By: Craig Gaulzetti Friday November 6, 2009

i’m higher on the anxiety about getting my next fix
than i am when i get it
until i can’t take anymore watch me drop to the floor
won’t you revel in it all
i deserve it all

Thank you for yesterday
I enjoyed the solitude
Worlds apart, we’re both in pain
And when I heard you cried on the phone
I tell you, you’re not alone
There’s always a hand to hold
And your tears inside are mine
When you cried, cried
I love you there
I love you there

S*M*A*S*H, spring 1993

Neither the answer nor the question really bespeaks my true sentiments on the issue at hand. But it nonetheless epitomizes the disdain I have towards the caustic, insulated, reactionary, sentimentalist view the vast majority of thinking people seem to hold on just about each and every issue. To the interweb expert guy, waxing in-eloquently about the hardness of some 25 year old man child who’s paid twenty grand a year to pedal a bicycle and lives with his mother when he’s not sleeping on someone’s couch; to the guy on my ride who insists on chirping code words he gleaned from a bad translation of the Bernard Hinault’s Complete Ghostwritten and Useless Guide to Cycling, while pointing out variations in pavement color tint as if they were the missing manhole covers, to the dude who asked me why I hate the environment as I channeled a long line of dead under-achieving, working-class white American ancestors and installed louder, freer flowing axle-backs in my Mustang – I know you have an intense desire to attach meaning and value to your existence; it’s only human. I do not hate you for it, I hate you for the fact that you have never added any meaning or value to anything; be it your existence or a 2008 Mustang Bullitt.

Action and work have an inherent value and an inherent ability to manipulate and change the world in a way, which sentimentality and romanticism and an unhealthy regard for insulation against risk do not. It is perfectly all right to hop on a bike without a helmet and go get a beer, to tell your kids to go out and play in the street, to go buy a handgun, because you think it’s the fucking coolest thing ever and you want to shoot shit with your buddies. It is not alright to hide behind a windshield in order to act like a tough guy, or sign your kid up for every single sport you sucked at as a kid when all he wants to do is play with barbies and work on his tap steps, or buy that handgun because you sincerely are such a small-dicked, little, scared douchebag that you honestly believe without it people will break into your house and steal your tv. If people are going to break into your house and steal your tv, you need to either move or lock your door. In short, living is about action, and doing things and a little bit of risk and fun and stepping outside. If for every 25 tussles you get into with nameless, faceless persons on the interweb, you had just one fist fight, you would be a better, kinder, more considerate and caring person.

Much if not all of this nihilistic vitriol stems from my own attempt to make sense and (gulp) attach meaning and value to something I simply cannot. I lost a friend and a hero this past month. Someone who shared an adolescence of big hopes, shattered dreams and even some gut wrenching hard fucking work with me and many others of our generation; an adolescence he unfortunately or fortunately inhabited for the entirety of his short adult life. My own brand of bicycles is even an homage to him; something unbeknownst to me until my friend Justin pointed it out. Honestly there is no story to his death I don’t think. It was neither inevitable, apropos, meaningless nor meaningful. It was simply a stupid act undeserving of the permanence it caused for those of us who are left standing. We’ve all imbibed a bit too much of life at times, and the scary thing is, I could see my self popping another pill while sitting shitfaced on vacation having fun. It’s bad luck and it sucks but the levity only exists up to the minute his heart stopped and he was gone. Trying to make anything stick to something as real as life and death is pretentious, dumb and banal. Unrealized potential is never what any of us are about; and no one should ever, ever think about life in those terms. Meaning can only transcend reality when realized through impossible action. Navalmoral, Liege, Flanders, Paris-Nice, that stupid race in Leper where he lapped the pro field twice as a junior; no one on a bike ever had as many of those moments as him. Die wade et arvey, con. I’ll miss you. Oh and I want my S*M*A*S*H CD back.

By: Craig Gaulzetti Wednesday October 7, 2009

I hate the fall almost as much as I hate the winter. It’s the season where my high functioning alcoholism begins to lose its masking agent of 400km weeks and the fattening process commences. I do not have body image issues, I am just acutely aware of when and if I am a fat fuck and I know everyone else who has ever raced a bicycle knows this as well. Supercharged skinnies hell-bent on their own destruction are, for me, an aesthetic ideal, be it manifested by Thomas Dekker, Sid Vicious or Kate Moss. I’m equal opportunity when it comes to what physically impresses me, but it’s got nothing to do with sex.

