The Driving Force of History and of Velodrome Racing
Thymos, megalothymia, and insanely hard bike rides for fun
An arresting lead in the New York Times today:
Sixteen months ago, Ashton Lambie hopped onto his bike in Roubaix, France, and cranked his way to a world championship in individual pursuit, a grueling, 16-lap sprint around a 250-meter banked wooden velodrome.
The victory — two months after he set the world record in the same event — placed him at the pinnacle of track cycling, a goal he had pursued for five years.
And that was enough for him. It was the last time Lambie, 33, raced in a velodrome. He felt accomplished after winning the world championship and had little desire to hang onto his place in the sport. He was also ready to be done with the training such high performance requires.
“The mental depth that you have to dig to, like, actually go really hard in those, it’s brutal,” Lambie said of individual pursuit events. “And I think it really takes a toll on me, oneself, and, it’s like you got to go to a pretty dark spot, man. I don’t have any desire to do that if I don’t need to.
I’d like to know more about velodrome racing, but I’d love to hear about that dark spot.
Francis Fukuyama, in “The Last Man and the End of History,” wrote about the struggle for recognition, which he calls thymos and believes is the engine that drives history. Those of us who have an outsized urge for recognition have megalothymia. This urge to be recognized and respected by other people is a useful tool in the primeval struggle for survival, and for struggles most people had to face until recent decades. But what happens to this urge in our bourgeois, post-war, post historical era when most of our needs are satisfied, when we are not fighting for food, freedom, or much of anything at all?
Apart from the economic realm and political life, megalothymia finds outlets increasingly in purely formal activities like sports, mountain climbing, auto racing, and the like. An athletic competition has no "point" or object other than to make certain people winners and others losers—in other words, to gratify the desire to be recognized as superior. The level or type of competition is completely arbitrary, as are the rules of all sports activities. Consider the sport of Alpine mountain climbing, whose participants are almost invariably from prosperous post-historical countries. To get into physical shape, they must train incessantly; the upper bodies of free solo rock climbers are so highly developed that if they are not careful their muscles can pull tendons from the bone. In the course of their ascents, Himalayan climbers must ride out bouts of dysentery and blizzards in small tents in the Nepalese foothills. The casualty rate for climbing over four thousand meters is significant; every year, as many as a dozen people are killed on peaks like Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn. The Alpinist has, in short, re-created for him or herself all the conditions of historical struggle: danger, disease, hard work, and finally the risk of violent death. But the object has ceased to be an historical one, and is now purely formal: for example, being the first American or German to ascend K-2 or Nanga Parbat, and when that has been accomplished, being the first to ascend without oxygen, etc.
“For most of post-historical Europe, the World Cup has replaced military competition as the chief outlet for nationalist strivings to be number one. As Kojève once said, his goal was to reestablish the Roman Empire, but this time as a multinational soccer team. It is perhaps no accident that in the most post historical part of the United States, California, one finds the most obsessive pursuit of high-risk leisure activities that have no purpose but to shake the participant out of the comfort of a bourgeois existence: rock climbing, hang gliding, skydiving, marathon running, ironman and ironwoman races, and so forth. For where traditional forms of struggle like war are not possible, and where widespread material prosperity makes economic struggle unnecessary, thymotic individuals begin to search for other kinds of contentless activities that can win them recognition.
Fukuyama, The Last Man and the End of History
According to the Times, and Ashton Lambie, he has turned his back on thymos: The title of the article: “The Cycling Champion Who Doesn’t Have to Win to Be Satisfied.” Subtitle: “Ashton Lambie won a world championship in individual pursuit 16 months ago. Winning was great, he said, but now he just wants to explore.” Header midway through the article: “Deciding Not to Go for the Summit.” Text hinting at the new, mellow Ashton: “Now Lambie’s desire is to explore, a throwback to his life as a cycling shop employee who grew most of his own food and did whatever interested him, rather than what others considered important.”
Here is how that works out.
“This year, Lambie wants to complete the Flint Hills Ultra, a 1,000-mile ride through Kansas and Oklahoma, and race The Rift, through Icelandic lava fields. He wants to pioneer new distance routes out of Houston, where he bought a house with his wife, Christina Birch, a former professional cyclist who is in the NASA astronaut candidate program.”
So, maybe not full blown megalothymos, but a tad more than the mere thymos of a daily bike commute.
And man, an astronaut. Of course he married an astronaut. Who else would really get him?