Cyclist subjectivity: Corporeal management and the inscription of suffering
Brian Joseph Gilley
University of Vermont, Brian.Gilley@uvm.edu
ABSTRACT
The body of the European road cyclist, gaunt faced and emaciated but with enormous muscled legs, is an indelible image. This image has been venerated and parodied by film, literature and used in nationalist propaganda. The heroic persona of the cyclist who shapes their body to maximize strength-to-weight ratios further reinforces discourses of body management. Yet, the men who exhibit the superhuman strength to endure the requisite suffering are also docile bodies continually put through disciplinary regiments by their team directors, sponsors, the cycling industry and themselves. It is this contradiction between the veneration of individual suffering and cyclist as a form of subjectivity where we can investigate the ways in which the cycling industry naturalizes techniques of domination.
KEYWORDS: cycling, subjectivity, the body, suffering, discipline
Introduction
The body culture of professional road cycling exemplifies the nexus of historical nuanced processes and the demands of modernity. Over the course of the development of road cycling as a professional sport, athletes have subjected themselves to not only the rigors of training but also to the rigors of national and social projects that seek to draw political meaning and economic reward from their physical movement. The modern cyclist is one that seeks to adhere to a body culture of technological profundity and systems of bodily discipline. Accordingly, the cycling subject is constructed along the corporeal axis of suffering and disciplinary regiments that bring the individual into line with the expectations and discourses of the cycling body culture. Body culture as conceived of by Danish cultural sociologist Henning Eichberg proposes that the body is 'primarily cultural, which is to say, as socially constructed and historically variable' (1998: 41). At the center of Eichberg's ideas is that bodily movement becomes bound up within class aspirations, nationalist missions, religious causes and societal attitudes. Social movements, industrialization, and political reforms all endorse forms of bodily movement that inevitably come to shape sporting cultures (1998: 112-3).
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The work of Eichberg, as well as other theorists of the body, will be used to begin a long overdue discussion of cyclist subjectivity. Cyclist subjectivity has three major components: first, the positioning of the modern cyclist body within the development of the cycling industry; second, the human body of transnational professional cycling is produced by the systemization of bodily movement in the sport of cycling; third, key to understanding cyclist subjectivity is how the bodily movement of the cyclist is regulated through the surveillance of suffering and corporeal management. I will conclude with a discussion of the implications for cycling subjectivity.
The Early Emergence of Cycling Body Culture
The body of the cyclist is historically situated within the emergence of the cycling industry as a mass spectator sports tradition. Throughout its history cycle sport has reinforced, endorsed and surveilled particular forms of bodily movement. When I use the term cycle sport and cycling I am explicitly referring to the forms of racing that gave birth to contemporary transnational professional road bicycle racing. Transnational professional road racing developed through socio-historical circumstances that at various times reinforced particular body cultures and very specific forms of bodily movement.
The history of the Euro-American cycling industry itself began with the convergence of the mass production of the bicycle, spectacle style racing and the formation of local enthusiast organizations in the late 1800s. Industrialization played a major role in the broad societal appeal of the bicycle. Bicycling as a form of recreation and transportation was primarily an upper class pursuit until companies began mass producing bicycles around the turn of the century. The 'safety bicycle', which remains the design standard of the contemporary bicycle, took the place of the wobbly high wheeled Victorian era bicycle, the 'penny-farthing', in the 1880s. The better engineering of the safety bicycle made riding a bike easier and more accessible and eventually led to a bicycle craze in 19th century Europe and the United States. France was the principle bicycle manufacturing country in Europe at the turn of the century. Companies such as Compagnie Parisienne produced as many as 200 bicycles a day. In both Western Europe and the United States, mass produced bicycles found their way to the lower classes, which used the bicycle for transportation as well as recreation. The availability of the bicycle and increased leisure time for the lower classes led to the creation of local bike clubs that sponsored races in cooperation with provinces and cities. Many cities began to build velodromes to meet the demand for entertainment and interest in spectator sport (Thompson 2006: 14-6).
