Domestique Quotes

“live in fear, and that is what probably motivates me to do well a lot of the time – because, really, I’m just shitting myself.”
― Charly Wegelius, Domestique: The Real-life Ups and Downs of a Tour Pro

“cycling, and from my first days living in Italy I couldn’t help but feel its influence and importance. It played a pivotal part in where I was, what I was doing and who I was trying to become. Once I was in Italy the Giro was forever on my mind. The thing about Italians is they love to talk. They love to talk about anything, but much in line with their Mediterranean cousins in Greece and Spain they love to debate. In Italian the word is polemica – it is what keeps bars in business, cafés bustling, and it is what makes cycling, along with football and politics, so important. The drama and aesthetic beauty set against the titanic physical struggle of cycling make it the perfect subject matter for this kind of debate. In Italy, while one-day races might provide reasons for a good debate for a day or two at best, the real winner is the Giro. It provides one whole month of conversation and argument, and the newspapers and television stations delight in fuelling the conversation – they exist purely to stoke the fire of debate.”
― Charly Wegelius, Domestique: The Real-life Ups and Downs of a Tour Pro

“In a very simple way the amount of pain that a professional cyclist goes through, even on a normal day, far exceeds what most people would experience in their entire lives.”
― Charly Wegelius, Domestique: The Real-life Ups and Downs of a Tour Pro

“But the paradox of cycling is that if you are riding well then you are kept from your failings as a human being. The morality of dedication required to achieve racing success is never once questioned, except, perhaps, by the more sensitive cyclists. In most cases, it is also in the team’s interest to perpetuate the myth that a good rider is a good man, because, as long as he wins, personality is irrelevant.”
― Charly Wegelius, Domestique: The Real-life Ups and Downs of a Tour Pro

“But the paradox of cycling is that if you are riding well then you are kept from your failings as a human being. The morality of dedication required to achieve racing success is never once questioned, except, perhaps, by the more sensitive cyclists. In most cases, it is also in the team’s interest to perpetuate the myth that a good rider is a good man, because,”
― Charly Wegelius, Domestique: The Real-life Ups and Downs of a Tour Pro

“Cipo had come up with the idea of running a two-lap time trial around the tiny ring road that ran around the outside of our hotel. The rules were quite simple: each of the four neo-pros would do the TT stripped down to his waist, and could only leave the start gate after downing a carafe of wine. The course was two laps of the circuit (to allow us the opportunity to chuck freezing water on the riders after the first lap), and just to make sure the riders were properly motivated Cipo would be following behind each rider in his own car. The sight of the first rider coming around the bend on the first lap on Bäckstedt’s enormous bike, with Mario Cipollini’s Bentley behind him, horn blaring and lights flashing, while Dario Andriotto leant out of the window yelling, ‘Vai, vai, vai, Porco Dio!’ like the most rabid directeur sportif you’ve ever seen, was side-splittingly funny.”
― Charly Wegelius, Domestique: The Real-life Ups and Downs of a Tour Pro

“I recognised a Swiss doctor whom I’d seen at a lot of races. I knew that she also worked in a mortuary. I remember I had tried chatting her up once by jovially saying, ‘I bet we’re all a bit like corpses, aren’t we?’ referring to our skeletal look – to which she had coolly replied, ‘Yes, but corpses don’t have so many needle marks.”
― Charly Wegelius, Domestique: The Real-life Ups and Downs of a Tour Pro