no good dreams go uncrushed

on roglič, language, and the balkans

“I’m not the cycling Terminator, that’s not who I am.”

These were the words Primož Roglič spoke to CyclingNews’ Stephen Farrand in a recent in-person interview, one of Roglič’s first since the beginning of the pandemic. The statement is not without its contexts. Since his appearance on the WorldTour in 2016, Roglič has been frequently characterized as cold and merciless on the bike, and stiff and mechanical off it. When, at the beginning of this year, I set out to profile Roglič for Bicycling, I was very determined to show the world that this was not who Roglič was, and though I believe I succeeded in completing the brief (and so too have others such as Alastair Fotheringham, whose Vuelta wrap-up for ProCycling is a detailed, accurate account of Roglič’s disposition) the meme of Roglič as a cold-hearted killer continues unabated. Two recent examples include GCN commentator Rob Hatch exclaiming at Milano-Torino that Roglič was “a cannibal” — in context, less a reference to Merckx and more an impromptu description of perceived viciousness — and the cycling journalist Daniel Friebe colorfully dubbing Roglič in his essay in The Road Book “the Slovenian Dream Crusher.”¹

Roglič is not unique in his plan of attack, his specialty, which is to kick off explosively in an uphill sprint leaving everyone else to suffer. He shares this tactic with other riders, among them Mathieu van der Poel and Julian Alaphilippe, whose diverse characters and dispositions are proof that winning uphill sprints and doing so without mercy is not, in fact, a personality trait. And yet, we do not call Mathieu van der Poel the Dutch Dream Crusher, or Julian Alaphilippe cannibalistic, preferring instead the more flattering term panache.

There’s something, isn’t there, about Roglič, and the fact that he himself has come out of the shadows to explicitly push back against these kinds of characterizations reveals the uncomfortable reality that they are both tired and a bit personally offensive. But it also speaks to a broader truth about Roglič in general, which is that, being from a small Balkan country and arriving late to the sport despite his dominance, he has always been seen fundamentally as an outsider. His portrayal as such is part of two broader linguistic disputes I have long held my tongue about: the underlying othering of Roglič and Pogačar as some kind of foreign force disrupting the Western European world of cycling, and the paternalistic, exoticized way in which Slovenia in general is portrayed discursively. In this analysis, the keyword in “Slovenian Dream Crusher” is not dream crusher but Slovenian.

To list a few anecdotal examples, I recall very distinctly the English-language commentary from the first stage of this year’s Tour of Slovenia which I found so distasteful I shut it off after several minutes of listening to the two British hosts going back and forth trying to come up with the best positive stereotypes with which to generalize the Slovene people, after which they insisted over and over that Slovenia is beautiful and the Slovenians are very nice, the insistence patting itself on the back as being generous and worldly when it was, in reality, simply patronizing.

Earlier, in one of the better long-form Roglič interviews, the Dutch interviewer gravely asks Roglič about the role the struggle for Slovene independence had in his life as though he grew up in some perennially war-torn country and had considerable trauma about it. (Roglič, unlike his younger compatriot Pogačar, was born in the twilight years of Yugoslavia and this adds an additional layer of the political to his particular characterization.) The liberation struggle in question happened when Roglič was a toddler and he gave a rather wooden answer to that effect, adding a few sentences about the importance of Slovene independence like a good ambassador to his country.

Finally, at the Tour de France there was a quite a lot of suspicion towards the performance of Tadej Pogačar, whose stiffest competition all crashed out in the first week, and yet little leveled against Mark Cavendish who, in a very short time, went from winning nothing for years to winning four stages of the Tour. This is not to imply that either is guilty or innocent or even worthy of suspicion, merely it is a note of who was and was not repeatedly interrogated.

In no way do I have a monopoly over writing about Slovenian cyclists or about Slovenian cycling — it would be arrogant and entitled for me to claim such a thing, considering the fact that the two best cyclists in the world are from Slovenia and we all have to share the duties of writing about them. However, born too late for the Armstrong era and unmoved by the static Team Sky mountain train that dominated the grand tours when I was in college (where watching the Tour de France was considered a worldly and liberal thing to do) I owe my interest in the sport and my development as a journalist within it exclusively to the Slovenians. This is a horse I have beat to death elsewhere. Perhaps because of my long profiles of Slovenian cyclists, some colleagues and fans have called me things like “the Roglič whisperer” or the “Slovenian whisperer” which is flattering, but it never quite sat right with me for reasons I couldn’t articulate until now. It furthers the Western European conception of the Balkans as some kind of mystical, untamed black hole requiring supernatural interpretation or worse, some special technique of conversational manipulation, to understand.

