As an inveterate snark purveyor who has made a lifestyle of cutting down others in order to compensate for my own mediocrity, even I enjoyed this interview with Peter Sagan, and despite my best efforts I can’t help being happy for him after reading it:
Only in his mid-30s, he’s already retired, having built a Palmolive® that shall forever secure his position as one of cycling’s greats. This leaves him plenty of time to do stuff like participate in Slovak dance shows:
He’s found plenty of time for other activities, not least partaking in a primetime dance show in Slovakia last spring, eventually getting knocked out in the semi-finals with his dance partner Eliška Lenčešová.
Sometimes when you hear about a thing you’ve never seen before and then you finally see it, the thing turns out to be completely different from what you expected. However, a Slovak dance show is not one of those things, and is exactly what you’d picture when you hear the words “Slovak dance show:”
This is easily the best dance show performance by a professional cyclist since Mario Cipollini, and “Mario Cipollini on an Italian dance show” is yet another thing that is exactly as you’d imagine it:
In fact the only thing that surprised me was that someone didn’t constantly run out to clean the floor like they do in the NBA:
The guy’s oily is all I’m saying:
I suppose another reason I enjoyed the article is because I too dream of retirement–and sure, I know what you’re thinking: “Retire from what? You don’t do shit as it is.” This is true. But consider the words of Chinese philosopher Hui Shi, who wrote:
If from a stick a foot long you every day take the half of it, in a myriad ages it will not be exhausted.
The same is true of idleness, and I can tell you from a lifetime of experience that however little you may be doing, you can always do half as much…at least until you die, which sounds depressing until you consider that death is really just a state of extreme relaxation.
Of course some people are afraid to retire precisely for this reason–with nothing to do all day the thinking is that they’ll only slip into that eternally relaxed state that much quicker. But cyclists don’t have this problem, because the few responsibilities we have the busier we get. See, when normal people don’t have to work they just sit around doing fuck-all, whereas when cyclists have extra time on their hands they undertake massive landscaping projects like this:
Though now they’ll have to dip into the retirement fund to pay off that settlement:
Following an investigation by the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, the State found that between 2016 and 2021, Cyril Brunner and Aaron Rice were responsible for unlawfully cutting approximately 327 trees to the ground and permanently altering rocks with drilled holes to anchor wooden trail crossings in Mt. Mansfield State Forest. The trail consisted of two loops of approximately 8,000 feet in length. To resolve the matter, Mr. Brunner and Mr. Rice agreed to pay $35,000 in timber trespass damages and remove any remaining constructed features associated with the trails.
“Vermont’s state forests are a treasured resource,” said Attorney General Clark. “Protecting these public lands and ensuring their long-term stewardship with sustainable forest management is critical for the benefit of current and future generations of Vermonters and for the preservation of our natural world.”
The above makes it sound like a couple of bros had a few too many beers and went wild with a chainsaw, but in fact the story is far more nuanced:
And “illegal” doesn’t necessarily mean “irresponsible:”
“The more historical stuff is actually very sustainably built,” Brunner said. “Last year, STP and our neighboring chapter, WATA (Waterbury Area Trails Alliance) […] helped commission a sustainability study of the trails back there by a local trail builder, and we found for the existing historic trails, there was only one full trail and little snippets of another trail that were not sustainably built that we needed to either alter or close down.”
Brunner was clear that the trails were illegally built, but the rogue builders “haven’t done a bad job of building trails. In total, the trails are just as sustainably built as a lot of our existing sanctioned trails here in Vermont.”
Anyway, it sounds like these trails were low-key enough that the town tolerated them…
…but not anymore:
The recently closed mountain bike trails, which were built without permission by local riders over several decades, are technically illegal, but town officials in Waterbury have historically tolerated the activity, Leitz said.
Not anymore. Leitz said that, with continued trail expansion in the area — including new features built along streams high up in the woods this summer — the situation has become “untenable,” leading Waterbury to close trails that are encroaching on surface water sources.
Yes, once again, it all comes down to the age-old conflict between mountain bikers and tea drinkers:
“We can’t have a little old lady making tea in Waterbury and paying for management of mountain bikers in Stowe,” Finucane said. “I mean, that’s just stupid.”
PLOT TWIST–here’s that old lady:
Alas, this is reason number one million that we’ll keep hearing about “gravel, gravel, gravel” until we all finally slip away into that final state of extreme relaxation. There are too many cars on the roads, and there are too many land use issues in the woods, and so the only place you can still escape both on a bike are the routes that are both too shitty to drive and are too boring to hike:
As for my own retirement, I’d have no problem filling my days with riding and tinkering. Take this bike:
[Don’t literally take it, because I wouldn’t let you.]
I’d been riding this bike a lot, because it’s a dreamboat, but I keep thinking it would be even better with more than one chainring–and I have everything I need to make this change, except one of these:
But I won’t order one, because it’s the only thing keeping me from descending into an endless fit of parts-swappage. Like, I could take the parts from the Craigslist Bike and move them over to the Farbman:
But then I’ve basically created this bike, the entire point of which was to address all my drop bar needs and put an end to exactly this sort of behavior:
So then I’d have to change that bike, plus put a new drivetrain on the Craigslist Bike, and…
So I really shouldn’t retire, because then I’d either be forced to address whatever psychological problem is causing me to keep building and rebuilding the same bike over and over again, or else I’d only work harder to avoid doing so, thus accelerating the bike-rebuilding process, and very I’d soon wind up in a state of extreme relaxation in a dark room filled with bike parts.
I’d better go for a ride.