Two forms of racing defined bodily movement in cycling at the turn of the 20th century. Cycling in Europe and the US centred on track events and monumental one day point-to-point road races. One of the most popular styles of track racing was the six day race (sixes). These races were held on indoor or outdoor tracks and literally lasted for six days. They were prevented from going for longer than six days by the Sabbath. Six day races were held in velodromes in major cities mostly in France, Great Britain and the United States. Victories and prize money in sixes went to the individual who had ridden the furthest at the end of six days. During the race, riders were also offered 'primes' (cash prizes) for sprinting competitions. Primes might be sponsored by race organizers or by
individual spectators. The six day racer was usually a working class man who did other forms of work and rode their bike in competitions for the extra money. Eventually six day racing became so popular that popular riders could fully support themselves with prize money.
Six day races however were notoriously corrupt affairs. The demands of racing for six days straight required an unnatural amount of endurance and riders often turned to aberrant means to achieve their goals. Race promoters had very loose definitions of cheating due to the enormous profits from admission fees and refreshments. Fans would come and go during the day and in the evenings the races would turn into raucous affairs with heavy betting and drinking. The demands on the riders' bodies were extreme, 'Riders could become gibbering wrecks, wobbling, falling, climbing back on only to fall again a few hours later. Certainly the worse they got, the longer the line became at the box office '[...] What folk wanted was terrible suffering and the misery of grotesque wrecks' (Woodland 2003: 37-8). The spectacle of the race and the financial payoffs for the riders created an atmosphere where performance enhancements were a critical aspect of racing. Riders would initially use coffee and other herbal stimulants, but eventually graduated to cocaine and strychnine. Strychnine was taken in small doses to increase the tension in tired muscles (ibid.: 39).
Six day racers' bodies had come under the purview of race promoters, their coaches, and the paying public. The forms of bodily movement that the six day races produced were chaotic, extreme, dangerous and violent. Riders would attempt to crash one another, box in other riders so they could not move forward, and drive themselves to hallucination from exhaustion. Serious injury and sometimes death were a normal aspect of six day races. Riders were intimidated into performances by trainers and race promoters. The body culture of six day racing was one where racers were willing to undergo the physiological rigors with no thought of their own physical well being. According to Hoberman (1992: 12-13, 130-1), this ethic arose out of the interest in physiological experimentation in the late 1800s. Western society was interested in the ways humans could be pushed beyond limitations, which also applied to 'extreme athletic effort'. The interest in extreme efforts did not prevent public outrage, especially in the US. The New York Times and New York Herald ran stories critiquing the practices of sixes, which eventually led to some states passing laws about how many hours individual riders could be on a bike during an event (Woodland 2003: 39-41). Bodily movement in the sixes was one of extremes and of brute force which lies in contrast to the contemporary emphasis on refined and highly efficient movement.
The other popular style of racing in Europe, the point-to-point race, was not wholly unlike six day racing in its emphasis on extremes. The form of movement emphasized was one of agony, speed and sheer endurance. Point-to-point races were usually conducted as an aspect of a city and provincial holiday celebrations. Many of these early point-to-point races continue today in the form of 'one day classics'. For example the oldest continuing Italian classic race, Milan-San Remo, was first raced in 1907 as a part of the San Jozef Day celebrations in mid-March. This style of racing had a different character than the more sullied six day scene. Point-to-point races were by design meant to draw
spectators from the towns and rural areas where they passed. In Belgium, Liege-Bastogne-Liege (La Doyenne or 'the oldest woman') is the oldest classic and was first run in 1892 for amateurs and became a professional race in 1894. 'Liege' is known for its grueling traverse through the Ardennes region of Belgium. France also had its fair share of punishing point-to-point races. The first race from Paris to Roubaix (Paris-Roubaix) was held on Easter Sunday in 1896. The race of almost 300 km was sponsored by two textile manufacturers who had recently funded the building of the Roubaix velodrome where the race ends to this day. One of the most notorious of the early point-to-point races was Paris-Brest which first ran in 1891—an epic race of 1200 kilometers. As Thompson (2006: 12) points out, 'As a new century dawned, the bicycle racer-dusty, mud-splattered, and bloodied, hunched over his machine and battling his rivals and the elements—was increasingly celebrated as the heroic personification of courage and perseverance'.
