Why cycling matters

The most important thing about sport is that it is not important,” reflects Steven Connor, Professor of English at the University of Cambridge and author of A Philosophy of Sport. “It is only a game. But the paradoxical thing about circumstances like now is that they show that things that are not important – artistic, cultural and sporting activities – are the most important things of all.”

Many cyclists have spent the last few months wrestling with this strange paradox. With people dying of coronavirus, whole nations in lockdown, endless job losses and financial chaos, does sport now seem irrelevant or more beautiful than ever? Certainly the disruption to the professional cycling calendar and the ban on group rides with friends has left many cyclists feeling disorientated by the end of their familiar racing rituals and exercise routines.

“Sport is important because it gives us the sense of the rhythmical and the cyclical,” continues Professor Connor. “Sport takes you up into a rhythm of depletion and recovery, stress and ease, that is elemental and echoed in the rhythms of the natural world. For many people cut off from other cycles of customary experience, like the cycles of the working day, a regular