Wednesday 8 February 2012

Olympian Achievement: how we are all part of Team GB

British cycling scientologist, Dave Brailsford, combines an otherworldly, spindly baldness with a lazy, ray gun stare; if he ever crash-landed in the American Midwest, he could easily be mistaken for the Roswell alien. He carries the same air of insistent biology and rubber-gloved post-mortem to his sport. He probes Team GB’s success with a scalpel, half-smiles, squints and announces calmly: ‘Ladies and gentlemen of Britain. We are now a genuine cycling nation’. But, as the People’s Peloton hurtles onwards to the Olympic village, can this ever really be true?

Britain claims parentage to every known global sport. Cricket is an errant and eccentric eldest son who has a secret that other relatives never ask him about. Snooker is an estranged and wispy-moustached uncle, still modelling 70s clothing and chain-smoking in darkened recesses of the home. Water polo is an uncertain, illegitimate conception that has the family nose. Football has pride of place as the favoured baby, cherished and fussed over despite continually soiling itself. When it comes to the Olympics, boat sports like sailing and rowing evoke a sea-faring pride that harks back to Trafalgar and a ruling of the waves. But how are bicycles entwined in the nation’s history?

The Tour de France is able to conjure continental landscapes of the Dordogne region, whilst commentators discuss the merits of local cheeses. The British equivalent shows competitors cycling past a Netto on the outskirts of some hardy Lancastrian settlement. The free spirit of cycling in Britain gets somewhat choked and tarnished by exhaust fumes, suicidal gyratory systems, and witnessing the road rage of a businessman in a Passat.

But success breeds popularity, just as the Channel 4 free-to-air Ashes boom created the hazy image of a starry-eyed and champagne-squiffy Mark Nicholas handing out Harrow bats to hopeful teenagers. Cycling now has Team Sky, Team GB, Team Elizabeth II, all closing entire city centres for velo-maniacs to gather together; man, woman and child under flag of St George bunting, sharing picnics from wicker bicycle baskets and tap-dancing in pedal clogs.

The heroes of our new sport are grand and enigmatic. First there is Bradley Wiggins, known nationally, as ‘Wiggo’. He is cycling’s Rhys Ifans, uninhibited, brash and maybe even prone to answering the door in the buff. Known extremely locally as the ‘Modfather of Roule’, he has the hairstyle of a Northern Soul disciple, clad in Ben Sherman, coolly tooting on a bifter in the queue of the Twisted Wheel. When he received his CBE in 2009, he was closely shorn, but still sported agricultural sideburns, lending him the appearance of an intolerant and aggressive local who terrorises Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs. Then there is a young Welshman, known only as ‘G’ who is a clone of Wiggo with helmet and sunglasses on, but somehow looks nothing like him without. There is the cycling knight, Sir Chris Hoy, famous for his chipmunk grin, tree-trunk thighs and punch-drunk, agonising performances in cereal adverts.

But none compare to the household name of Mark Cavendish, even if it precedes with: ‘Who is…’ and ends with: ‘never heard of him’. In the saddle he is squat and powerful, but at the same time heart-warmingly small and babyish. Next to the hulk of Tom Boonen in a fierce sprint he resembles an outsized toddler scurrying around the dining room on a plastic tricycle, about to collide with the Wedgewood cabinet. The adrenaline of his post-race interviews seems to put him on the edge of a precipice. He may laugh or cry. He may talk or walk off. He may attack or hug. With sunglasses propped on his head, he has the dancing watery eyes of an inebriated and over-emotional younger brother being propped up in the moonlit grounds of a wedding venue.

Curiously for an Olympics taking part in Britain, when it comes to the cycling, it is the winning, not the taking part that counts. We will witness a summer of lycra-clad gold medal-biting to a backdrop of union jacks. Even now, we might even allow ourselves to talk confidently of ‘podiuming’. Vive Le Chopper de Walter Raleigh! Vive The Revolutions!