovered from any initial sense of awe and be much more interested in demonstrating their own insight; or they don’t know much about cycling in the first place, and nothing short of winning the Tour five times is going to achieve much cut-through.
My experience is that people are more taken with anecdotal things. I’ve raced against Sir Bradley Wiggins several times. The head-to-head record is 19-1 (to Wiggins, lest you were wondering).
