‘I want to go to the brink’: Cycling, the fold and men's sporting stories

Abstract

This article tells the stories of three cyclists: Rob, Lucas and Cayden. For each, racing offers catharsis and emotional expression between riders deeply familiar with one another, riding together every day across years in Sydney, Australia. At Glenwood Cycle Club, the stories athletes tell of how to be a ‘hard’ racing man allows for the simultaneous denial of what is a core functioning of such sporting relationships, namely unspoken intimations of love and care. Cycling affords these riders an understanding where each can avoid speaking to the emotional difficulties that necessitate their being on road, where they share stories that gesture to personal difficulty, but rarely in detail. To explain such sporting practice, I rely on the ‘fold' as a methodological and theoretical framework to re-conceptualise dominant myths in both sport but also ‘masculinities’ studies. Rather, than ask ‘what kind of masculinity’ a person is, I ask what does a person do? What are the life-narratives men tell, interwoven with sporting movement, to fantastically augment their lives in advanced capitalist conditions specific to Sydney, Australia?