Cycling Quotes

• "I wish to Christ we had bicycles," Bonello said. "Do they ride bicycles in America?" Aymo asked. "They used to." "Here it is a great thing," Aymo said. "A bicycle is a splendid thing." "I wish to Christ we had bicycles," Bonello said. "I'm no walker." -- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
• "This is not Disneyland, or Hollywood. I'll give you an example: I've read that I flew up the hills and mountains of France. But you don't fly up a hill. You struggle slowly and painfully up a hill, and maybe, if you work very hard, you get to the top ahead of everybody else." -- Lance Armstrong
• "When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking." -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, January 18, 1896, Scientific American Magazine
• "She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life." -- Frances E. Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle
• "Getting up at six and racing up a col from the gun is a bitch." -- Jacky Durand
• "Think of bicycles as rideable art that can just about save the world." -- Grant Peterson
• "Enough with this sunday stroll...let's hurt a little bit." -- American Flyers
• "When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair or the future of the human race." -- H.G. Wells
• "The best rides are the ones where you bite off much more than you can chew--and live through it." -- Doug Bradbury
• "You get a feeling on certain trails, when you're reacting like you and your machine are just one thing. It's the feeling of physical exertion and speed and technique all wrapped into one." -- Ned Overend
• "Passing softly through the backcountry creates a fascinating tension. On one hand is the environment, generating powerful swells of energy that course through our psyches. There's something about mountains, deserts, woods, that excites us. Yet, on the other hand, the awesomeness of it all diminishes our importance in the earth's affairs." -- Hank Barlow
• "Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle." -- Helen Keller
• "A bicycle ride is a flight from sadness." -- James E. Starrs, The Literary Cyclist
• "Wheel, kindly light, along life's cycle path, Wheel Thou on me! The road is rough, I have discerned Thy Wrath, But wheel me on!" -- Christian Hymn
• "The pack is a single, fickle entity, a blaze of color leaving only a trail of dust in its vacuum wake. Even the most pervasive social conventions fall by the wayside under physical stress, as mere survival takes precedence over winning. The pack may be heedless of its own stragglers and have no more sympathy or sense of smell than hounds chasing a fox. In the end, you are on your own, a particle in the false constant of motion." -- Laurence Malone
• "There is something uncanny in the noiseless rush of the cyclist, as he comes into view, passes by, and disappears." -- Popular Science, 1891
• "For all their fearlessness, sprinters are a delicate breed. At the peak of form they effuse an aura of invincibility, suggesting no bicycle rider ever pedaled as fast. To win, sprinters must have everything: physical condition, confidence, luck, aggression and committed team support. An elusive combination, attainable but not sustainable." -- David Walsh, Inside the Tour de France
• "You have to sprint on feeling, not thinking. You must have faith in yourself but you cannot think about it too much." -- Jean Paul Van Poppel
• "Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel...the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood." -- Susan B. Anthony
• "Don't be afraid of going fast and getting hurt. (You can always wear black stockings to cover up the scars!) You just have to forget what your parents taught you--stuff like being careful, looking good and catching the best man available." -- Marla Streb
• "You not bike rider, you nobody." -- Eddie B.
• "I still feel that variable gears are only for people over forty-five. Isn't it better to triumph by the strength of your muscles than by the artifice of a derailer? We are getting soft... As for me, give me a fixed gear!" -- Henri Desgrange
• "But to say that the race is the metaphor for the life is to miss the point. The race is everything. It obliterates whatever isn't racing. Life is the metaphor for the race." -- Donald Antrim
• "Eat before you are hungry. Drink before you are thirsty. Rest before you are tired. Cover up before you are cold. Peel off before you are hot. Don't drink or smoke on tour. Never ride just to prove yourself." -- Paul de Vivie
• "Perhaps the single most important element in mastering the techniques and tactics of racing is experience. But once you have the fundamentals, acquiring the experience is a matter of time." -- Greg LeMond
• "It never gets easier, you just go faster." -- Greg LeMond
• "The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community." -- Ann Strong, Minneapolis Tribune, 1895
• "To be a cyclist is to be a student of pain....at cycling's core lies pain, hard and bitter as the pit inside a juicy peach. It doesn't matter if you're sprinting for an Olympic medal, a town sign, a trailhead, or the rest stop with the homemade brownies. If you never confront pain, you're missing the essence of the sport. Without pain, there's no adversity. Without adversity, no challenge. Without challenge, no improvement. No improvement, no sense of accomplishment and no deep-down joy. Might as well be playing Tiddly-Winks." -- Scott Martin
