Seems legit.

Quiz the man in the street about Professional Wrestling and you’ll get a fairly generic answer. But first, just who the hell is the man in the street? And for the sake of holding-the-baying-social-justice-mob-at-bay, and/or woman in the street. The average Joe/Joeleen is timid, afraid, closeted by the highly likely chance they might offend someone (or everyone) by actually speaking their mind, or by just having an opinion on anything that they haven’t been told to think about by their particular National New Normal branch. They’re pathetic. They will go along with the status quo, hell they’ll even listen to Status Quo and not dare say how shit they really think they are, and sing along awkwardly to Rockin All Over The World, while cheerily accepting they’ll never be allowed to Rock© anywhere else in The World™ ever again. Safe in the knowledge that their fellow subservients will provide the same rehearsed and approved answer, the man in the street will undoubtedly proffer that Professional Wrestling is bullshit. It’s fake. It’s for entertainment purposes only. Suggest the same about any other Professional Sport though, and you’ll be labelled a “conspiracy theorist™” faster than you can say “Brian told me“.

So here goes, numb nuts: Professional Cycling is the same as Professional Wrestling. And so is rugby, cricket, tennis, football, baseball, basketball, tiddlywinks and chess. Fake. Rigged. For Entertainment Purposes Only. Money-making machines designed to keep us all braindead and our focus and curiosity shied away from the actual underhanded dealings going on right under our stupid noses. And boy, doesn’t it work a treat! We’re not afraid even a little bit to disagree and argue about our favourite sport teams/heroes without fear of retribution, because no matter how much we believe that “sport is not a matter of life and death, it’s much more important than that” we know that there are no serious far-reaching consequences for stating that your guy sucks and mine doesn’t. Try the same and go against the grain on whatever narrative the localised propaganda outlet is pushing out today and all hell breaks loose. You fucking racist sexist genderphobe anti-vax flat-earth fuck.

Hiding in plain sight is a term that is commonly used, but rarely believed. Only if it fits the particular story and belief around it will anyone take it seriously. Quotes like “you can tell it’s real because it looks so fake” are taken with a grain of salt, or worse, largely ignored. Sport is usually described––and played––as ‘games’. Mega corporate shill Nike deployed a slogan ‘Life is a Sport’ and there are hundreds of similar slogans that put it right there in front of you; life is one big game, and we’re unwitting but willing players, ie we play but we just don’t know it. We’re like video game characters in a much larger simulation. And we don’t know it. Or, maybe we suspect it but choose not to even entertain the notion. There’s that word again, entertain. We’re not just being entertained to keep us muted, we’re the entertainment for the big players. “Sport changes Life”, “Life is not a Spectator Sport”, “This Sporting Life”, “Life As Sport”, and hundreds more similar themes have been thrust at us for decades, all with the aim of placing the importance of sport above that of the other aspects of our lives, so as to keep our focus on the back pages rather than the headlines. “How about those Bears” is much more comfortable to negotiate than “how about those Elites”.

How then are we, the non-gullible intelligent creatures we think we are, duped into believing that sport is actually a bona fide contest between two players, two teams, or in the case of cycling, hundreds of riders on dozens of teams? Have you ever heard the term ‘sports psychologist’? Or ‘coach’, ‘manager’ or ‘trainer’? What about ‘game plan’ or ‘set play’ or even ‘tactics’? All part of the modern sporting vernacular which we have come to blithely accept without a second thought. But if we heard ‘choreographer’ and ‘scriptwriter’ we’d probably wonder why sport needed those particular roles. That’s exactly what sport is though, choreographed and scripted and the participants are highly tuned to play their parts to the letter without question. You’ve gotta do what the coach says, right? Look at a game of basketball or American football: they spend more time not playing the actual game, on the sidelines drilling the pre-rehearsed plays into the already programmed minds of the players, much like an actor repeatedly learning their lines and how to deliver them, over and over and over again. If the sporting contest was just one of skill, strength and talent, there would be no need for the script and the best player/team would prevail, and a true contest would be witnessed. A game of rugby would once again simply be big blokes bashing into each other until one got over the line, rather than the ballet for boofheads of the modern era.

