Sporting Insights -16
Finding the Right Balance between Sports & Commerce
What at start seems a tough art to master, but soon becomes our second nature is cycling. The art of balance is one of the key life skills that we learn at a young age. The same seems to be the case in sports too. Commercially successful sports like football, Tennis, and cricket have learnt to balance commercial interest with sporting excellence effortlessly, which for many other sports seems to be a struggle. Interesting to note that cycling was among the first sport to turn commercial where professionals came to rule the roost even in its earliest days.
The advent of bicycle is of relatively recent origin. German Baron Karl von Drais, a civil servant was the first to invent the Laufmaschine, German for “running machine” in 1817, and patented the design in 1818. It was the first commercially successful vehicle that resembles our bicycle today. Drais’s interest was in finding an alternative to horses, as the crop failure of 1816 caused the starvation and death of a large number of horses due to weather change resulting in what is called the “Year Without a Summer”, that followed the volcanic eruption of Tambora, Indonesia in the year 1815 CE.
The first documented cycle race was over a 1,200 metre distance held on May 31, 1868, at the Park of Saint-Cloud, Paris. The Englishman James Moore, who rode a bicycle with solid rubber tires won it. John Moore also won the first long distance race held between two cities Paris -Rouen of 123 kilometres in 10 hours and 40 minutes. Not just travelling physical distances, bicycles also helped societies evolve by racing to political, social and economic goals. In 1895 Frances Willard who wrote the book How I Learnt to Ride the Bicycle, used the cycling metaphor of using momentum and not wasting energy on fiction to propel women’s suffrage movement. Likewise, the rational dress movement of functional dresses for women in the place of archaic fashion dress of that era led to the use of bloomers, the divided bottom wear for women that is essential in cycling.
Cycling was never an amateur sport. In the late 19th century, when for first time cycling race started, bicycle and Tyre manufacturing companies sponsored the best riders by giving them food, accommodation, health care and equipment to win races by riding their bicycle or tyres that would promote their products, making it a professional event. These companies choose to participate in neutral third-party organized races, as company organized races were not credible to promote their product sales, laying a strong foundation for professional cycle races. The Toure de France, organized in the year 1903 by L’Auto, the French newspaper, is one of the best known cycle race event even today, that became notorious for doping scandal involving Louis Armstrong.