It was the body culture of the suffering endurance rider (and the need to sell newspapers) that eventually produced the ultimate form of endurance cycling event—the grand tour. Grand tours, particularly the Tour de France, changed everything for the sport and for the cyclist. The first Tour de France, known as la grande boucle (the great loop), was organized by the editor of the sporting magazine L'Auto-Velo as an attempt to increase circulation and an endeavour to filch readers from the competing sports publication, Le Velo (Dauncey & Hare 2003: 6). The Tour was a novelty among cycling events. The first Tour, July 1 to 19, 1903, included six stages with rest days in between. Many of these stages were as long as the most popular single day races, with the entire loop covering 2,397 kilometers. The first winner, Maurice Garin, won the race with a time of ninety-four hours and thirty-three minutes. The Tour brought cycling to the various towns through which it passed, but also brought rural parts of France into the national fold and promoted national unity. By 1926 the average Tour had increased to fifteen stages, 5,193 kilometers, and an average stage length of 347 kilometers. Many days riders would spend as much as thirteen hours in the saddle to complete a stage (Thompson 2006: 32-3). Italian sports newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport followed suit in 1909 when its editor Emilio Costamagna began the Giro d'Italia. These races then inspired Juan Pujol of the newspaper Informaciones to begin the Vuelta a Espana in 1935. The Tour de France however remains the pinnacle of cycling achievement among the three grand tours.
Unlike earlier forms of racing, grand tours were a way to make cycling a modern sport; to redefine the bodily movement as one that the whole of a society could support. To insure the French public's support of the Tour de France, Henri Desrange sought to transport cycling and cyclists' behaviors into modern values through various disciplinary techniques: rules were placed on rider's conduct and the cycling came to be considered work through an industrial analogy (Thompson 156-73). It was at this moment that cycling and cycling bodies were transformed to the rigors of modernity.
Ethics and Aesthetics of Body Culture
Although the roots of cycling body culture can be found in six day races, early point-to-point races, and the grand tours, I would argue that a distinct divide occurred in the latter half of the 20th century with the systemization of cycling movement by the cycling industry. Prior to this point cyclists had sponsors who paid for their labours and benefited from their bodily movement. However, it was in the post-war era that cycling began its orientation toward what Maguire calls the sports industrial complex, which he defines as 'four main elements: sports medicine, sports science, sports science support programmes, and regional/national centres of excellence' (2005: 162). Within the sports industrial complex, I would characterize the modern cycling industry as having developed several components beside the athletes: national and international federations, team owners, team sponsors, bicycle and cycling related manufacturers who sponsor teams, race owners and promoters, and directeur sportifs or 'team directors' (DSs). Post WWII cycling began to emphasize the importance of training regiments with particular focus on diet, hygiene, sport specific movement, and the medicalization of the cycling body. Increasingly over the next sixty years the independent (non-sponsored) rider began to fade; riders were no longer responsible for managing their own training, diet and machinery, but instead came under the purview of management systems funded and required by the cycling industry. It is within management systems perfected by the cycling industry where we can locate the techniques used to produce the contemporary body culture of cycling.
The body culture of contemporary professional cycling is immediately apparent in the appearance of the cyclist in the same way one can evaluate the body culture of a weight lifter or high fashion model. The values of these microcultures are marked on the bodily aesthetic of individuals (Palmer 1996: 114). Body culture, however, is more than simply individual appearance, but is also bodily movement. Any noticeable characteristics of the athlete are the result of bodily movement. Bodily movements are endorsed by a particular body culture and internalized in the intentionality of the individual. Professional road cycling of the European kind endorses several body types each with its own rigidly defined bodily movements. These bodily movements are associated with particular roles on teams, specific kinds of competitive events, precise body aesthetics, and are tied to rigid performance expectations and systems of training. The bodily movements of a climber (someone talented in riding up mountains) will differ greatly from those of a classics specialist (someone who is good at fast one day races on rough roads) and both will differ from the body culture of the time trialist (race against the clock).
Cyclists will often be referred to as a 'pure climber' or a 'pure sprinter'. This statement refers to an individual's body movement as ideal for a particular discipline in cycling. Certain individuals are known as 'all arounders', which means that they have proficiency in all the important categories needed to win major stage races. In the past athletes such as Belgian Eddy Merckx could meet the physical demands of both classics and stage races and had a versatility to excel in multiple disciplines of cycling. Merckx, who raced from the mid-1960s until the late 1970s, won the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France five times each, but also won major one-day races such as Paris-Roubaix, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, and Milan San Remo as well as holding the World Hour Record on the
track. However since cycling's 'golden age', Maguire (2005: 160) points out, 'Sport performers have come increasingly to participate in only one sport and, within that sport they specialize according to task or positional requirements'. Seldom will someone be a classics specialist and a grand tour winner. We can recognize that at the basic athletic level the different disciplines of cycling demand the perfection of different bodily movements and individuals with naturally different kinds of physical abilities will be drawn to specific disciplines. Therefore, we are not interested in critiquing cycling specialization; rather we are interested in examining the construction of a systematized body culture that not only endorses particular bodily movements, but also normalizes particular bodily techniques through systematization. That is, a body culture created and reinforced by governing norms embodied within competing systems of corporeal management.
