Bad to the Bone

Every year we do a Tour de France window display at the bookstore, with a few Lance Armstrong books, a Michelin guide or two, my favorite cycling novel (more on that later), a stray Campagnolo part or two from my closet, and a whiteboard that I update every day with race results. Mainly we do it because I'm a bike geek, but it's also true that our neighborhood is big on bike racing. Even now, in the post-Lance era, people still tell us that they follow the race in our front window.

Of course, this Tour has been a rough one for cycling fans--Alexandre Vinokourov, the pre-race favorite, thrown out for doping, and his whole team for good measure; then Michael Rasmussen, the actual leader, fired by his team (for doping-related lies) just when he had all but clinched the yellow jersey; and a number of small fry ejected as well. I had to get out the red marker and cross Vino and Rasmussen ("The Chicken") off my leader board.

You hear some people saying "The Tour is dead." But that's bullshit. As rider Christian Vande Velde put it, "Cycling will always be a beautiful sport no matter how many people disgrace it." The transition to clean competition will be tough, but cycling at least is being forced to tackle the challenge while other sports are still in denial.

Now it's true, doping is a venerable tradition in cycling. The French champion Jacques Anquetil, a five-time Tour winner, when asked if he'd ever doped, replied "Only when it was absolutely necessary;" and when asked how often that was, said "Almost all the time." And when Englishman Tom Simpson died from amphetamine use on a Tour stage, a statue was erected to honor the event. Little mixed message there?

The doping thing, as I see it, fits in with a certain masochistic strain in cycling. It's just not a feel-good sport. You'll frequently hear riders talk about races, or even training rides, in terms of "suffering" and "pain." The covers of cycling magazines typically feature the hero of the day sweating and grimacing as though his limbs were being torn off. And of course, it's common to see riders crash in a race, then ride on with broken bones or with blood streaming off their body. If sports were Shakespeare plays, cycling would be King Lear or Hamlet.

It's this dark and twisted spirit that animates my favorite bike racing novel, Bad to the Bone by James Waddington. (OK, there aren't a ton of bike racing novels to choose from, but still.) Told in a cheerfully snarky voice (think Nick Hornby on exogenous testosterone), the book is laced with authentic detail--you can tell that Waddington's gotten a close-up view of cycling's underbelly. But it's also wildly imaginative, almost surreal in places, a nightmare vision of the drug-sodden lunacy of the Tour de France.

Waddington keeps the reader enjoyably off-balance: it's a farce, it's horror, it's a mystery... but whichever, absorbing fun. There's a Spanish rider who suddenly, inexplicably, has awesome form; a more than sinister team manager with a suitcase full of something very nasty; a mutilated corpse or two, riders murdered in scenes fraught with Christian symbolism; a philosophical, borderline incompetent police detective; and a gut-wrenching, mindbendingly improbable finish.

Though only a little more improbable than this year's race.