It started with a fire...
Distant memories of 2020
If you have a copy of the 2020 Road Book, especially if you happen to have collected several or indeed all of the 8 editions and can compare, you will notice that it is noticeably thinner than 2019. By 2021 the book is almost back to full size, but it wasn’t until 2022 that normal service resumed.
The reason for this, of course, is the Covid pandemic, and the number of cancelled races that year.
I wrote the piece that follows on March 5th 2020, a couple of days before the start of Paris Nice. You may remember that race. It never made it to the end. Day by day entire teams pulled out, and the restrictions in place were tightened. At one point, the French government declared any gathering of over 100 to be illegal, prompting Gary Imlach to suggest that there’d have to be a breakaway of over 22, so that the peloton would be no bigger than 99. Dry humour in the face of increasing uncertainty.
I wanted to share this little essay, first posted on the Road Book website, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it is a reminder to me of the passion project that is the Road Book. Back then we were starting to work on only our third edition of the book, and the increasingly bleak news about the cycling calendar was giving us nightmares. In the end, there were just about enough races for us to justify producing a book. Had that not been the case, I think the project would have been sunk. In my opinion the 2020 book is one of our very best: some of the writing by Rose Manley, Nic Dlamini, Rob Hatch, Max Leonard, Bert Wagendorp, as well as Wout Van Aert, Anna van der Breggen and Tao Geoghegan Hart is truly remarkable.
I was talking about the Road Book with my fellow founder Jonathan Marks the other day. Over the years we have given a platform to well over 70 different writers, many embarking on their careers, and we have documented a truly astonishing time in the history of road racing. Think how much has changed since 2018! The rise of Pogačar is one thing, but the explosion of interest in women’s racing has been even more significant, and just as unexpected.
Publishing the Road Book for Jonathan and for me is an enormous annual undertaking, and over the course of the decade in which we have been dreaming it up and then putting it out into the world, we have both earned the royal sum of £0 from it. What profit it generates is returned straight back into the following year’s costs which are, like everything, spiralling: storage, printing, postage, everything is immensely more costly than it was in 2018. And with Brexit and Trump’s tarriffs, it is not viable for us to export to the E.U. and our USA customers pay a very heavy price. But there is not a chance that we will stop, however hard it has been for us to keep going. It matters to us both too much.
And the second reason that I wanted to share this missive from the pandemic with you is that it is a reminder of two qualities which are in short supply right now: perseverance and compassion. Humanity surprised itself in the spring of 2020 by rediscovering both of those deeply normal attributes. A little more of them right now wouldn’t be a bad thing, I don’t think.
In the end, it’s not about the virus, not really. It’s about us.
What is tormenting about COVID-19 and its coded desire to self-replicate and co-exist with humanity, is how it has exposed to plain sight the undeniable fragility of the world we’ve built for ourselves. All seems suddenly sickly.
All seems dizzyingly uncertain, and though on the surface today looks very much like yesterday, there is a nauseating dislocation from the surety of the past, and from the hidden assumption anchored within it; the path that we thought the future was going to take. I can’t dress it up any way other than to admit I am finding it sad in the extreme.
Many lives have been lost already, often elderly and infirm folk innocently caught up in this outbreak. And tragically it seems impossible not to conclude that many thousands more will follow. This is the kernel of the drama sweeping us up in its net.
But alongside this tragedy, the virus is unwittingly committing everyday vandalism to the structures we have put in place to keep us happy and content, to make life into a reward, rather than a punishment. There will be people feeling just this way from the all corners of the earth, representing all spheres of human endeavour, from education and healthcare, to music and science. Our world is being rattled.
