In his excellent book Letting Rip, Simon Wilde describes the omerta that batsmen maintain about their fear of fast bowling, at least until they retire. Active players simply can’t admit that they’re scared. Robin Smith used to talk about how life-affirmingly exhilarating it was to be bounced by Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh and how he’d much rather that than be bamboozled by devilish back-of-the-hand-merchants like Shane Warne. Ian Bell breezily told us he knew he’d “wear a couple” facing Brett Lee, but he was cool with that. Then they retire and – with the exception of the greatest narcissists by which I mean Geoffrey Boycott – they admit that they were, in fact, shitting it.
Why maintain the lie? Because, of course, to admit you were scared of bouncers would be to invite … all of the bouncers.
Cycling’s equivalent is surely crashing. Pros are supposed to be totally comfortable with the high risk bits of their job; descending, riding on cobbles, sprinting; and they even manage to seem nonchalantly into it, in a studly kind of way. And when the inevitable happens? They have to brush it off.
“I’m fine. It was only superficial wounds I had, and now I’m looking forward to getting on with the rest of the race.”
That was Chris Froome having crashed in this year’s Giro d’Italia, scraping his poor body across the tarmac in a skinsuit thinner than a wetwipe.
Even the vocabulary the pros use is euphemistic and down-playing. “Road rash” is nothing of the sort. It’s hideous. People lose masses of skin. Epidermis, dermis, erm, subdermis, whatever; we’re talking holes in skin not just nasty grazes.
Froome had to say it was all ok, but his coach Tim Kerrison, in a BBC interview after the race, said he’d spent the next several days’ worth of recuperation energy not “building form”, as they’d planned, but simply healing.
Why the subterfuge? Because, as Geraint Thomas – no stranger to brushing off a flesh wound like, er, a broken pelvis – says in The World of Cycling According to G “the peloton can be a horrible place when you’re struggling. Stories fly around; this bloke’s lost his nerve; he’s a bottler. He’s gone”. Cultivating a reputation for toughness avoids this and deters rivals from attacking you when you’re injured. And affecting to enjoy recklessly fast descending, cobbles, sprints etc presumably makes it less likely anyone will challenge you on that territory. But I bet any money a quarter of the peloton has actual nightmares about crashing, the same way Chris Broad’s sleep is probably not untroubled by Australian quicks.
It all makes me wonder what the pros talk about, when they talk about crashing (to one another). Do they all just accept that crashes happen randomly, and that anyone can have one at any time, regardless of ability? (after all, if a guy goes down right in front of you, what can you do?) Or do they, like the test pilots in The Right Stuff, secretly believe that even a crash that was clearly unavoidable – an engine failure for instance – was still, somehow, that pilot’s fault. “He failed – but I wouldn’t have!” is how Tom Wolfe conveys it. And perhaps an element of egotistical self-delusion is prerequisite to all three careers …
Pursuit Books 