The relationships between immediately post-pubescent men in largely female-free environments can easily be dismissed as homoerotic. Add to this leotards, money, drugs, shaved legs and massages and I begin to understand why the guy in the F150 called me a fagot as he urged me to use the non-existent sidewalk on route 117 last night. If he only knew about the time I shared a bed with a 17 year old guy named Dirk from Sint Niklaas at Hotel Ibis in Majorca. I weighed 155 pounds then; big, strong and perfectly dialed chemically and mentally for dragging more competent, talented and important people along on shitty windy roads for hours on end. But to everyone else in the entire world, I was a skinny, gangly, weird looking kid. When you’re going good you’re pretty in love with yourself; and the physical appearance of other men merely serves as a gauge of who could take you and who you could take out on the road. In a sense, regardless of the sexual orientation of the bike racer, they are thoroughly and completely immersed in a hetero erotic social structure in spite of the lack of woman or potential mates of any gender. Staring at a guy in a skin suit, you’re eying him up to determine whether he’s physically capable of kicking your ass and stealing your prize. The relationship between bike racers is more bighorn sheep than high school shower room. It’s a primeval vestigial relationship that owes more to evolution than anything else. The hierarchy is based upon how good you go- and the physical and mental gifts bestowed upon you is what determines your place in that order.

So dude, when you catch me staring at your ass, it’s all about me checking you over as a rival all right? I mean I suppose I’m not too threatening presently, but wait ‘til I start Nautilus.

By: Craig Gaulzetti Wednesday September 9, 2009

I try to care about the Vuelta. At this point in the season, it seems like even the potential podium finishers don’t care about the Vuelta. Outside of stadium sports, the Fascists have never done too well with sport, despite their best intentions. Short shorts, throwing things, jumping and running while seated hordes of thousands provide a soundtrack demands a certain aesthetic and cultural reality. Oklahoma high school football games, the 1936 Berlin Olympics are proof that all sorts of rabid right wingers into God and Country and diffusion of the self into the mindless glob of the mass can pull this kind of shit off. They don’t do too well with bike races. Naturally, the Italians are excluded because in the end they sucked worse at Fascism, and for Italians, individuals of the caliber of Coppi and Bartali are always going to transcend everything else even when everything else is a world war, near famine and a Duce who insists on skiing without a shirt. But pre-Borbon restoration Spain was different. Even when Mr. Merckx himself set out to compete in Franco’s bike race, the rest of the world just sort of saw it as strange and a bit depraved. Headlines read, “Spain shuts off the water supply to Gibraltar again. Eddy Merckx samples wine out of cardboard box.” Ocana had bronchitis for Christ’s sakes and any scene of the peloton passing in front of statues featuring generals in sunglasses assumed its own level of backwater absurdity.

The timing of the Vuelta has changed over the years, and certainly the state of Spanish politics has changed even more. There are rumors that three elderly women living in Hoyo de Pinares still occasionally vote for the Falange party in county elections, but they are unsubstantiated. Today Spain is a liberal democracy, with an economy that rivals Italy’s and Britain’s and is the poster child for how the EU can turn around a nation through massive redistribution of German money to sunnier, poorer places. I like Spain and pedaling a bike in February around Tenerife until ones 6’3 frame could legally box as a welter weight is as close to the liberal Christian view of Eternal Paradise as I could imagine.

Nonetheless, The Vuelta is not the Giro, it’s not the Tour, it’s not even Lombardy or Flanders for most cycling aficionados. It’s a weird race – a warm up for a meaningless criterium often called the World Championships or a way for a rider to atone for a lackluster season, career or blood level. The organizers have always hinted at bizarre changes in format to make the race more exciting. They’ve moved it around on the calendar to try to entice the best to come and contest. They’ve incorporated stupid roads in successful efforts to make privileged Nancy-boys like David Millar throw temper tantrums and cry; but all for naught. The Vuelta generally sucks. It’s a boring race for boring riders. It’s suited to Denis Menchov, not Lance Armstrong. Gerald Ciolek, not Mark Cavendish.

So wither the Vuelta? No. The Vuelta has its place and it should remove itself from the UCI and oversee itself. Invite exciting, South American teams to compete. Remove the more draconian drug testing, or at least roll it back to Superweek levels. It is a modest proposal, but I want every edition of the Tour of Spain to be the 1999 edition. I want Mavic neutral support cars chirping tires and spinning out in a reckless attempt to keep up with the Peleton while it goes up a fucking mountain. I want a Rock Racing rider playing the roll of a returning Jan Ulrich. I want to see Vino and Rasmussen do their best imitation of VDB shooting the entire world down on stage 16. I want to see a megalomaniac with self esteem issues, willing to trade his contract for a night with an Italian Super model, arrive “all fucked out” to the start of the 19th stage, and kill it again. In short, I want ultimate bike racing. Too much to ask? Watch this youtube video and tell yourself, are you not entertained?