• "Winning never gets repetitive" - Mat "Cashmoney" Glaser
• "Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride." -- John F. Kennedy
• "If you were a spectator on one of the mountain passes today, the super-light bikes would be little different in appearance from the machines of years ago, pedaled by earlier heroes, Coppi, Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault, LeMond, Roche. They would look like the bikes our dads rode when we were kids. But the Tour is a commercial race, and innovation must be given its place on the catwalk, or in this case the velodrome...." -- James Waddington, Bad to the Bone
• "The riders come out, knights for the tournament, neck to thigh in slippery lycra with the sheen of deep space condoms, faired helmets on their heads like the glans from another galaxy and neoprene pixyboots to slide the air around their feet, mounted on gaudily caparisoned donkeys - the carbon fibre monocoque monoblade." -- James Waddington, Bad to the Bone
• "What was supposed to be a summer of fun on the bike turned into a year, then two years. It certainly wasn't a calculated plan to have a career as a cyclist." -- Derek Bouchard-Hall
• "Pain is a big fat creature riding on your back. The farther you pedal, the heavier he feels. The harder you push, the tighter he squeezes your chest. The steeper the climb, the deeper he digs his jagged, sharp claws into your muscles." -- Scott Martin
• "There was a second supremely sweet moment of victory. As I made my way through the finish area, I passed the Cofidis team. Assorted members of the organization stood around, the men who I felt had left me for dead in a hospital room. "That was for you," I said as I moved past them." -- Lance Armstrong after winning the opening time trial and becoming the leader of the 1999 Tour de France
• "There are no races. Only lotteries." -- Jacques Anquetil
• "I won! I won! I don't have to go to school anymore." -- Eddy Merckx, after winning his first bike race
• "I guess I just have bigger ovaries." -- Missy Giove
• "I was a hero, and a second afterwards it was all over. Casartelli was dead so what I had achieved was worth nothing." -- Richard Virenque, on winning the Tour de France stage in which Fabio Casartelli died in a crash
• "He's dancing on the pedals in an immodest way!" -- Phil Liggett, on a victory by Dag-Otto Lauritzen
• "The Europeans look down on raising your hands. They don't like the end-zone dance. I think that's unfortunate. That feeling - the finish line, the last couple of meters - is what motivates me." -- Lance Armstrong
• "It was eleven more than necessary." -- Jacques Anquetil, after winning a race by tweleve seconds
• "The bicycle riders drank much wine, and were burned and browned by the sun. They did not take the race seriously except among themselves." -- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
• "A mountain bike race is a constant hard effort for two to three hours. In road racing the efforts often come in surges. You ride easy for awhile then you have to make an extreme, hard effort. They are two different efforts, two different forms of suffering." -- John Tomac
• "I picked my head up during an interval and saw an enormous ostrich zigzagging in the road. I swung wide to get by - and just as I did he started chasing me. These guys can motor. I had to sprint to drop him." -- Tyler Hamilton
• "To prepare for a race there is nothing better than a good pheasant, some champagne and a woman." -- Jacques Anquetil
• "Ride lots." -- Eddy Merckx
• "I'm fascinated by the sprinters. They suffer so much during the race just to get to the finish, they hang on for dear life in the climbs, but then in the final kilometers they are transformed and do amazing things. It's not their force per se that impresses me, but rather the renaissance they experience. Seeing them suffer throughout the race only to be reborn in the final is something for fascination." -- Miguel Indurain
• "Downhill's the future of the sport. Cross-country's not geared for TV. Some fat guy watching it with a beer in one hand and potato chips in the other is going to say, 'I can do that.' America likes to see people crash." -- Missy Giove
• "My favorite courses are nasty, technical downhills that frighten my mom." -- Josh Ivey
• "I'm lucky that mountain biking wasn't around when I was 20, because I wouldn't have won the Tour de France. It's my kind of sport - hard, individualistic, and not a lot of tactics." -- Greg LeMond
• "Cycling is like a church - many attend, but few understand." -- Jim Burlant
• "Some people pay a thousand dollars for a tattoo. This scar cost me twenty grand." -- Matt Hoffman
• "First week you feel good, the second week you lose strength. Third week, f_cked." -- Per Pedersen, on the Tour de France
• "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." -- Gloria Steinem
• "The main thing is to not cut yourself and bleed to death in the tub." -- Frankie Andreu (Retired USPS Racer) on leg shaving advice
• "I looked back and bikes and riders were flipping in the air. There must have been 20-30+ riders in the pile." -- overheard after Early Bird 4/5 race