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Written by: Colin Batchelor

I’ve a friend who many years ago became father to a baby girl, when asked how he felt, in a cycling context of course, his reply was ‘Great, imagine the disappointment if I’d had a son and he never won the Tour de France!’

Now days everyone wants’ to be a cyclist and as the number of riders on your local club training run goes up, it more than likely that you’ll hear fully grown adults utter something similar. Well maybe utter is the wrong word, as they say a picture is worth a thousand words and the picture is one of team replica kit, team replica bike, team replica helmet (and you better hope they haven’t got onto the team replica medicine cupboard, or else you’re gonna suffer on the climbs).
Of course they may dress like a pro, they may ride what a pro rides, but you can bet your tub of AAB (Assos Arse Butter) that they won’t ride like a pro. Ride with a pro, or ride with anyone who spends a lot of time racing and you can happily bump against them without a problem. But get too close to a wanna be pro on the ride or even touch then and you’ll hear a yelp of fear that you only ever utter when you do an emergency stop and the soft dangly parts of your anatomy make contact with the stiff carbon of your frame.

But having the bike, the kit, the hair style, even having a Skoda filled with podium girls won’t make you look like a pro. You see Pro’s look, well, they look like pros. It’s as simple as that. If you spend hours and hours every day riding your bike, if you get paid for sprinting over cobbles or covering breaks in the Alps something is going to happen to your body, something that is apart from feeling like you’ve had the living crap beaten out of you in a Saturday night bar fight. You’re going to lose the odd pound or twenty of fat, you’re muscles are going to tone up to the point where they resemble that carbon frame that recently brought tears to your eyes and you’re going to end up looking like a pro. So tough luck then, if you wanna look like a pro there’s only one way to do it and it doesn’t involve bouncing your bouncers on your top tube.

Of course one of the other things that marks you out as a pro is your passport. Now you or I may well think traveling a hundred miles for a race is a big deal, but for most pros that’s a training trip. Most pros think nothing of spending days, weeks even traveling across the world, Spain on Monday, France on Tuesday, Wednesday is Italy and then on the plane for the US. Well I say most pros, it seems that there are some pro’s who not only have trouble getting on a plane, but have a memory like a Roubaix ripped tyre when it comes to where they’ve been.

First there was Rasmussen who seemed to have a bit of trouble telling the difference between Mexico, Italy and Turkey; well it’s an easy mistake isn’t it. Now it seems that a certain Russian can’t remember if he’s ever been to Austria. Well it’s an easy mistake isn’t it? If you don’t speak Austrian you could be in, well, Italy or France without knowing it.

There must be something about spending all your time on the bike and getting paid for it that makes things slip your memory. Mr Boonen seems to forget that every time he has a beer he finishes up with a Colombian chaser. I know, I know, he’s entitled to celebrate after all he’s been working hard following Cav to the finish line?

Maybe the UCI should fit all riders with GPS systems, so that at anytime they know where they are:

‘Hey Pat, put the testers on standby, someone’s just gone to Mexico’