La Course en Tete?
It wasn’t that long ago that we held our breath. Chloe Dygert is on her way seemingly to certain glory in the UCI World Individual Time Trial championship race at Imola, stretched out on the aero bars and leaning into a right-hand bend. Suddenly, the front wheel bobbles and she is now fighting to recover the bucking bronco that her Felt bike has become, squirming and shuddering into a tank-slapper as the tyre momentarily gains and then loses traction over and over again. The bike keeps an inexorable course towards the barriers on the outside of the turn, agonisingly past the safety padding before the inevitable collision with cold exposed steel. The 23 year-old American champion is pitched upwards and over the barrier with her bike and down the embankment on the other side.
We’ve seen this already, just a few short weeks before when Remco Evenepoel suffered a similar fate, pitched down a ravine after colliding with a section of exposed wall at the Tour of Lombardy. Once again, we hope for the best while fearing the worst.
Remarkably, mere hours after her crash and surgery to repair the 80 percent laceration suffered by her left leg in the accident, she was sharing pictures on social media of the hideous open wound and how her first thoughts upon sitting up from the crash were “can I still win?”.
Chloe Dygert was a hero for about a week. On a day when her compatriot Quinn Simmons incurred the wrath of Twitter (and subsequently his team, Trek-Segafredo) by sharing some ill-advised right-wing comments on social media, including a black hand symbol as part of a reply to an anti-Trump rant by Dutch journalist Jose Been on Twitter, Dygert was exposed as “a massive Trumper” after – wait for it - liking tweets by the (now) outgoing President of the USA as well as some other social media posts by right-leaning commentators and platforms. To some extent these indiscretions were overshadowed by the Simmons controversy and his subsequent benching by his team, but on social media your sins, perceived or otherwise, have a habit of catching you up.
Last Tuesday, the cycling world awoke to the announcement that Dygert would be joining Canyon/SRAM on a four-year contract, her first with a Women’s World Tour team and also her first outside the USA. Canyon SRAM is the big time, with names such as Tiffany Cromwell, Kasia Niewadoma, Pauline Ferrand-Prevot and Dygert’s compatriot Alexis Ryan on their books. Toto, we’re not in Indiana any more.
It didn’t take long for the murmurs of discontent to begin. It began with “I’ll never buy a Canyon” or some comments about Trump but each post by the team itself or Canyon Bikes or even sponsors Rapha drew comments ranging from the snide to the incandescent as their new signing was branded variously racist, transphobic, homophobic or any number of prejudices linked to race, gender and sexuality. On Saturday, the rider issued a statement via her Instagram account stating:
"Cycling should be for everyone regardless of color, gender, sexuality or background. Like Canyon/SRAM Racing, I am committed to promoting diversity, inclusion and equality in cycling and our wider communities.
"I apologize to those who felt offended or hurt by my conduct on social media.
“I am committed to keep learning and growing as an athlete and a person."
It’s already clear that this isn’t enough for many but my point here is Was Any Of This Necessary? I’d have seen the point had Dygert been actively promoting a right-wing or racist agenda or posting stuff about the Proud Boys or #MAGA or whatever, but I am deeply uncomfortable with the notion of singling out a young athlete for the apparent crime of liking some posts for reasons known only to her. It is little more than thought policing.
We love professional cyclists for being cyclists and, as unpalatable as it may be, their world view may occasionally differ from ours. And that’s okay; I think we call it “democracy” or something. Despite losing the 2020 US presidential election, more than 70 million Americans voted for Donald Trump which was actually more than the number who elected him in 2016. Now, this asks some serious questions about American society as a whole, but are all Trump voters automatically hideous racists? Did we never consider that there was a chance that some of those voters may be professional cyclists?
My inference from this whole episode is that while we want our cycling heroes to be multi-dimensional, well-formed characters with views on things beyond cycling, we also want them to think like us and subscribe to our beliefs and struggle to deal with the reality that our cycling heroes wear clay Sidis.
We criticise the UCI for taking cycling to China, the UAE and other authoritarian states, and rightly so. We just don’t need to use social media to bring an authoritarian state to cycling.