Programs of systemization in cycling body culture are implicated and reinforced by the political economy of sport in general and specifically within the structure of professional road cycle sport. The structure of professional road cycling mirrors that of any corporation. Teams are usually sponsored by a large corporation and supplemented by smaller companies that provide equipment or wish to advertise to the cycling audience. The level of financial commitment of sponsors and the team's ability to gain the desired public attention determines everything from riders' salaries to the kinds of towels used by athletes. Within the team structure there are specialist athletes: the grand tour contenders, the classics specialists, young riders being cultivated for future roles on the team, and the domestiques or helpers. Each of these roles is designed to make victory more likely. Grand tour contenders tend to be best well-known members of the team, followed by successful classics specialists. The least well paid and most unrecognized are the domestiques, who may themselves be as talented as the stars on the team, but by their contracts must sacrifice personal goals for the glory of team leaders. Inevitably whatever a rider's position on the team, they are required to maintain a certain level of athletic performance and provide results in the form of wins for their sponsors. To deal with the rigors of cycling as a profession riders of all levels and specialties employ systems of bodily management to meet the requirements of their job.
Within cycle sport there are many systems that individuals can follow. When referring to systems I am explicitly referring to training regiments developed and managed within the sports industrial complex. Heinila points out '[...] as a consequence of continuous upgrading of demands in international sport, competition totalizes into a competition between systems' rather than individual athletes (1988: 128). In order to perfect the bodily movements required of their role on a team, cyclists have increasingly sought out a sys-tematization of their training and performance through the sports training industry. Until the 1960s most professional riders also had full time jobs, some cycling related but others not. A racer attempted to fit his training in when he had the time. The contemporary full time European road cycle racer has the financial and temporal ability to follow the regiments of training systems. The same would apply to the use of performance enhancing drugs. Before systematized doping programs, boosting one's performance was spontaneous—as needed practice—with cocaine, heroin or what is known as pot beige (a potent mixture of drugs taken during a race). However, the introduction of anabolic exogenous
steroids and drugs such as Erythropoietin (EPO) into a training regiment has systemized the doping process into programs rather than unplanned performance boosting.
The use of anaerobic threshold is one example of a training system that is now a standard aspect of all cyclists' training programs. Italian sports physicians Ferrari and Conconi (1982, 1989) developed a test estimating the point at which an individual would begin producing lactic acid within their muscles. Lactic acid is the chemical produced by the body as the result of the use of oxygen by muscles under exertion. It is the chemical that makes the muscles of a cyclist hurt. What is known as 'the Conconi' is a test where several variables are measured in order that a cyclist can raise their anaerobic threshold through specific training regiments. Ferrari has also developed a way to test an individual's climbing ability called VAM (CITE), which uses a power meter attached to the bicycle cranks to determine the cadence needed for a rider to climb a particular gradient. A cyclist's VAM would determine how much power a cyclist would need to produce to climb a hill within a specified time frame. From these tests such as these trainers, team doctors, soigniers (rider's personal assistants), nutritionists and other personnel who oversee cyclists will develop specific training regiments for a cyclist's particular goals and position on the team. This regiment could include skill specific training but could also include the use of particular nutrients, weight loss, or muscle gain. In some instances a cyclist and his attendants might seek a program of systemized performance enhancing drugs such as the red blood booster EPO or anabolic steroids—both of which require consistent use and incorporation into training programs to be effective. Also, the use of both is a violation of international cycling rules.
These systems are so prevalent that it is commonplace for amateur riders to conduct these tests on themselves and emulate the nutritional and bodily aesthetics of professionals (Palmer 1996: 101-14). Other tests such as VO2 maximum (oxygen absorption capacity) and muscle tension are combined with numerous nutritional supplement systems and are also used by professional and amateur alike. These training systems have the inevitable goal of creating an obedient cycling body that has the ability to perform the required movements to achieve goals as specified by the cycling industry.
