The long and
long of It

No one wants to hear about things going right, about the world clicking, about smiles, about joy, about perfect trails and exquisite pizza, azure seas, and delicious wine. That’s not drama. Let history be my attorney, what famous tale or storied fable starts happy, and continues on merrily through to the end? We’ve been brought up on friction and drowned in adversity, we’ve been trained to revel in a woeful twist of fate. What then is a storyteller to do when struck with the calamity of good fortune? When we find ourselves not only living through but needing to spin a yarn that is light on trial and lacking in heartache. A story where the sun always shines, the trails are ideally dusty, and the scene is persistently idyllic.



I could attempt to fabricate some obstacle but you’d correctly guess that all my droning on about  flight scheduling and witching hour bike builds were grossly exaggerated. Dedicating my vitriol and your time to overwrought descriptions of zero-hour arrivals or teasing out a short missive titled “Missing practice in order to drive to some far afield town with the uncertain hope of completing a Kafka-esque medical examination,” is over sensationalizing the true emotional weight of these moments. The world has taught me that simply having a great time is not enough to make a story, this is then unfortunately a story simply about having a great time. We did run into a few hiccups on our journey to race day, a couple “half-cooked burritos” but nothing unreasonable. Yes, Dylan and I missed our chance to practice, but Georgia got out and assured us that “guys, it is all rideable.”  Did we drive to Savona so that Dylan could wear a belt-mounted EKG machine and assure the Italian medical community that he didn’t have a heart arrhythmia? Yep but the doctor was so nice and we watched Italian teens smoke cigs while we ate cheap and delicious pizza on the edge of a plaza picketed with Roman columns. During the race, we couldn’t find the assigned race day lunch stop so we made our own. The hot dogs were basic but the beers were delicious, and it's a safe bet that they didn’t have suds at the official stop. I mean we were in Italy, on the coast of Italy, and we were there to race mountain bikes, downhill on the coast of Italy. Not just any race, a first of its kind world championships, the Trophy of Nations.


Here’s how it works, there are three levels; the 100s, 200s, and 300s. The 100s are amateurs; that means you, me and pretty much everyone we know. The 200s are Industry level, riders who didn’t make the national team, team mechanics, and other industry fast folk. The 300s are composed of the top 3 riders from each participating nation, essentially Top Gun. At the 300 level, there are men’s and women’s teams competing in the u21 and elite categories, elite being a fancier way of saying over 21. In the 100s and 200s, you race as part of a three-person team and the teams can be mixed gender or not. Qualifying is limited to passing the medical exam, if you can prove that you won’t have a heart attack on the course and you can pay the entry fee then you can race, that’s it. The doc gives you the ok and you’re racing World Championship courses, all for 360 some odd quid, on the coast, in Italy. Yeah, you should go.

Based on Italy, on ocean, on sunshine, on pasta, wine, pastries, olive trees and this first of its kind kinda deal plus our lack of truly killer instincts we weren’t really there to race as much as we were there for the experience, to take a survey if you like, insiders outsider style. We named our team Tourist, had necklaces and linen jersey’s made, and took a lot of pictures both moving and still. If we were committed to something, we were committed to the bit.


Admittedly we were a little lost on the rules, we thought that since we were racing as a team, then the timing stopped when the last person went through the timing gate. This inaccurate understanding leads us to take a very casual approach between the tape. We didn’t totally turn off our competitor brains–there was the start gate, time clocks and taped sections. Being life-long bike racers it's hard to stifle the Pavlovian response to such overt triggers. Lean into it the lizard brain? Sure. So we raced / didn’t race. We tried / didn’t try. It was a flexible thing, elastic, and our bright yellow jerseys, team necklaces, and brand new bikes meant we had a rep to protect; even if said rep was a self-inflicted, conjured out of a rapid-fire intra-team banter and arguably over-indulgent bouts of wine that had been kicked into hyperdrive during the very short time we had together. Keen readers are likely sensing that the groundwork is being laid for an excuse. Regardless, when the dust settled, considering it all, we did a pretty good job. What I mean is that when the dust settled we leaned our bikes against some overturned boats and swam in the Mediterranean.

The course was divine, as if Zeus on his pilgrimage from Olympus to his new career as Jupiter had let his eyes fall upon this breathtaking stretch of land and so struck with its beauty conjured lightning to carve The Gods’ paths on these hills. They wind their way through coastal pine forests and olive groves tracing soil that is a granular, hale-colored affair dotted with bleached shelves of formerly submerged rock. Throughout the day we covered a fair mix of trails; fast and flowing, awkward and interesting and then there's the famed stage seven, a 700-meter freefall fraught with sharp fins of rock spiking through depressions of popcorn gravel. The trail itself diving like a peregrine toward the ocean.

