Free Cyclogeography by Jon Day

Doping was rife. Early riders of the Tour used alcohol and ethanol to dull the pain of pushing their bodies to breaking point. In the six-day track races which were popular from the 1890s to the 1920s – races that wore riders down to inhuman lumps of twitching muscle – seconds used strychnine to tighten muscles, nitro-glycerine to terrify their rider’s hearts into pushing on. Later amphetamine and cocaine tinctures became prevalent. In 1924 the cyclist Henri Pélissier gave an interview in which he described the regime he and his fellow riders underwent during big races:
    cocaine for the eyes, chloroform for the gums […] and do you want to see the pills? We ride on dynamite. When the mud is washed off us, we are as white as sheets. We are drained by diarrhoea. We dance jigs in our bedroom instead of sleeping. Our calves are leather, and sometimes they break.
    The professional peloton is a place of applied suffering. Though a bicycle race is a communal endeavour, you don’t only race against other riders, though you do do this, but against yourself and the terrain you ride over. ‘During the big races,’ writes James Waddington in Bad to the Bone , a novel about murder in the peloton:
    the competitors are reduced to fleshbags of blood and sinew. The usual appetites are suppressed. Everyone just works, eats and sleeps. Francesco Moser, weeks before he broke the hour record they sucked blood from his veins, separated out the red blood cells and froze them in glycerol, then at the last moment melted them and squirted them back into the living bloodstream. Legitimate, maybe, but it’s close to vampirism for an honourable profession.
    As spectators we consume the riders. Following the Tour, being a cycling fan, is a more intrusive form of fandom than that of most other sports. Racers submit to the gaze of the team manager, the coach, the directeur sportif. They do what they are told both on and off the bike. Cycling fans are themselves vampiric, suckling on the smallest titbits of information, condemning their heroes for doping on the smallest pieces of evidence. Cycling geeks read about the training regimes of their heroes, following weight fluctuations with all the dedication of Daily Mail journalists. Output and performance are measured in mechanical terms: in wattage and time.
    There is a typology of cyclists’ bodies which as a cycling fan you learn to interpret. The best climbers are birdlike creatures: hollow-boned and covered with a taught carapace of nerve and gristle, no extraneous bulk to speak of, which is all so much extra baggage. Sprinters are solid lumps of twitch muscle. Not over-bulked, not too lean, the time-trial specialist is a monotony artist. The best all round racers have the hypnotic ability to get into a rhythm and grind on and on, over any surface, for any amount of time.
    The legibility of cyclists’ bodies is apparent both to fans and to other riders. Gino Bartali – Italy’s most famous pre-Second World War racing cyclist – used to instruct one of his team mates to watch the legs of his arch-rival, Fausto Coppi, and shout ‘the vein’ whenever an artery on Coppi’s leg bulged, indicating that he was under duress. Then he would attack. Those massive varicosed legs, the products of years of doping, made Coppi’s body as legible as a road-map, with its purple and green ribbons and its dendritic culs-de-sac.
    You don’t have to be an athlete to be a bicycle courier, but a few messengers have gone on to become professional racing cyclists. Graeme Obree – ‘the Flying Scotsman’ – worked as a courier in Edinburgh for a few years before he broke the hour record for cycling the furthest distance around a track in one hour on a bike he’d made himself from washing machine parts. Then there’s the story of Nelson Vails, a New York messenger who went on to win a silver medal atthe 1984 Olympic games before travelling to Japan to become a professional Kierin racer in the velodromes