Suffering and Surveillance
In order for a body culture to be implicated in the structure of the sports industrial complex, that industry must scrutinize individual bodies. Michele Foucault points out that bodies are disciplined through a variety of applications of power and specifically through certain techniques and knowledge. These disciplinary techniques are used in the surveillance of individual bodies (Foucault 1995: 170-83). Disciplinary matrices create docile bodies, 'bodies whose training extends their capacity and usefulness' (Cole et al. 2004: 212). However there is also a factor ofjudgment involved in determining to what extent riders are successful in 'extending their capacity and usefulness'. That is, for each aspect of cycling, such as climber versus sprinter, there is a corresponding normalized bodily expectation. There are specific bodily movements that are required of an individual to meet cycling industry expectations. Many of these normalized movements can only be achieved by certain kinds of bodies. It is in this diffusion of the 'body particular' that we
find the body culture of cycling. But the diffusion is inevitably reliant on the surveillance of the body particular by the various techniques employed by the cycling industry.
There are many aspects of cyclists' bodies monitored by the cycling industry. In this section I am concerned with suffering. Within the discourse surrounding cycling there are two forms of suffering; one legitimate and one illegitimate. The determination of which form of suffering a cyclist has met is determined by numerous techniques of surveillance. To suffer legitimately is often considered heroic and inevitably involves ones ability to match their bodily movements to the expectations of the cycling industry. To suffer illegitimately has many possibilities and is perceived by the cycling industry as almost always the result of one's inability to meet the corporeal requirements of cycling discourses. These two notions of suffering are inevitably tied to questions of honour, fitness and ability, but are also tied to riders' support systems within teams and the cycling industry at large in practical ways. The images of these two forms of suffering are primarily distributed through the cycling media: magazines, live race coverage, sporting newspapers, and internet news and fan sources. Images or descriptions of riders representing both forms of suffering might be visually similar: grimaced faced, sweating, exhausted and gaunt looking, and maybe even weeping. However, legitimate or heroic suffering while not always victorious is portrayed very differently than that of illegitimate suffering. These two differences will be explored below.
My examination of suffering no doubt invokes the idea of punishment as the regime of disciplinary power put forth by Foucault:
[Punishing] differentiates individuals from one another [...] It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value the abilities, the level, the 'nature' of individuals. It introduces [.] constraint of a conformity [.] it traces the limit that will define difference in relation to all other differences, the external frontier of the abnormal [.] in short, it normalizes (1995: 182-3).
Here punishment does dialectical work, as both the corporeal experience of extreme exertion upon the field of play, the tarmac, and punishment in terms of the ways body culture discourses reward and condemn particular bodily movements. For one's suffering (bodily movement) to be deemed illegitimate is not emancipatory, rather both forms of docility could be considered 'automatic docility' in which 'governing norms become one's own' (Foucault 1995: 169; Cole et al. 2004: 214).
There are multiple ways the cycling industry creates docile bodies through discourses of fitness. At a fundamental level, a rider can be visibly fit by looking thin with no body fat and highly muscled legs, or can look unfit by having fat around their waist or neck. The governing bodies of cycling also seek to determine fitness in terms of health, such as a rider being healthy enough to compete. Drug testing is one way to determine rider fitness, which may include tests for specific chemicals, but tests that monitor bodily processes can also be used. For example, a rider with a higher than normal haematocrit would be under suspicion of using the banned blood booster EPO. Riders under suspicion for doping are officially considered 'unfit for competition'. These forms of fitness are monitored by several techniques, which can include medical tests, but can also include
press releases and articles in cycle sport related publications. Inevitably these techniques discipline riders who are out of the norms of fitness, but also determine that any kinds of suffering that occur outside of the norms do not meet discursive requirements of legitimacy (Butler 1990: 23, 173).
In recent years many professional cyclists have seen themselves punished by the cycling industry for being overweight. One case however has interested me the most. In a press release (VeloNews, 17 April 2004) reprinted on cycling internet news sources and covered by both European and American cycling magazines Team Saeco publicly admonished Dario Pieri. An excerpt of the press release reads:
From the beginning of the season during the first team training camps, the team has notified Dario Pieri that he was over weight due to the poor managing of his diet and of a general damaging lifestyle not suited to the needs of a professional cyclist. For this reason Pieri has been verbally warned several times and a sent a registered letter by team manager [...].
