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As tight-skinned as a python that’s swallowed a village boy, and as gaudy as a Mardi Gras float, the peloton leans one-legged on its bikes waiting for the last members to arrive. When the tardiest has joined them, cursing his wife for having shrunk his bib-shorts in the tumble dryer, the peloton sets off, standing on its pedals, bikes sashaying from side to side, its members shouting at one another, leaving a contrail of vacuities in its wake.
Nothing is too private to be bawled on Main Street by one bike rider to another. They will discuss prostate and probate, tax rorts and Thai massage, they will bellow of infidelities and foghorn their misfortunes. But eavesdropping on pelotons is a thankless task. All you hear as they flash past, are the shouted morsels that leave you wondering. Fascinating jewels set in larger unseen narratives. Some of the things they shout seem to me to be designed specifically to infuriate and confuse pedestrians.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
Yesterday I was walking the dog when a peloton went past honking small talk. One shouted, “He’s done it three times now. I don’t know whether to sack him or promote him.” What am I to make of this? What had he done three times that was either laudable or punishable? I have a catalogue of similarly inexplicable snippets bawled by passing pelotons. On Wednesday: “She wants to live on the coast, but she hates lasagne.” What? Why should Italian cuisine postpone a woman’s sea change?
A peloton is, like China, a collective that disdains the outside world, but is nevertheless riven with internal power struggles. What goes on inside the peloton should stay inside the peloton – but it doesn’t. Bike riders are the greatest vectors of gossip in any city or town. The peloton is a type of mobile confessional that draws tit-for-tat revelations. If Sid’s wife’s sister has had a boob job then the band of brothers on their Cannondales will all soon know. And the peloton will spread that news like the town pump once spread cholera. Swimmers drown attempting gossip. Runners are too breathless for tittle-tattle.
But the peloton runs on furphies. And after Andy has offered the news on Sid’s wife’s sister’s boob job, then Ken, who is riding alongside him, feels indebted and must repay Andy with the latest buzz on the sexual harassment case at his law firm. Noel, pumping away at his Giant, will then blurt news of an affair he had with his maths tutor in 1983. In this way, the peloton moves on, telling all, but leaving only morsels in its wake for bystanders to decipher, as if some mystic has wandered through the village strewing redacted aphorisms.
When I was a kid The Herald Sun Tour was riding through Shepparton and curious spectators lined the roads to watch gobs of shrink-wrapped athletes whizz past. No one kept a dog on a lead back then, and my pup Bindi wandered out on the road in front of the peloton.
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The riders panicked in perfect, mindless murmuration and followed their lead rider to disaster as if he were Lord Cardigan in a yellow jersey, swerving off the bitumen straight into, and through, the cement sheet wall of a commission house. Its resident family was sitting on a couch taking turns to suck a chicken carcass while guffawing at Hogan’s Heroes. With helmeted men in Lycra flying through their walls unannounced and landing upside down in corners of the living room, they assumed they were being attacked by the DC Justice League and began to scream.
I scooped up Bindi and headed for home because a rural community was so close-knit back then you were allowed to hit other people’s children, and I was a boy uniquely able to awaken the dormant disciplinarian in strangers. Perhaps it’s this memory of the peloton attacking the couch potatoes that has left me believing that pelotons consist chiefly of depilated lemmings.