Cyclesense
BOWLING-BALL BICEPS
If you can’t stand up, stand out
by John Schubert
A racing wheelchair athlete is an awesome sight. The best of them are
faster than most of us on our bicycles. They have the determination
and lust for pain that all good athletes share, and an upper-body
in 2:09, on average. The wheelchair
racer beats him by 40 minutes.
For three years now, I’ve had a frontrow seat watching (and, I hope, helping)
these athletes, as one of the approximately 70 riders in the ING New York
City Marathon cycle support group. It’s
the most fun I’ve ever had on a bike.
The story goes like this: In the early
days of wheelchair racing, race organizers and athletes learned the hard way
that (a) racing wheelchairs are low to
the ground, silent, and hard to see, and
(b) on a marathon course, before the
thousands of runners and their police
escorts start to clog the streets, spectators may assume, wrongly, that it’s okay
to cross the street. Collisions occurred.
Wheelchairs were overturned.
All this despite the fact that barricades and police galore are already in
place when the wheelchair athletes take
to the course.
So now the wheelchair athletes —
well, the fastest 30 of them‚ anyway —
get protective escorts. One cyclist skims
the left curb, the other cyclist skims the
right curb, and you use a combination
of whistle blowing, yelling, and menacing body language to convince people to
climb back up onto the sidewalk.
The job is like shoveling sand against
the tide. The spectators don’t learn from
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the escort rider who came through a
minute or two before, but still, it’s fun.
And if these athletes deserve anything,
they deserve a safe, clean course, and we
shout our lungs out to give them one.
Our story begins with a pre-dawn
bus ride for riders and their bikes, from
midtown Manhattan to somewhere in
southern Brooklyn.
Why Brooklyn, when the marathon
starts on the Staten Island side of the
Verrazano Narrows Bridge? Because
there are no spectators on the bridge.
The marathon course exits the bridge
onto city streets in Brooklyn, and that’s
where the cyclists pick up the trail. We
wait for the wheelchairs to come around
the corner and, when they do, there is
an involuntary gasp at their speed. It’s
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like seeing the lead riders in a professional bike race sprint into view, only
the wheelchair’s low profile makes the
speed seem even more dramatic. The
first year I was there, my brain involuntarily asked the age-old stupid question:
“Where’s the motor?” In a flash, the
lead riders are gone, their bowling-ball
biceps propelling their chairs at intimidating speed, their assigned bicycle
escort riders sprinting to catch up to
them.
Only bike racers with a current
United States Cycling Federation license
need apply for the job of guarding the
top five or six wheelchairs. Us ordinary
cyclists couldn’t keep up so we guard
the next tier of wheelchair athletes —
people whose speed is still impressive
but, by comparison, easier to believe.
The escort cyclists are assigned official-looking vests and whistles. Neither
makes much of an impression on the
errant spectators. It takes some creativity to get their attention. I found that the
most effective way was to ride straight at
them, shout and issue rhythmic whistle
bleats, and wave my arm angrily.
We accompany the wheelchair athletes northbound through Brooklyn,
Queens, over the 59th Street Bridge to
Manhattan, and into the Bronx. Then
we turn south, return to Manhattan,
RICHARD ROSENTHAL
build that would make Arnold Schwartenegger look twice. Watching them race, you forget, quickly, any notion of pity for their disabilities. Instead, you feel respect, bordering
on fear, for their boundless energy. A world-class male runner does a 26-mile marathon
and on into Central Park. One mile
from the finish comes a cruel taunt for
the escort cyclists: we have to peel off
the course.
Last year, this led to intense suspense. I had dedicated my day’s ride to
guarding Amanda McGrory, a 20-yearold woman who was headed for a two-up
sprint for the title of first female. And I
had no idea whether she won or lost the
sprint until I looked up her bib number
the next day and found out she had eked
out a two-second victory over Shelly
Woods, also 20.
This year, I had a different kind of
educational experience: Due to some
excess optimism about my physical condition, I was assigned to guard a handcyclist. The hand cranks and gearing on
the handcycle allow the best athletes to
ride at speeds that would embarrass us
ordinary people. I got dropped, quickly,
but had no trouble finding some wheelchair athletes on the course who needed
my crowd-control services.
The best wheelchair athletes race like
bike racers. They are allowed to draft,
and they draft within millimeters of one
another, taking turns at the front and
using familiar bike-racing moves. The
escort cyclists have the rare privilege of
watching these moves unfold as the race
goes on. During the middle of the 2006
race, I watched as McGrory’s peloton
spat the less-capable athletes off the back
on the course’s several notorious climbs.
What started out as eight athletes
dwindled down to the final two.
The escort cyclists are race officials,
not cheering spectators. We are warned
to not talk to any wheelchair or handcycle athlete. It’s hard to not feel enormous affection for these people, and it’s
natural to want to express that, but that
would make the race unfair. The only
thing the athletes hear from us is an
endless series of bleats from the whistle
and shouts of, “Get up on the sidewalk
where ya belong.”
Near the finish one year, an escort
rider briefly broke the rules and asked a
one-legged wheelchair athlete, “Where
are you from?” The answer: “Kentucky.
Iraq. Walter Reed Hospital.” And then
he was gone.
The slightly less-fast wheelchair athletes give us a lesson in determination.
Their bodies ache, in ways I can only
imagine, but they don’t show the pain,
let alone succumb to it. They just soldier on. Two miles from the finish, one
woman apparently couldn’t decide which
hurt more — having her gloves on or
off. She tried it both ways, dropped one
of the gloves, and had to come to a stop
on an uphill to pick it up.
The elite wheelchair athletes are only
part of a large group of handicapped
people who complete the New York City
Marathon. An hour or two before they
take to the course, a series of people
with a wide variety of handicaps goes
past our vantage point in southern
Brooklyn. We see non-elite wheelchair
users, amputees walking on artificial
legs, people with cerebral palsy, blind
power walkers, blind wheelchair athletes … it’s a long list. Every year, one
woman who has multiple sclerosis happily and slowly walks the length of the
course with two canes, dressed quite
formally in what Richard Nixon once
called “a respectable Republican cloth
coat.” Handicapped people have come
from Pakistan, Turkey, and other far
flung places to be part of this. What all
these people have in common is their
smiles. We see them when they’re two
miles into a marathon, and they’re just
so glad to be doing it.
These people have defied their rotten luck and injuries to accomplish
something inspiring. Many of these
people would have been locked away in
institutions a generation ago, because
society took a while to figure out how
to deal humanely with disabled people.
But now, they’re flaunting their pluck in
front of the New York City Marathon. If
a double amputee can walk a marathon,
or McGrory can win a finish-line sprint
when the palms of her hands must hurt
like they’re on fire, I have to ask: what
excuse could any of the rest of us have?
Technical Editor John Schubert can be
reached at [email protected].
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