The statement goes on further to critique Pieri's 'incapacity to lead the life style of a true professional rider'. Pieri was eventually let go from Team Saeco (which changed to Lampre-Caffita in the 2005 season) for his inability to manage his weight. He may not have produced the work desired by the team. His contract was extended by the team as classics specialists after placing second in the 2003 Paris-Roubaix. After 2003 he did not win any races and apparently lacked the ability to help team leaders. However, by publicly disciplining Pieri, the team was bringing him into line with the corporeal expectations of the team. By not living the 'lifestyle of a true professional rider' Pieri had not punished himself through training and diet to ensure his ability to suffer heroically. Rather, Team Saeco feared Pieri's illegitimate suffering on the race course. Therefore, the goal is not to judge Pieri's accomplishments as an athlete, but to understand how the cyclist bodily movements are subjected to surveillance and techniques of management. Pieri's abilities and natures were quantified in terms of his body mass (weight) which would inevitably disqualify his bodily movements and making them inappropriate to a professional cyclist. Therefore any suffering shown through his bodily movements, such as lack of ability to keep up with other racers or failing to climb a hill at a certain rate, is deemed deviant from the 'values' of cycling as a profession.
In order to ensure their adherence to official forms of bodily movement many riders discipline themselves through forms of weight maintenance and training regiments —through systems of corporeal management. Others also use additional systems of performance enhancement to insure their docility. Is it possible that the techniques applied to the cycling subject subtextually endorse a form of suffering that can only be achieved through technologies publicly deemed abhorrent by the cycling industry? That is, could doping be the only possible way to ensure proper forms of suffering are exerted and displayed by the rider? At the same time if one is caught doping their suffering is deemed false or invalid because it was aided by performance enhancers.
As this article goes to press American Floyd Landis is being disciplined by both cycling governing bodies and the cycling media for testing positive for exogenous test-
osterone while winning the 2006 edition of the Tour de France. In question is Mr. Landis' extraordinary feat of breaking away from the pack and winning the gruelling mountainous Stage 17 into Morzine, France. On the previous day Landis fell apart in the mountains and lost ten minutes to his rivals. Landis' miraculous comeback was heralded as truly heroic; possibly the greatest stage win ever in the Tour de France. Three days after he stood as winner atop the podium on the Champs-Elysees in Paris the cycling world awoke to the news that Landis' ratio between testosterone and epitestosterone was 11:1. The governing body of professional cycling, Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) deems anything over 4:1 as suspicious of doping. Consequently Landis was suspended from his team, Phonak, and doping proceedings were begun by the UCI and the US Cycling Association. No resolution of this matter is expected until early 2007. Despite the complexities surrounding the evidence and legal issues in the case, Landis' lone breakaway to win in Morzine has now been deemed 'unspectacular' and 'fraudulent'.
For our purposes here we will not debate Landis' guilt or innocence. Instead we will focus on the ways Landis' suffering in his 'heroic' effort became illegitimate after the positive test result. This description of Landis' bodily movement was typical of news reports that day:
Landis was tapping away in a beautiful rhythm that belied his struggle
of 24 hours earlier, drawing nearer to the leaders with every pedal stroke
[...] His speed was simply overwhelming for those survivors of the
initial break who tried to stay with him [.] (VeloNews, 20 July 2006).
