Cycling to win
For all the years that I have spent living in Italy I have never associated a bicycle to anything else than a toy for children and a vehicle for professional races, something hardly relevant to my life.
I had to come to The Netherlands to learn that such an object can be so interwoven into people lives as to become one of the fundamental traits of a society. Cycling can be in turn: the first flavor of freedom, a transportation mean, a hobby, a sport, a social convention, a green statement, a job, an obsession and probably much more.
I have to say that in my first years in this country I fully embraced this whole cycling experience for several reasons: I am an awful car driver and my husband did not trust me with the only car we had at that time. I did it all, cycling under the pouring rain, transport a whole week worth of groceries, go to job interviews wearing my most precious business suit, repair a flat tire, have my bike stolen, fall, stand up and fall again.
On one item I set the limit, no transporting babies on the bicycle. This demarcation meant that at the birth of our first daughter we bought a second car. My cycling days were over, and I have to tell you I do not miss them.
Cycling has remained for me exactly what it was when I was in Italy, something for children and something for people on TV.
I have never really understood the passion that people have for the Tour (or the Giro). How the acclaim of the crowd can make these little bent men soar to the level of heroes/legends. Invariably to plummet to the ground at the next doping scandal.
We all long for heroes and the cyclists seemed the closest heroes to the common man, the ones you could identify with. But still we want them to do extraordinary things, to break any possible human limit, and they have been doing this. They have fulfilled our hunger for greatness.
To do that they needed a big push from the drugs development world, and they got it. Do we want to blame them now? No actually we don't want to blame them for going against the rules. They did it for us after all, because we needed them to be heroes, while they were only little bent me on a bike.
Even though I could set the cycling days behind me and I could freely decide to change channel when they broadcast the Tour de France, my little damage daughter could not escape the fate of every dutch child.
She needed to bike to be part of this society, not to be an outcast, not to be freak. I therefore became the most ruthless of trainers and she did succeed. She learned how to bike, she broke her own human limit, but this time without the help of doping. Just not giving up and by pure will power.
I am very proud of her and I am sure this achievement will help her in life in many ways. I am only sorry that so much of her energies had to be spent on something as irrelevant as cycling
I had to come to The Netherlands to learn that such an object can be so interwoven into people lives as to become one of the fundamental traits of a society. Cycling can be in turn: the first flavor of freedom, a transportation mean, a hobby, a sport, a social convention, a green statement, a job, an obsession and probably much more.
I have to say that in my first years in this country I fully embraced this whole cycling experience for several reasons: I am an awful car driver and my husband did not trust me with the only car we had at that time. I did it all, cycling under the pouring rain, transport a whole week worth of groceries, go to job interviews wearing my most precious business suit, repair a flat tire, have my bike stolen, fall, stand up and fall again.
On one item I set the limit, no transporting babies on the bicycle. This demarcation meant that at the birth of our first daughter we bought a second car. My cycling days were over, and I have to tell you I do not miss them.
Cycling has remained for me exactly what it was when I was in Italy, something for children and something for people on TV.
I have never really understood the passion that people have for the Tour (or the Giro). How the acclaim of the crowd can make these little bent men soar to the level of heroes/legends. Invariably to plummet to the ground at the next doping scandal.
We all long for heroes and the cyclists seemed the closest heroes to the common man, the ones you could identify with. But still we want them to do extraordinary things, to break any possible human limit, and they have been doing this. They have fulfilled our hunger for greatness.
To do that they needed a big push from the drugs development world, and they got it. Do we want to blame them now? No actually we don't want to blame them for going against the rules. They did it for us after all, because we needed them to be heroes, while they were only little bent me on a bike.
Even though I could set the cycling days behind me and I could freely decide to change channel when they broadcast the Tour de France, my little damage daughter could not escape the fate of every dutch child.
She needed to bike to be part of this society, not to be an outcast, not to be freak. I therefore became the most ruthless of trainers and she did succeed. She learned how to bike, she broke her own human limit, but this time without the help of doping. Just not giving up and by pure will power.
I am very proud of her and I am sure this achievement will help her in life in many ways. I am only sorry that so much of her energies had to be spent on something as irrelevant as cycling
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