A few weeks ago, an image from the 1990 Vuelta a Espana of Danish cyclist Alte Petersen bleeding from the head while having his hair cut from the team car made the rounds on Twitter. The image is violent, Petersen gritting his teeth, the picture of anguish as he continues to ride his bicycle, visibly and gravely wounded.

The tweet’s caption on this picture was a flippant joke: “I’d have probably just asked for the rest of the day off.”

Posts consisting of cyclists wounded and maimed—yet continuing to ride their bikes—circulate quite often on Twitter with similar quips: these are real hardmen not like you or me or athletes in other sports like soccer, which are full of pampered weaklings. These images—Petersen in the Vuelta, Jani Brajkovič bleeding from a similar gaping wound in his head in Stage 5 of the 2011 Tour de France, Eddy Merckx getting back on the bike with a broken jaw—are celebrated as a macho ideal, a visual testament to the toughness of cycling. In reality, all they do is fetishize human pain.

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Cycling is a difficult sport. Within its pages are great stories of human resilience in the face of struggle and defeat. In our contemporary era, take, for example, Primož Roglič winning the Olympic Time trial after crashing out of the 2021 Tour de France, or Thibaut Pinot coming back from what seemed like a permanent back injury to win a stage of the 2022 Tour de Suisse. These are admirable feats that lend inspiration to all of us in our everyday lives. The sport’s narratives of redemption, struggle, and suffering are relatable because as human beings, we all suffer and struggle in our own ways, hoping to be redeemed.

levens, france   march 14 primoz roglic of slovenia and team jumbo   visma yellow leader jersey  bruno armirail of france and team groupama   fdj during the 79th paris   nice 2021, stage 8 a 92,7km stage from le plan du var to levens 518m  stage itinerary redesigned due to covid 19 lockdown imposed in the city of nice  crash  injury parisnice  on march 14, 2021 in levens, france photo by bernard papon   poolgetty images
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But there’s a difference between empathizing with the human narratives and relishing in the physical pain and violence athletes incur. You see it in a certain pushback whenever cyclists leave races early because of injury, band together to protest unsafe conditions, or whenever the CPA steps in to protect cyclists from dangerous situations, such as extreme temperatures and weather. There’s always a slurry of Twitter comments about how cycling has “gone soft” or isn’t as tough as it used to be, how these athletes are overpaid wimps for not voluntarily subjecting themselves to bodily harm for the entertainment of fans. This partially happens because the mediums of film and television detach the viewer from the human subject, who becomes a plaything for the viewer’s amusement, and thus athletes’ bodies are transformed into abstracted objects of debate and consumption. On television, after a crash, the camera pans back to the peloton after a while. The crash is just an interruption in the flow of things. The cameras don't show the victims when they limp their way home—they’ve already switched over to the winner’s exit interview.

The persistent “real hardman” attitude is also indicative of a certain impulse in the sport, one that’s been a barrier to positive change for too long. Machismo and a conservative appeal to traditionalism (“things can’t change because they have always been this way, if you don’t like it, leave, don’t ruin my sport”) is part of the reason it took until the early 2000s for helmets to be mandatory in professional cycling despite the track record of severe injury and deaths related to head trauma. It’s why it took Fabio Jakobsen’s near-fatal crash in the 2020 Tour of Poland to jolt organizations into making race infrastructure safer. It’s why concussion protocols in cycling didn’t become mandatory until 2021. On the latter, one of the most surreal incidents in recent history came in 2011 when Chris Horner crashed in Stage 7 of the Tour de France. Visibly concussed, Horner was encouraged by his team to continue riding. When he crossed the finish line, he did not know where he was. That’s not being a hardman. That’s putting a man’s life in danger for money and spectacle.

chateauroux, france   july 08  france out christopher horner of team radioshack during stage 7 of the tour de france on july 8, 2011, le mans to chateauroux, france  photo by james starttagence zoomgetty images
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The thing is, these machismo fears are also unfounded. Cycling will never be no-risk. There will always be crashes, speedy descents, cobbles, the thrill of the sport—there’s no danger of these elements ever going away, and this pearl clutching that cycling will be ruined forever because riders won’t be allowed to continue to ride while bleeding from their skull is revealed for what it is: a desire to witness human cruelty under the guise of sporting purism. It’s frankly bullshit. It’s fan entitlement at the expense of people with lives, dreams, and families.

I have the supreme privilege of being a cycling journalist, meaning I know quite a few professional cyclists in real life and have human to human conversations and connections with them. Whenever that horrible picture of Jani Brajkovič, a cyclist I know quite well, makes the rounds on “hardman Twitter,” it makes me want to throw up. No one sharing it with some snippy captions about soccer or how easy their day job is knows or cares about Jani, yet they have the audacity to share one of the worst crashes of his career in order to make a chauvinistic point about real masculinity—because this is about masculinity, a toxic masculinity that fetishizes strength and violence and minimizes basic human decency, care, and empathy as being feminine, “soft,” and thus undesirable. May I remind people that it’s 2022, not 1950.

It is distinctly difficult in an emotional sense to see grown men cry as they head for the team busses, to see how fragile their bodies can be when they roll across the line with torn bibs, road rash, and blood trickling from their mouths, to feel one’s stomach drop whenever race radio alerts the convoy that the ambulance is coming.

That’s not because I’m soft or, even worse, because I’m a woman. It’s because I have a shred of compassion. Hence, my appeal to viewers is simple: to remember that cyclists are human beings who feel pain. They have a right to lessen that pain without being called a pussy by some guy on the internet.

Headshot of Kate Wagner
Kate Wagner

Kate Wagner is a cycling journalist whose work can be found in Bicycling, CyclingNews, ProCycling, and in her newsletter derailleur.