HEIDI FRANZ
Iwoke up this morning feeling like I had smoked a pack of cigarettes. My knees feel knocky and my neck is so very sunburnt except for a few awkward crease marks, a sign of many hours looking at the road ahead. But on the phone with my team director, his first remark was, “Oh, you sound a lot more chipper than I expected!” It wasn’t because he told me that I have only one more virtual racing obligation to do - though if my legs had let me, I would have danced around my living room to Kool and the Gang’s ‘Celebration’.
Despite 200 miles and 11 hours of pedalling, I was feeling energised. My friends and I decided to circumnavigate the Puget Sound on our bikes to raise funds for a local organisation that actively breaks down barriers to cycling for kids of colour, minorities, and girls in our region.
Decades of tension (400 years, really) around racism in America have come to a critical point this last month. In my lifetime, I cannot remember a moment more critical. I’ve been a pro cyclist for three years and it took four months at home for me to realise that I let myself take a passive or dismissive approach towards social justice issues being magnified in the world. I even studied at a university whose mission statement contained the words “...for a more just and humane world”. Yet outside of that environment as I race, mentally checking out from what’s happening outside the cycling bubble is so common that it’s a default.
Now, following the protests happening a few blocks away from me, suddenly I care. Why? When the issue being fought is a simple request to treat human beings no more and no less than others are treated, why is it so controversial? Why do I do nothing?
I was mulling things over as my three friends and I were riding on Whidbey Island, about 160 miles into our adventure. Achievements and pursuits are maybe 99.99 per cent lost without other people. Riding your bike solo for 200 miles is possible, but requires the support of others in spirit, preparations, planning. My friends were crazy enough to want to ride 200 miles with me, and others pulled us in their draft for 10, 20, or 30 of those miles. My family fed us and provided puppy snuggles, another friend served us a feast of snacks at mile 162. Every contribution mattered and made the ride as successful as it could have been.
It’s so obvious that it’s silly - my job involves racing with 90 other people and maybe unless you’re Annemiek van Vleuten in Yorkshire, we need each other to contribute and make progress. I know it’s totally unrealistic of me to think that from now on I will be switched on and 100 per cent aware of every injustice happening in the world at any moment. Yet, if I’ve learned anything about race in the last four months, it’s that my skin colour gives me the privilege to not have to think about injustice if I don’t want to, when for others it’s a daily reality.
I have also learned that any action is positive. To fight for something, we need to support each other in any way we can. It’s a very human thing to do.
“I have also learned that any action is positive. To fight for something, we need to support each other in any way we can”