The trails alone would be enough to make this a desirable riding destination but the course only touches on a small portion of the offerings anchored in Finale Ligure. Above the town a range of mountains climb into the hazy blue, dominating the horizon from east to west they hug the coast in the robed embrace, the folds spilling into ridges and valleys as it tumbles to the sea. Throughout the day we came across ancient stone walls and the crumbling remains of long-abandoned fortifications line the track. Here’s a quaint church, there a braying donkey, an aging shrine to the Holy Mother winking from a forgotten garden, of course. What swooning advances, what concealed trysts, what forlorn musings echo along these paths? Even while fully gripped and skittering across the top of an awkward slab, the romantic nature of this place is impossible to disregard. Best to let the mind wander post race.


Even though we raced on Saturday, the day before the pros, the stages were lined with fans and spectators filling the hollows and crowding the trails with colorful shouts and outgoing enthusiasm. Blind racing is one thing but blind Touristing is quite another and since Dylan and I missed practice these trails nothing but Greek. While Georgia was able to get in a full practice, it turns out riding with the Specialized pro team meant riding fully pinned and definitely not at Tourist pace. Which meant her insights were anything but, “Guys, I think yes, this one is quite turn-y.” We were all on our own. Fortunately, we quickly surmised that the degree of difficulty in the oncoming terrain had a direct correlation to the amount of fans clustered nearby, best to just white knuckle and lay off the brakes. Thankfully the famed final stage was more a test of endurance than of daring; our bodies were fried from riding all day, the challenge was simple. Just. Hold. On. That final crucible completed an easy liaison that took us back to town, and my my what a liase. It's right along the beach, through rock tunnels, past pods of retired Italians fine tuning their hickory tans in the late afternoon sun. So this what Milton imagined before he imagined it lost. We capped the experience with a swim as the sun flushed peach and was slowly consumed by the bruised magentas and indigos of twilight. If I could tattoo a picture in my mind this would be it. As I write this I am beaming.
With our race in the bag, we decided to take a v-casual approach to Sunday’s spectating. Stage seven would be our singular destination, this being the one with the rocky plunge and the gorgeous sea in the background. This being the one closest to town. The crowds surrounding the track had swelled since yesterday and we watched as the best in the world attacked the course, where we just managed to hang on they inspired, their movements physical alchemy, a visceral transcendence, here we witnessed verifiable moments of grace.



I thought about how these moments of grace are what I look for in art, music and literature; my steadfast conduits of the sublime. I had yet to have this experience with my own sport or specifically around the codified, formatted version of my sport. In contemporary culture mountain biking, especially gravity-oriented riding, still falls squarely under the auspices of “bro culture.” Not that it is doing much to shirky this title, it is a sport of privilege, one that requires excess money, ample free time and access to terrain. This privilege begets entitlement and entitlement should be limited to things like clean air and healthcare. Gravity mountain biking has a tendency to be insular and insulated, the culture is protected by the barriers to entry and so contained, it festers. Toxic masculinity runs rampant and energy drinks with the most base sexualized marketing schemes continue to be some of the sport’s biggest sponsors. But the actual physical experience of downhill mountain biking evokes the sublime. For me the bicycle is the ideal vehicle for experiencing the world and when pushed to create a synthetic version of flight you have the closest thing that this atheist is going to get to experiencing divine ecstasy. Like any good acolyte,e I want to prosthelytize this joy to the world, engage the community and inspire new believers.

The division between the personal and the social isn’t unique to mountain biking. It’s a pervasive issue that cuts across cultures, bound to the dichotomy of the haves and have nots. This is my thing here and now, so what to do? Make cheaper bikes, more trails, easier access? Yes, sure, but that feels more like a result of a solution rather than the solution itself. I suspect that the secret might be in how we approach our intrapersonal relationships and by extension our community. In taking the love and camaraderie that you have with your “bros” and radiating it outwards to those not yet in the family. I want everyone to have the chance to feel that flying sensation, to breathe hard and see stars, to pick themselves up off the ground, dust themselves off and try again. And I want to be there to support you too. Take action where you can and tie the action to what you love. Mountain biking and to a lesser extent road biking ;),  is a big part of my life. It is the thing that fixes my brain when anxiety comes knocking. Simply hauling ass through the woods steels me for another bout with the dread anxiety of neo-liberalism.


That was the impact of being here, feeling a sense of shared history and experience. I was surrounded by families stumbling over broken rocks and craggy brush to cheer for each helmeted rider. Enthusiasm rippled down the hillside in lockstep with each plummeting racer, it didn’t matter what nation they raced for, their gender, or their age, each rider was confronted by a deafening wall of sound, each rider was made part of the rapture. Camaraderie, community, we were one unit, completely enthralled.