When One Gravel Biker Girl Kills Another, The New Yorker Knows Who Is To Blame
When One Gravel Biker Girl Kills Another, The New Yorker Knows Who Is To Blame
Hint: it's not either one of the women
True confessions time, or as my parody alts would say, full disclosure: I think “gravel biking” is the dumbest fuckin’ thing the cycling world has come up with since the Formula One BMX races nearly four decades ago. For those of you who haven’t already spent the money on a $10,255 Allied Able, I’ll explain it in a nutshell: you ride road bikes on unimproved roads.
“Hey, Baruth, isn’t that called cyclocross?” Not exactly, because cyclocross has a bunch of obstacles and whatnot, plus you spend a LOT of time carrying your bike over your shoulder. Gravel racing is just road biking, but on worse roads. I’ve done a few gravel rides in Michigan on my Lynskey Urbano, and I hated every minute of them. I can see the appeal of road cycling, and indeed I’ve put tens of thousands of miles on road bikes from my Cannondale SR500 in 1987 to my Lynskey R275 nowadays. I can see the appeal of mountain biking, and have spent much of my life on mountain bikes ranging from a “rigid” Schwinn High Sierra to my current Session 9.9 and Megatrail. But gravel biking is all the crummy parts of both.
And yet it’s the “hottest thing” at the moment, largely because it gives people a reason to buy another bike and do something different. This is particularly true of road cyclists, because so much of road cycling alternates between tedium and sheer physical misery. I remember the first time I did two 100-mile rides in a weekend; it was also the last time I did that. Nowadays I don’t ride more than 40 miles at a stint, largely because that’s all I can mentally handle. Tim Krabbe, the Dutch chess player whose The Rider is an acknowledged must-read for two-wheel types, once made a very pertinent observation that cyclists begin each long road ride anticipating that they will get some deep thinking done, only to fall prey to “ball bearing mind” where they just exist in the present moment for hours at a time. I find the ball bearing mind to be interminable.
Gravel riding may be hot, but it’s also struggled to get much respect among elite competitors in other cycling disciplines. Which perhaps explains how a couple of third-tier road riders made it to the top of the “sport” in such rapid fashion. Chris Tolley is, and was, a pretty decent BMX freestyle rider who never raced anything longer than a criterium; Colin Strickland was a “fixie” rider who did fringe-style single-speed events in Austin. Together, they became gravel racing royalty, making big money and getting tremendous attention in the walled garden of a sport that road riders barely acknowledged. (Lance Armstrong once wandered into a gravel race at the ripe old age of 46 and laid waste to Strickland and the rest of the crew, who were in their mid-twenties at the time and had much more familiarity with the environment, if that gives you any idea of the level of competition in “pro gravel racing”.)
I apologize to my five (or thereabouts) female readers for what I’m about to say, but: Gravel racing is also hugely popular with women because, like CrossFit and other chick-crack fitness activities, it prioritizes self-abuse and social activity rather than genuine talent and cutting-edge competition. There is something about the feminine mind that values process over result. Men want to win shit and show off; women want to suffer and experience things. That’s why the “tough mudder” events are so popular with women; it’s also why the vast majority of women who race cars do so as part of enduros rather than sprints.
For that reason, gravel racing was a target-rich environment for getting one’s dick wet. At any given BMX or downhill MTB race the boys outnumber the girls ten or twenty to one, but gravel is chock-full of extremely fit women with high sex drives. Colin Strickland apparently went though them like the proverbial knife in butter, even though he was in a “long-term relationship” with a female rider named Kaitlin Armstrong (no relation to Lance) with whom he usually lived and with whom he owned a rather serious investment property.
This past May, Miss Armstrong got tired of the fact that Strickland had found a fairly high-profile gravel-racin’ fuck buddy, acclaimed rider and likely future champion Moriah “Mo” Wilson, so she shot Mo then hopped a plane to Costa Rica, where she had plastic surgery and indulged in some apparently remarkable sexual athleticism with a variety of party boys before being apprehended on day 43 of her flight from justice.
Her story has all the makings of a half-decent Netflix series; there’s a lot of banging and a little bit of shooting. But there’s nothing that unusual about it. Really, it’s not all that different from the “Bring Da Movies” tale told at Chateau Heartiste a while back, except everyone is twice as old and the girls are half as hot. This kind of stuff happens all the time among young people, particularly young people who are poor and stupid.
Perhaps that combination of upper-middle-class credibility and ghetto-trash behavior is what attracted the attention of the New Yorker. The resulting piece by staff writer Ian Parker is called A Murder Roils the Cycling World, and it places the blame for the murder squarely where it belongs: on the cycling patriarchy.