Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 7, 1994 TAG: 9405090154
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER NOTE: above
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In golf, even the TV announcers whisper. In tennis, polite applause is acceptable. But in football, it's OK for grown men to bare their chests in subzero weather and scream out rude observations about the parentage of the opposing team's quarterback.
(Except in Philadelphia, where it's not just OK, it's required.)
So where on the vast range of sports etiquette does a bike race fall?
After all, Roanoke bellyached so much when the Tour DuPont didn't come through last year that we sure don't want to offend someone now when we do have a leg of it.
And with the whole world watching on ESPN, we certainly don't want to show ourselves off to be biking rubes.
Hey, Vern, take a look at those funny-lookin' fellas comin' down the hollow. Their pants shore are tight, ain't they?
More to the point, how are we supposed to cheer? And when? And for whom?
Easy, say the authorities on bike-racing etiquette.
Cheer loud. Cheer all the time. And cheer for all of 'em.
Odds are, you won't know the difference anyway - the pack of cyclists will whiz by so fast.
"If you see 10 minutes of bicycles, you'll be lucky," says Willie Simmons, a biking aficionado from Fincastle who's caught three Tour DuPonts.
Not that he's disappointed by the brevity of the actual event. On the contrary. After all, he's also the mayor-elect of Fincastle, which the tour passes through Tuesday as part of the Lynchburg-to-Blacksburg leg. To whip up the proper enthusiasm for biking in his little burg, Simmons has compared this to having the Super Bowl breeze through town and "play a down or two" in your back yard.
Of course, it's easy to picture Emmitt Smith stiff-arming his way through the neighbor's hedge, giving a head fake to the boxwoods and then sprinting to daylight through the petunias.
Truth be told, Simmons says, this is more like having the Daytona 500 take its third turn through your driveway.
After all, the cyclists are plastered with as many corporate logos as any NASCAR driver. (Difference is, NASCAR drivers have macho sponsors such as Skoal and Pennzoil and GM Goodwrench; the cyclists wind up with yuppie sponsors from Wordperfect and a Belgian company that makes garden fences.)
Nevertheless, these cyclists will speed by almost as fast. "You can't tell what colors they are," Simmons says. "They're all bunched up. You can't tell who you're looking at. You just have to keep in mind you're looking at some of the best athletes in the world."
Never mind that they're just a sweaty blur.
Of course, the Roanoke Valley gets a better view than most communities. Elsewhere, the cyclists are just flat-out racing in one big pack. Here, they're holding a "time trial," in which bikers set out at one-minute intervals from the Salem Civic Center racing against the clock - so there's a chance spectators here may actually be able to tell the riders apart.
If you insist, you could pick out specific racers - or teams of racers - to root for. But once you get past the big names, such as Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong, there seems to be no good formula for deciding who you're for.
"You could go by the sponsor," suggests Scott Leweke, owner of Cardinal Bicycle in Roanoke, "and whether you like their corporate products."
Oh great. OK, all you computer nerds, listen up. It's time to do the Wordperfect cheer: Two-four-six-eight; how does your hard drive rate?
There's always the tried-and-true method of siding with the team that has the best colors.
Which brings up another question: Just why do cyclists wear such outrageous jerseys anyway?
"Cyclists are just kind of independent and they like to stand out," Leweke says.
Still, the advice from the racing authorities is to cheer for everybody. National pride is on the line, for one thing. "In Europe, there are spectators four or five deep," Morris says. "In the United States, we're a little thin, because people aren't accustomed to bike racing."
In a way, Simmons says, we're cheering for ourselves. "The way it's growing, in five years, this will probably be the pre-eminent bicycling event in the world." And we want to make sure we keep our little piece of it.
So we're trying.
In Fincastle, the Town Council has appropriated $50 to buy chalk for the schoolkids at Breckenridge Elementary so they can write the names of the riders on the street. And at Botetourt Intermediate School, the Spanish and French classes have been learning foreign-language phrases to shout at the European cyclists when they wheel by. There's only one cautionary note from the bike bosses.
"Biking is definitely a high-volume, high-decibel, high-octane activity," Morris says. "The only time you don't want to hear a cheer is when you're doing really, really badly."
So if you see someone sucking wind as they struggle up Twelve O'Clock Knob, better keep your mouth shut.
by CNB