Maybe we had that scenario in cycling in the early days, when a dominant rider like Eddy Merckx won just about every time he turned up, because he was the best. It probably didn’t make for great spectating and drama, when there was a 90% chance the same guy was going to win again. Even the greatest riders from the following generations never were as dominant, which coincided with more involvement of team managers (directeurs sportif) and team tactics, and then the advent of race radios. Of course the sports psychologists came into the sport as well, basically another name for a hypnotherapist. Bike racers aren’t the most intelligent people to start with, or they’d be nuclear physicists and not wont to sitting on a saddle for five or six hours every day. It’s easy to mold their minds to churn out a robotic tempo in an uncomfortable position in a somewhat intense amount of physical pain without much resistance or question of why. Mind over matter. No pain, no gain. It’s a mental victory. Sports psychology, right?

But how do they not know? How can a hundred riders be fooled? Well, they don’t have to be. Most domestiques are just that, pack horses who are never going to win, unless the breakaway of the day is allowed to fight it out. Don’t you think that it’s peculiar how every race, every stage of a tour, is played out by the exact same formula? A breakaway is ‘allowed’ to go, and then it’s decided whether or not it’s going to survive or not. Even stages when it’s expected that a sprint finish will ensue, because of flat terrain etc, can be deemed to be one for the break if the DS’s collectively instruct their riders not to chase. But why do the strongest/most talented riders always win the big races? Because yes, they are the best riders, and they are always going to be fighting it out, because they are allowed to. Just who might conquer the others can definitely be pre-determined; how many times do we hear “the strongest rider didn’t win, but the smartest one did”? Or that a chasing group of six of the best in the world can’t catch a lone breakaway rider over 20kms because they won’t work together? Because they’ve been told not to work together, and the win is locked in. Pretty simple really. People are inherently stupid and will do whatever the fuck they’re told, if it’s “for their own good”, no matter how obvious it is that it actually isn’t.

The “Race of Truth” is a lie. Even easier to manipulate than road races are time trials. No actual racing one on one, no chance for a rider to go against the orders and outsprint another when they’re not supposed to, no chance to climb away from the group. Just tweak the timing, a tenth here, a hundredth there, fuck, make it a full second or two if you want, no-one is going to know. Downhill mountain bike racing too, easy pickings. A 30km TT could be tweaked easily up to or even beyond a second a kilometre, no-one would know. No-one. Think about it. Remember thinking?

Did you catch the latest season of Breaking Bad? Orange is the New Black? Whatever the fuck everyone else is watching on Netflix? Crazy storylines right? Obviously scripted, and no chance could that happen in real life. What about that Movistar cycling series? And now the Visma one. Or the Tour one. Same shit, but it’s real. Right? But it’s on Netflix, so it must be real, right? It’s real in the sense that it shows that it’s fake, the truth hidden in plain sight. Entertainment needs to be entertaining, so if there’s no suspense, no controversy, no scandal, all you have is a biopic with nothing happening. The whole Lopez abandoning the Vuelta in a hail of accusations was a perfect way to garner some interest in the show, when it was known he was leaving the team anyway, so why do it on good terms when a yelling match with no actual outcomes serves to keep the braindead on (their meaningless) life support? Just be sure that if it’s on Netflix, it’s propaganda.

We know how the whole Armstrong saga played out, but why was it allowed to? You really think if Lance wanted to keep his seven Tours and his fake legacy alive, he would’ve risked it all with his comeback? No. And as we know the script now, doesn’t it seem just a little curious that he went on Oprah to confess? Absolute bread and circuses there. The UCI played their part in the whole show too, and yet still people deny what is right in front of their faces. Even Lemond was a part of that whole shitshow, playing his part for his masters, knowing his reputation would be intact with the blind masses. He’s as big a liar as Armstrong was (portrayed to be). After a deep dive into his shooting accident, that has more holes in it than his body allegedly had. It’s not hard to see when you actually look.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re either thinking “what a fool” or hopefully using your brain or at least your eyes to draw your own conclusions. Once you see, the red flags and outright fakery becomes impossible to ignore. The notes I’ve made over the two years since I started this article are as long as the Tour is dirty, so many specific examples of rigged races, unbelievable performances, and ridiculously evident fakery. (I was goung to break down each one, but I don’t have another two years trying to explain it to you. If you’re really interested, hit me up and I’ll give you some homework. O maybe I’ll do a follow-up to this.) Why do you think so many confessed and/or convicted dopers/cheats are still welcomed in the sport, as directors, commentators or even still competing? If the sport was serious about nurturing clean competition and a cleaner image, they would have been banished to the history books as the scum they are long ago. No, our sport is a dirty one, a fake one, and it’s undeniable unless you are too afraid of the truth, of having your safe space shattered, to even take a look. Pro cycling is pro wrestling, full of drugs, lies and fakes. The only difference is that wrestling fans, and the athletes and organisers, actually admit it. Enjoy the show.