THE NEXT BIG THING
What happened to America? Given the last five years, you can take that question any number of ways, but specifically, what happened to American bike racing? How could a country go from an afterthought in the sport to winning fully a quarter of the Tours de France since 1980 then fade from contention; endure a 72-year Olympic medal drought and then burst back with nine medals, four of them gold, in a single Games in 1984, only to struggle to keep momentum; invent a new form of bike racing and dominate it and then slowly lose its advantage across every discipline?
The story of American cycling is, really, the story of America: of its exceptionalism and ecclesiastical belief in it; of its capitalistic boom and bust cycles, the greedy heights of its manias and depths of its depressions; and finally, of its resilience and its remarkable aptitude for rebound.
When you look at it that way, the question becomes not, ‘What happened to America’ but an equally rhetorical inquiry: how could it have ever been different?
EARLY EXCEPTIONALISM
It is easy to look at Lance Armstrong and see America’s chippy self-confidence-or-arrogance - reflected in his unblinking gaze. But had those chips fallen differently, America might have dominated bike racing from the beginning.
America did not invent bike racing; the first official race, in 1868, was in Rouen, France. But Americans quickly warmed to the sport.
Cycling’s first international star was Arthur Zimmerman, followed shortly by Marshall “Major” Taylor, just the second Black world champion in any sport, in 1899. It’s hard to overstate how popular bike racing was in America then. “Among professional athletes, cyclists earned top dollar,” writes Peter Nye in Hearts of Lions, his definitive history of American bike racing. In 1894, Zimmerman signed a contract for a series of 25 races in Europe for an appearance fee of $300,000 a year in today’s money, plus winnings and 30 per cent of the ticket revenue.
American cycling dominance is long gone, but you can still
