You might have thought that today I’d be talking about the UK election. But you already know what to do, folks. (And if you need any reminders, this brilliant piece by Zadie Smith in the Guardian should fire you up.)
Or, if you know my love of cycling, you might have thought that today I’d be talking about Mark Cavendish. And, yes, wasn’t it brilliant? No fluke, no ‘gimme’, just a masterclass in sprinting. But that’s not it either—though I will say that there was another bit of cycling genius in the background, just before Cav crossed the line. Chapeau Axel Zingle for potentially saving Mads Pedersen from serious injury.
And if you knew that yesterday I ordered my proof copy of The Skilthorn Congress, Book Four of The Shattered Moon, you might have thought that today I’d be talking about that. And I will, you can count on it, but not today.
No, today I am going to talk about cycling, but not in the obvious way.
You’ve obviously heard of Mark Cavendish—sorry, Sir Mark Cavendish, since last month’s Honours List. But, honestly, how many of you have heard of Alex Dowsett?
Compared to Cav, a one-time neighbour and training partner, Dowsett’s record is modest. It’s still highly respectable, including two Giro d’Italia stage wins, a World Hour Record1, six National Time Trial titles, and Commonwealth Games gold and silver medals stand as highlights, but it hasn’t made him a household name.
But Alex Dowsett is different. In fact Alex Dowsett is unique. Until his retirement at the end of 2022, he was the only elite athlete with haemophilia.
That’s worth repeating. Not just the only pro cyclist with haemophilia; the only professional athlete, in any sport, anywhere in the world
.
Alex has now written an autobiography, Bloody Minded. The weird thing is that, as I’ve just discovered, some sites show it as not being officially released until October, but it was right there on my Lancashire Library BorrowBox app. And there are plenty of advance reviews so I’m just going to take it as an ARC. (After all, I’m open to sending ARCs of my books before the publication date {Hint}.) So here’s my review.
Sporting biographies can be pretty boring unless you’re actually interested in that particular sport. For me the only sport I really follow is cycling. I’ve raced, at a modest level, and I’ve done a lot of kilometres on a lot of different bikes, so I have some insight into how the sport works. I don’t follow football (no, not even the current Euros) and I have a positive anathema to rugby, so I wouldn’t have the same connection with biographies of players there. But I wouldn’t expect someone who doesn’t have my background in cycling to be particularly interested in the life of, say, Lizzie Deignan, or even Mark Cavendish, and I won’t be recommending Cav’s multiple volumes of autobiography to my followers.
Alex Dowsett, however, as I’ve already said, is different, and so is this book.
Bloody Minded is as much about his journey with haemophilia as it is about elite cycle racing. If I have to sum it up in a few words, it’s a story about not taking no for an answer. When the first doctor you see tells you that cycling is not a good thing for a haemophiliac to do2, you (and your parents) find another. In this case the doctor they found was called Dan Hart, at the Royal London Hospital.
One scary statistic that was quoted at the Dowsett family was that haemophiliacs, even if the condition is diagnosed early, have a life expectancy ten years below the norm. But life expectancy statistics are a good example of the way numbers can mislead. By their very nature, they’re retrospective; they’re based on people who’ve already died. Until relatively recently, there was no effective treatment and it was generally felt that the only safe way to manage haemophilia was to wrap sufferers in cotton-wool—almost literally in some cases. Active lifestyles were not encouraged, but as we know, a sedentary régime isn’t conducive to longevity. Now, with the availability of synthetic Factor VIII (the essential blood-clotting protein, which the non-haemophiliacs among us produce naturally), the risks can be managed much more effectively.
There’s obviously a feel-good story here, and nothing wrong with that, but what makes this book compelling is Dowsett’s candour. More, perhaps, even than Mark Cavendish (not noted for being close-mouthed), Dowsett is very open about many things, including his own shortcomings. He tells, for instance, how his early dates with Chanel ended with her not wanting to see him again and suggesting he had a lot of growing up to do. This is common enough in young athletes, who have so much of their lives managed by their teams, but in Alex’s case he’d maintained a very close, if not dependent, relationship with his parents and sister. (Without giving too many spoilers, Alex and Chanel’s story didn’t end there.)
For readers who are cycling buffs, the candour extends to the teams he’s ridden for, and to individuals. It’s fair to say he won’t be Sir Dave Brailsford’s biggest fan, for instance. He’s particularly damning about the two teams he rode for in the latter stages of his career: Katusha and Israel Startup Nation. Katusha seems to have been a shambolic counter to the usual image of World Tour Teams being slick, efficient, operations. ISUN offers a different example of how not to manage people, simultaneously asking Alex to take on greater responsibility for mentoring younger riders while expecting him to renew his contract on 50% of the previous year’s salary.
Alex Dowsett is the founder of Little Bleeders, a charity that, in its own words, supports young people with blood disorders to “move more and be more”. This autobiography is an excellent exemplar of why that aspiration is both attainable and vital.
The Hour Record is something unique to cycling. In essence it couldn’t be simpler: ride as far as you can around a velodrome in one hour. Riding around a velodrome for an hour isn’t hard; I could get on a track bike tomorrow and do it. But I’d do well to exceed half the current record distance of 56.792km, set by Filippo Ganna in 2022. By all accounts it’s an extraordinary mind game and many riders (from Eddy Merckx to Chris Boardman) have said they suffered more during an Hour attempt than any other time on the bike.
It’s not the riding that the doctors objected to, it’s the likelihood of crashing. And given that Alex, like so many others, started out mountain biking, crashing is all too likely.