By: Craig Gaulzetti Friday August 14, 2009

To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults. Telling the individual who just thoroughly dominated the greatest sporting event in the world that he has a lot to learn is equally abstruse. Any cultural endeavor which preys upon emotion at best hopes to be magic delivered from the lie of being truth. At worst, it spawns a spectacle deduced to being a caricature of itself. And this is the problem with trying to draw any tidy conclusions about what occurred in this year’s Tour de France.

I wrote before the race began regarding Mr. Armstrong:

But fuck him if he doesn’t pull it off. the rest of the world has retreated into American style voyeurism. we like our entertainment cheap, lacking all subtlety and with strong representations of dominated and dominator. people could give fuck all about good/evil, clean/dirty, doped to the gills/straight edge etc. etc. the fact is the masses demand something more than repentant versus unrepentant when it comes to the tragi-drama that is life and we want this illusion mimicked in pro-cycling. Objectively too numb to view the resulting farce and blind to the refuse of broken lives and mental collapses and damaged lives, we demand our sportsmen to transcend not just our own mediocrity but the very realm of possibility. Cycling is one of the few venues where glimmers of this dumb craving can be realized.

Armstrong did not deliver. His goal was two-fold; total victory and total subjugation of the entire race, all its participants and the entire sports media into his agenda. He speaks in the second person, because he honestly believes it moral and right and real to do so. His ego consciously takes everyone and everything that surrounds him into its service as a piece of this apparatus. But despite his cunning, his treachery and his delegation of everything into his business-mechanism/cause/ego he lost and Pistolero won. Bruyneel screaming at Contador to wait for Lance, an announcement of a new team during the race, Armstrong hindering the comfort and routine of his team leader through denying Alberto cars, water and literally his seat on the team bus-didn’t change the outcome of the race one iota- it just destroyed any potential narrative that wasn’t that of Mr. Armstrong’s.

The job of every individual employed by a pro-cycling team other than a select group of elite riders, is to insure the total comfort of the protected athlete. Soigneurs, directors, mechanics, cooks, press liaisons, hangers-on, agents, doctors and domestiques act to insure there are no true choices or decisions to be made by the athlete. A great cyclist should only ever need to think with his blood; not his rational mind. The physical body of the professional cyclist is a tool that is best not hindered in its ability for incredible, impossible action by a nagging conscious brain. Armstrong did his best to upset this world and force Alberto Contador into doubt and nervous reflection, and hoped for a physical breakdown which would at least bring Contador’s performance down a notch.

And it never occurred. Contador talked about the terrors off the bike during this year’s tour. On the bike it was different, tranquillo. The strengths that make him the greatest cyclist in the world; a near impossible power to weight ratio, the quiet self-absorbed selfish cocky adolescence that permeates almost every great endurance athlete partly allowed Pistolero to triumph. But in the end, Contador foiled Armstrong for the same reason all true supermen, regardless of their chosen endeavors and accompanying insurmountable odds eventually succeed. Contador, shares an important trait with Mozart, with Einstein, with Lance Armstrong, with each and every great whose actions transcend the possible; namely the ability to suffer and act with such a totality of exertion that any space left anywhere for anything else to exist is destroyed by their own force of will. Contador spoke of emptiness on the bike, of nothing else mattering except his physical action. Contador vanquished the mighty Lance Armstrong and all he inhabits with his legs; and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Sport had yet again betrayed reality, given power to the powerless and a skinny, shy high-school drop-out from the wrong part of Madrid profanely destroyed a dumb narrative of what should have occurred, and no force this side of positive test will change it. Congratulations Alberto. Despite everything that stood in your way- you showed the world a tiny, seemingly insignificant kernel of objective truth; Albert Contador is the greatest cyclist in the world. Thank you.

By: Craig Gaulzetti Tuesday July 28, 2009

Outside of Kazakh oil barons and their Rolex-wearing apparatchik ilk, I may be the only person in the world who welcomes Vino’s return to pro-cycling. Astana is his baby, and were it not for his connections in the shady central Asian underworld and the even shadier corridors or political power in Kazakhstan, pro cycling may very well not have survived the Landis/Phonak debacle. Despite his later doping transgressions, his efforts off the bike completely revolutionized and revitalized pro-tour sponsorship. A testosterone patch left on too long coupled with the massive amounts of money required by the increasing formula one-isation of the sport, had made the traditional provincial sponsors anxious to say the least. Coupled with this, the sport had become increasingly global and less (western) European.

When the traditional Belgian flooring companies, Italian textile firms and the assorted rich cycling angels were all jumping ship from what had become a PR nightmare, Vino stepped in with a bunch of sketchy Caucasian money….and in the process saved pro-cycling.

Without Vino there would be no Katusha, no Astana, and probably a downsized, cleaner weirder pro-tour without Armstrong, Riis, and all the big money programs. In short the racing would be worse, the spectacle dimmer.

It’s just a shame about that silly blood transfusion thing. Welcome back Vino.