KEY POINTS:
I may get into trouble for this - trouble on two wheels - but, heck, sometimes what needs saying needs to be said, even if it doesn't sound so good. So here we go ... I should have a lot of sympathy for cyclists. I really should. After all, I have a bicycle myself and have even been known to ride it around the streets of Auckland, so I know what it's like out there for a cyclist. I do know that you take your life into your hands every time you strap on a cycle helmet and launch forth into the hellish world of buses, couriers, taxi drivers, pizza deliverers, thoughtless car-door-openers, inattentive U-turners and just plain moronic cellphone-talking drivers; that it's a world where it doesn't matter how fluorescent you are, you are still invisible. Or maybe it is the fluorescence that singles you out as a target.
I also know that, like bananas, it only takes one bad one to spoil the bunch. Which is to say, before I incur the wrath of all cyclists, that I am fully aware most cyclists are fine, upstanding citizens - even as they sit upon their saddles - and that the number of tossers among them is a minority; I know all this.
Okay, let me explain where all this is coming from. Last weekend the tribe and I trundled off to Bike the Bays. This is a cool event where they block off Tamaki Drive and thousands of families take to the blacktop without fear of getting run down by rampaging automobiles. As a way to get kids out on their bikes and to get them interested in cycling, it is a top idea. Unfortunately, Bike the Bays also attracts Cyclists. I shall call them Cyclists (with a capital C) because they take cycling Very Seriously and have about them the fervour of the obsessed, and the wide-eyed stare of those who have spent way too long doing their tour of duty on the roads of Auckland, staring death in the face every day.
I differentiate Cyclists from cyclists by their appearance. The Cyclists, who look very much the same (like brightly-coloured parakeets stuffed into a condom, then put on two wheels and let loose on the roads). The cyclists (with a lower-case c) were, on Bike the Bays day, happily whizzing in and out of the families and kids who were happily riding at a less whizzy pace. I have no problem with cyclists.
It was the Cyclists who were, not to put too fine a point on it, a complete pain in the ass (which is a technical cycling term, by the way). They usually travelled in packs, clearly in the belief that they were the peloton on the Tour de France, chasing down the breakaway bunch that might get to the performance-enhancing drug stash before they did.
"Keep to the left! Keep to the left!" they would squawk, like demented fluoro-magpies, as they shot past at high speed, narrowly missing the 5-year-old girl on her Barbie bike with training-wheels, battling gamely on towards the finish, shepherded by Mum and Dad who would mutter words like "morons" and "idiots" as the Cyclists swept onwards. "Keep to the left! Keep to the left!"
Now it may be unfair of me to suggest that these Cyclists were too far up their own Tour de Lower Intestines to realise that the point of the fun ride that is Bike the Bays is for families to get their kids out on the road in the fresh air, enjoying a beautiful Sunday morning and the freedom to cycle round the waterfront without the threat of being squished by an articulated truck. There is, a couple of hours before the fun ride part of Bike the Bays, a race for the Cyclists. So maybe the packs of Cyclists that got caught up in the fun ride and were treating it like a race were, in fact, really just crap Cyclists who got left way behind and were still actually racing, trying not to come last. That would be about the only possible rational explanation I can come up with for such idiocy.
Actually no, there is one other explanation. Maybe the Cyclists, after years of being treated like moving targets, had lost all perspective on life. Maybe in their minds this was payback time - out here on Bike the Bays day they were the Hunters, not the Hunted; so it's time for a little tough love and for the little girl on the Barbie bike to learn the harsh realities of life on the mean streets of Auckland.
Nah, I'll stick with the they-were-morons theory.
"Keep to the left! Keep to the left!"
