FALSE STARTS
Ned longs for the old normal to return in 2021
“It was fun while it lasted, but Covid uncertainties have played havoc with the resonance of every race”
Isuppose that the novelty couldn’t last forever. What began with a riot of surprise and delight as racing restarted at the beginning of August has gradually slipped into a curiously dysfunctional feeling as we slide towards the end. Though I will always enjoy almost any racing (and a few days at the Giro were magnificent), I have watched the increasingly wintry-looking races with the same degree of reluctance and trepidation with which a floundering Mastermind contestant, praying for the release of the buzzer to mark the end of the round, has to stay in the spotlight and listen to the well-worn phrase, “I’ve started so I’ll finish.”
The redesigned racing calendar for 2020 has been a triumph of both the imagination and the sheer bloody mindedness of race organisers to get the show on the road almost at all costs. But at the same time, the longer it has gone on, the more it has made us yearn to return to the old normal. While there is a certain guilty pleasure to be had in watching Gent-Wevelgem, the Giro d’Italia and Paris-Tours all on the same day, it does nonetheless feel a little bit decadent, as we unconsciously ape the behaviour of a hyperactive child on Christmas Day tearing the wrapping paper from presents.
Big race days should normally demand an appropriate degree of patience before they can be consumed, spread out as they are across the sweep of the seasons that mark another year of racing. Flanders is Flanders mostly because of the endless sense of anticipation that the weeks leading up to it engender. Likewise, the Giro, in its usual birth in May, has a dual emotional function that resembles the structure of an Italian restaurant menu: in itself, it is a fulfilling, rich and delightful antipasto. But it is consumed always with the knowledge and understanding that the full meal is only just getting underway and both the primo and secondo are still to come. Racing deep into October as the second Grand Tour, and overlapping with the Vuelta, have stripped the race of the joyful if unconscious sense of good things still to come that normally underpin it.
Covid uncertainties have, of course, played havoc with the pitch and resonance of every race. The depth with which Europe has plunged into its inevitable second wave of the virus has undermined to a great extent the amount of emotional energy that can be invested in the simple outcome of a bicycle race. Each successive positive test result has chipped away at the edifice of relevance and appropriateness with which the triumphant return of racing heralded back in those long gone and now longed-for distant days of summer. It was fun while it lasted. But, as they warn you on those gambling advertisements, “When the fun stops stop.” I have no idea whether or not holding a bike race around an entire country, shifting a caravan from place to place, town to town and city to city over the course of three weeks leads directly to the spreading of coronavirus. But, in a way, that’s not the point. It’s the perception of unacceptable risk that almost matters just as much. As soon as the riders started to talk publicly about their discomfort in continuing to race, a sickly pall fell over the entire enterprise.
In many ways, I still feel very grateful for the sheer proliferation of races and, indeed, the manner in which the riders took to the task. But equally I’m aware that at some ill-defined point midway through the Giro d’Italia, I started to tire of the experiment.
Obviously, what I want more than anything else is for 2021 to revert to its traditional pattern, drifting through the calendar with that familiar meandering from Belgium to Italy, France to Spain. I want spring classics to be in spring and golden leaves to fall across the roads around Lake Como when Il Lombardia finally calls time on another completed year.
I don’t want much. I just want it back where it all belongs.