Extract: The cyclist and his shadow

Read My Pet Shadow, the opening chapter of Olivier Haralambon's book

The cyclist and his shadow by French novelist and philosopher Olivier Haralambon was published by The Cycling Podcast. Originally written in French, the English translation was the result of a conversation between Richard Moore, Lionel Birnie and François Thomazeau over lunch outside a cafe in the heart of Paris on the final day of the ‘lockdown’ Tour de France in 2020. Richard asked François to name his favourite cycling book. Neither Richard, nor Lionel, had heard of it and as François talked more about it, Richard’s passion grew and we decided to acquire the English language rights.

Here, we publish the opening chapter. To buy the book, click the buttons below.

---

Listen to Kilometre 0 – François and Lionel discuss the book

---

Sunday morning is when it happens, more than any other day. At the time of the first church service, you come across those small moving congregations obviously in a hurry to leave the gates of the city behind them. Cyclists riding in bunches before the day has completely risen, whatever the weather. Most of the time, they are misunderstood, those men and few women whose strange and colourful outfits are so tight that they betray every single fold in the skin – so tight indeed that they seem precisely designed to lay claim to the flaws of the body. They are intriguing, those figures perched on the uncertainty of their thin wheels. Their body or their shadow, which one comes first and defines the other? They look quite amusing, with their funny hats and huge sunglasses.

As a matter of fact, for whoever is not fond of it, cycling remains an oddity. Most of the time, the word brings to mind a few famous names, sometimes coupled with outdated first names, who have no more substance than apostles in a painting. Of course, Jacques Anquetil, Louison Bobet or Raymond Poulidor probably had faces, but they are no longer familiar. No more than schoolchildren could recognize Balzac or Flaubert in a picture. And most are unaware that Eddy Merckx was even better looking than Elvis Presley.

Only the overwhelming Tour de France retains a place, however irrelevant, in the complicated framework of our memories. It is indeed impossible, when French is your native language, to avoid being impregnated by the Tour. But frequently, what we know about it is little more than bored small talk. Cycling and the Tour belong to the back- ground of July, a little like the colour of the sky and the sand or the long-awaited warmth of the wind brushing your throat or silently creasing the surface of thick grass in the fields. The noisy background of the television, when you stretch out in front of the screen in the hotter hours in light filtered by blinds. Who never fell asleep in front of a Tour de France stage?

In the eyes of many, cycling races are a dreadfully monotonous spectacle. Watching the repetition of the same identical movement for hours, tens of thousands of times, what is the point? You might realise that the pace of their legs varies, that they accelerate sharply from time to time, that they stand up on the pedals and then sit back down in the saddle; you might, should you know the toughness of some climbs at a given place, roll your eyes at the speed at which they tackle them, but you quickly get tired of it. After a puzzled pout of disbelief, halfway between respect and pity for the sight of their suffering faces, you look away and turn to something else.

Pedalling appears to be the most mechanical activity there is. A movement everyone possesses as soon as, in childhood, we have learnt to stand on two wheels. Is not the bicycle actually doing most of the pedalling since it only requires following the neat, almost solid line established by the rotation of the crank? Some even say that the effort, so simply interlocked with the cogs of the machine, is produced by doping. So what does remain to admire or amaze if even the willpower is somewhat mechanical and the difficulty made up?

To tell the truth, there are many answers to those questions. There are in fact so many and they are so rich and so deep that you tend to back down instead of attempting to give them all. For in fact, as a result of an era obsessed with identical replications and objectivity, cycling commentaries often gravitate around a short list of clichés confining riders to a clumsy form of black-and-white thinking (the worthy and the cheats) and identifying a few ready-made race scenarios that can be repeated endlessly. Such a systematic reduction produces a sort of gibberish meant for the people in the know or those wishing to be, but very unlikely to spur the beginner’s curiosity. In the end it even becomes an obstacle. You vaguely hear about “sprints”, “climbers” and “escapees” or even “chasse-patates” or “echelons” and you focus more on the jargon than on the event itself. As for the cycling race proper, you still don’t have a clue; you can’t see through.

As for me, I was fatally bitten early on. I started pedalling and racing shortly before the age when the voice breaks and sexual desire suddenly turns the world upside down. I sometimes suffered from slight contempt, or misunderstanding, towards an activity that was central to my life and that would soon grow to the point of invading my whole self and taking over my daily routine.

