By Lanolin (RitteRacing.com)

I just grudgingly renewed my subscription to a cycling video website (not gonna say which one because they’ve F’ed me in the A every year for the past three years and i keep going back because there’s no good alternative). Now I can watch hours and hours of the Classics live. Highlights or the last 10k on YouTube just doesn’t cut it for me; I want to watch every goddamn minute of those races. Hell, I’d watch coverage of the teams’ pre-race breakfast if it were broadcast.

I think my obsession stems from the fact that actually being able to watch the sport I love is a pretty new experience for me. Before there was the OLN Channel and pirated web streams from Eurosport, there were only a handful of cycling news websites. And before them, there were just a few magazines and the back of the sports section in the newspaper. If you wanted to know who won the Prologue of the Tour, you had to hope some editor remembered to print the results somewhere in the “MISC. SPORTS” column. If you wanted to see pictures of the pros, you waited a month for Winning Magazine. Shit, I would wait all year to watch those 2 paltry hours of cycling coverage on network TV… and god was that shitty shitty coverage. I would always think about how lucky football fans were… they could actually watch the sport they wanted to watch. What a luxury!

As a kid I would memorize the pictures in Winning and when I was done with that I’d start drawing my own.

To me, the professional cycling world was like Narnia. I went out there every day and rode my bike and raced and dreamed of moving to Europe and becoming a pro, but I really had no idea what professional cycling really was like, or how to get there. All I knew was what the little races I was doing in Dallas were not at all like what they were doing every day in France and Belgium and Italy.

Little Lanolin, age 12, after his first race

But it didn’t matter. Frankly, the fact that true pro racing was a world away let me keep the fantasy alive. I’d lay awake every Monday night thinking about the next evening’s criterium, where I’d get to race with the Cat 1s and local pros (back then all the crits were 1-3). A successful night would entail spending a lap off the front and/or not causing a crash. After the race (assuming I hadn’t crashed), I’d pedal back home in the dark, literally riding 15 miles of sidewalk because I didn’t have lights. I’d then spend the next six days “training” around White Rock Lake in Dallas, waiting for the next Tuesday night, scanning the newspaper for pro results and pestering the local bike shop to give me the last month’s copy of Winning.

Of course, now I can watch European races live and even go do my own cool stage races. I’m even on a sweet team with cool bikes and matching helmets. But no matter how pro I feel (I’m only a Cat 3, mind you), the world of the ProTour is still as far away as it’s ever been. And I’m okay with that. After all, I’m just a grownup playing pretend, which makes me pretty much just like this guy at the Renaissance Fair.

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