In these descriptions Floyd Landis was suffering in the appropriate manner: he was making others suffer and thus punishing the other riders, he was suffering 'beautifully' by aggressively attacking the other riders on one of the most difficult mountain stages of the Tour, his bodily movement was heroic. However, after the positive test result, the VeloNews ran an article with the heading 'Heroic Effort?' drawing into question the possibility that Landis' 'miraculous' performance on the road to Morzine was the result of testosterone doping (VeloNews, 5 August 2006). The well known cycling journalist Graham Watson wrote in the editorial of the September 2006 issue of the Cycle Sport America: '[...] my feelings about the Landis affair [.] Sadness [.] that such a great ride on stage 17 has turned out to be completely fraudulent, when everyone wanted to believe it was one of the greatest rides in Tour history'. In the days following notification of the positive result, the Stage 17 victory in Morzine was spun in various ways by the media but also by Landis supporters and by Landis himself. Supporters of Landis no longer interpret his performance as heroic, rather it was the result of a lack of cooperation between other teams to bring him back into the main group. They also explained that Landis' data from training supported that his power outputs on that day were not miraculous in any way. Landis' team doctor said, 'This performance he had, this big Stage de Morzine (ph), was not unexpected. He has training data that compares to what he did that day [...]' (CNN Larry King Live Transcript, 28 July 2006). The rider veteran rider Charly Mottet surmised, 'What Floyd did was exceptional, but by no means super-human' (Cycle Sport America, September 2006). Discounting Landis' victory as the result of performance enhancing drugs no doubt attempts to punish him for bodily movements (those that are enhanced)
not endorsed by the cycling industry and punish him within cycling discourse. Landis supporters are also attempting to bring Landis' bodily movements on Stage 17 back into line with cycling industry discourses by claiming that he was simply a cyclist doing his job; it was his preparedness and brilliant tactics that allowed an ordinary performance to produce victory not testosterone.
Whether we are discussing the ways Pieri's inability to suffer appropriately or the transformation of Landis' suffering from heroic to ordinary or fraudulent, both riders' bodily movements are brought under the purview of cycling industry. That is, the interrelationship between the political economy of the cycling body and the actual bodily movements of the cyclists converge within a system of corporeal management (discipline). This system of corporeal management can normalize individuals by and through such discourses as fitness, heroism, power-to-weight ratio or any other systematized program that generates docility.
Conclusion: Cyclist Subjectivity
The purpose of this analysis was to show the ways the cycling sport along with its culture, politics and industry creates docile bodies through the legitimization of highly specific bodily movements. Also, the intent was to break the surface on an area where very little has been written about cycle sport culture and nothing has been written about the rigors of professional cycling as a form of subjectivity. To deconstruct cycling discourse is to reveal the mechanisms of an unquestioned set of values governing individual bodies. The intent is not to detract from the love of the sport or of the bike, but to understand how cycling discourses have a historical trajectory and circulate in similar ways as other totalizing systems. The political economy of the cycling industry and its techniques of corporeal management become marked on the individual cyclists' body. Inevitably it is the cyclist's body that becomes subject to flows of power not the cycling industry.
Turning again to Foucault let us consider discipline that [...] operates four great techniques: it draws up tables; it prescribes movements; it imposes exercises; lastly in order to obtain the combination of forces, it arranges 'tactics'. Tactics, the art of constructing, with located bodies, coded activities and trained aptitudes [.] are no doubt the highest form of disciplinary practice (1995: 167).
It is in tactics where we can see the totalization of the cycling subject. That is, bodies are located within the cycling industry and subjected to activities that are oblique under the guise of fitness, victory, and heroism. Uncooperative bodies' performances are relegated to illegitimate forms of cycling subjectivity. However, the bodily movements deemed illegitimate remain docile; for those bodies associated with the cycling industry continually fall under surveillance and discipline. As long as one attempts to reproduce the bodily movements of the contemporary cycling industry, they will continue to be judged in comparison to endorsed (normalized) forms of corporeality.
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PhD thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Adelaide, Australia. Thompson, Christopher S. 2006. The Tour de France. Berkeley: University of California Press.
POVZETEK
Telo evropskega cestnega kolesarja, shujšanega s suhim obrazom a z gromozanskimi mišičastimi nogami, je nepozabna podoba. To podobo so častili in smešili v filmih in literaturi ter jo uporabljali v nacionalistični propagandi. Herojska osebnost kolesarja, ki svoje telo oblikuje, da bi maksimiziral razmerje med močjo in težo zgolj potrjuje diskurze upravljanja s telesom. Kljub vsemu pa so možje, ki kažejo svojo nadčloveško moč in vztrajajo v zahtevanem trpljenju, tudi učljiva telesa, ki so nenehno podvržena disciplinskim režimom trenerjev, sponzorjev, kolesarske industrije in lastnim režimom. V tem protislovju med čaščenjem posameznikovega trpljenja in kolesarjem kot oblike subjektivnosti, lahko proučujemo načine, s katerimi kolesarska industrija naredi svoje tehnike oblasti naravne.
KLJUČNE BESEDE: kolesarstvo, subjektivnost, telo, trpljenje, disciplina