So now that I have progressed a little bit in my existence, now that I have moved some distance from the obsession with diet and nearly sectarian prescriptions that for so long ruled my life, I would like to ride along this path again. I would like to become fully aware of or rather embrace the enchantments I had the chance to experience by only being around riders for years, by only living with them, by only living like them to the point – I believe – of becoming one myself. Ad vitam.

Oddly enough, the bike that made me suffer so much also showed me the most optimistic perspective in which I was ever capable of settling down. Of course, I loved pedalling breathlessly beside the demon of my shadow – it was my pet, it bit my legs every time the light gave it a chance, I pulled it behind me mercilessly for tens of thousands of kilometres and it never ever let me down. I sweated, cried, spat, came, dribbled, bled sometimes on the tarmac and the landscape. I have loved the bike and I have loved racing fiercely because they gave me a form of trust in the unfathomable immensity of life, in the verticality of time. Without it, without them, I would never have had the slightest feeling of eternity – not as a myth but as an experience.

Of course, as I improved with time and a lot of train- ing, I was amazed by my own capacities. Never would I have thought as a kid that my legs could one day exhale so much heat and power. There were times when I thought myself indefatigable, insensitive to pain – the long rides on an empty stomach, the hills you climb a hundred times, the scorching heat that does not even dry up your tongue.

But because it was precisely, exactly where I did not expect it to be, the cycling I am writing about can possibly arouse some unexpected curiosity. It is thanks to the bike, thanks to the daily, almost desperate practice of cycling (you never hope as strongly as when you are desperate), that the pillars of my life were revealed to me. A lot of the things I was expecting from my elders, from my teachers, from school or books, were fed to me freely by cycling and cyclists. My idea of the body, of time – or eternity, as I said – my ability to handle anguish or the destructive effects of melancholy, but above all else my idea of the intelligence of others. Because – and it is something that is not well known and possibly the missing key – the best competitive riders are among the cleverest and the most subtle individuals in the human race. Even if too often they let themselves be convinced of the opposite and are totally ignorant of their own finesse. I was forced to admit the obvious: reading educates you but does not make you smarter. Racing does. One of the virtues of cycling races is to prove you wrong. You think that nothing is as simple, as automatic, as pedalling or you believe that a cycling race is like Modern Times but without Chaplin and the poetry. You don’t know a thing. Few suspect that being strong and riding fast are two completely different things, for instance. That you caress the pedal, that you stroke it much more than you press on it. That maintaining the effort and suffering the pain mean learning to follow the pedal after completing the stroke, and clinging to its rim, the inner well in which it bathes and threatens to drown you.

In fact, once again, you can’t see a thing. You think they are brutes while they are as delicate as ballet dancers and more astute than many writers. Otherwise they would not ride on. But their body language is not easy to read because the laws of appearance are such that you believe that their bodies are hindered by the machine and because you convince yourself that they are moving into a restrained and narrow space as a result. Children of emphasis and amplitude, you don’t see a thing because they are not gesticulating. I was a kid myself and kneel- ing in front of the TV set when Bernard Hinault became world champion after surging on the Domancy climb. It would take me many years and lots of disappointments to realise the amount of delicacy involved deep inside the body and behind the fierce features and the dishevelled hair of the Breton. Likewise, the sturdier riders, more suited to the windy and badly paved courses of the Northern races, are as subtle in their touch as ballerinas. Paris-Roubaix and Capezio are in the same league! But nobody seems to know.

There has been great writing – I’m thinking of Paul Valéry – about dancing and the body. On cycling, of course, there was the wonderful Antoine Blondin and a lot of others in his wake. But too colourful a style often blurred the shades and ignored the absolute, limitless way of riding that turns training into asceticism and performance into a kind of gnosis. Too often, champions were celebrated only in the naive light of their pure achievements – or worse of their success – without realising how they were motivated by their unhappiness – their taedium vitae. Races are now only commented on in terms of vulgar moralism or naive scientism in denial of evidence – if those men sometimes drift apart (via doping practices especially), they often fall or sin because of too violent a desire to be closer to God and because evil is only perverted good. Ironically, what they are blamed for is what should be forgiven. They are grossly misunderstood.

Competitive cycling is too large and too lively to be restricted to facts and knowledge alone. I want to bow in front of such a mystery. And since it finally only requires introspection, what I am requesting from my readers, besides their forgiveness for writing in the first person, is that they ride along with me because I want to open up my skull. That bony box is the only place where performance takes place, where it enlightens, where its world takes its various shapes.

Dancers, acrobats, sailors, writers, bullfighters, poets, craftsmen of effort, mystics, ascetics, whatever you like, but not sportspeople.

Forget about sport.