The Medieval Paradigm in Pro Cycling

In bygone days (and still sometimes at bizarre theme restaurants), kings and other royalty called local knights and other chancers to compete in martial arts tournaments, sword fighting, jousting, etc. The participants were sponsored in their efforts by wealthy patrons, and of course, many of them were injured, disfigured or killed as part of the fun.

It strikes me that we may have gotten the doping era(s) all wrong, in the sense that we focused our approbation on the riders, and to a lesser extent on the teams, when the corporate overlords happily poured their money in and looked the other way. This IS what modern professional sport is afterall, a minstrel show conjured by the mega-wealthy for their own profit/amusement/reputation enhancement. That we would castigate the riders rather than those who put all the incentives in place to create the crisis in the first place is perfect.

Plausible deniability is very much a currency of wealth.

“Stars and Water Carriers” is a 1973 documentary that follows riders through the 1973 Giro d’Italia, and it’s a classic of the cycling canon. To “carry someone’s water” is to do their work, most often subservient tasks, usually politically. “Star and Water Carriers” is famous for elucidating the hierarchical roles of racers within a road team, but maybe, just maybe, even the stars themselves were carrying someone’s water.

Today, we have teams in the pro peloton sponsored by petro-states like UAE and Bahrain, a chemical giant (Ineos), and then an array of other multinational companies. Even in this benighted “post-doping” era of pro cycling, a high-level sports squad will be more popular than an entity reaping billions from the destruction of the environment. That’s just PR math.

The ancient Romans, nearing their unforeseen fall, also ran this playbook, gladiators and lions, actual sea battles, inside the Coliseum. And so we know that religion has not been the sole opiate of the masses historically.

Sponsors will say they themselves are also victims of sport’s darker machinations, their names besmirched on the fronts of jerseys and team cars, but they must know what goes on. The phrase ‘due diligence’ wasn’t coined by the poor. No, I suspect there is a brutal calculus at work. It was Oscar Wilde who said, “There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

We can pillory the young racers who wreck their bodies on the altar of ambition, but they’re only so many champions sent into mock battle for the amusement of the lords and ladies of true wealth. A very select few will come away with some small measure of their own wealth, but no matter what transpires between the start and finish, in training camps and hotels and on team buses, none will ever sit atop the empire they’ve been sent to glorify. Even Eddy Merckx was just a water carrier.

---