This is not a call-out post — in fact, this essay opened as a stylistic disagreement about how the same individuals are portrayed by different people, including colleagues whom I admire and respect deeply. However, as we enter yet another year of total Slovene dominance in men’s professional road cycling, it is perhaps time for us in the English speaking press to examine critically how we talk and write about riders from the Balkans. And make no mistake, it is because Slovenia is, to Western eyes, a Balkan country that these particular characterizations take place: the merciless automaton, the demure killer, the dishonest, despite one’s own protestation.

Why, for example, is Roglič the savage who crushed the dreams² of Gino Mäder at Paris-Nice instead of Julian Alaphilippe who denied Mathieu van der Poel the opportunity to honor his grandfather Raymond Poulidor by winning the first stage of the Tour de France in the special purple-and-yellow memorial kit Alpecin-Fenix prepared for the grand depart, an event that left the Dutchman folded over his bike in tears? There’s no discourse over whether Sonny Colbrelli deserved to win Paris-Roubaix because, in opposition to those same “unspoken rules,” he rudely sat on the wheel when others did their turn and then out-sprinted them in the end.

Why is there little effort, outside of the glossier print outfits,³ to affect color, emotion, and travel into pieces about Slovenian cycling and to do so in a way that is empathetic and interesting, in the way we write about England or Spain or France or Italy? Why are the Slovenians, years into their present ascendancy (which arguably began with Mohorič becoming the under-23 world champion in 2013) still treated as some kind of odd curiosity instead of as a people with their own cycling history and culture dating back to around the same time as those found elsewhere in Western Europe? What can we do to engage with the vast catalogs of sporting or non-sporting Slovene history and culture, wherein there are a wealth of stories to be found and incorporated into narrative? After all, there are few better lines to describe the strange perseverance of cycling, its pursuit of glory within the timespans of such short careers than these penned by the 20th century Slovenian poet Edvard Kocbek:

“Then we rise and run forward again
after you who never stop, and again
we stagger wearily and again rush
after you, O human persistence, last
love of a frightened heart…”⁴

Instead, we almost entirely rely only on interviews with Slovenian cyclists or sports directors, asking them to explain Slovenia to us, the entitled West. We repeatedly fail to enlist the help of translators, interpreters, or our own colleagues who speak the Slovene language, insisting instead on English as the sole form of personal expression. In that choice alone, so very much is lost.

Since the 1980s, cycling has become increasingly globalized — it is no longer solely the domain of Western Europe. One of the great difficulties and ethical challenges of travel writing, of which I consider cycling journalism to be a part by way of the very nature of the sport, is accurately and movingly portraying other cultures to an audience of our own. Of this, there are many fantastic and recent examples. The Cycling Podcast (of which I was a part during the Tour de France, full disclosure) owes its success and its charm to its coverage of topics such as cuisine, history, travel, art, and culture in addition to cycling. CyclingTips recently — and deftly — covered the struggle of Afghan women cyclists in a time of political upheaval. The Tour of Rwanda received highlights coverage from Eurosport/GCN for the first time this year.

In the face of these successes and in anticipation of another year of Roglič versus Pogačar, I’m writing this simply because I no longer wish to devote my resources as “the Slovenian whisperer” to insisting that Roglič, in reality, is complex and humorous, that Pogačar is not some kind of impending dynastic icon to be resented but a still-young person for whom cycling is play and passion, that Mohorič, who should be categorized as one of the greatest breakaway men of the contemporary peloton, is just as worldly, interesting and intellectually sophisticated as a Romain Bardet or a Guillaume Martin.

When I go about my own work writing profiles, I think often of an early passage from the sprawling travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, written by the English writer Rebecca West during her trip to Yugoslavia in the 1930s. West remarked on the topic of writing about Balkan history:

“As we grow older and see the ends of stories as well as their beginnings, we realize that to the people who take part in them, it is almost of greater importance that they [themselves] should be stories…If one’s own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we are reading a bad book. We can all of us judge the truth of this, for hardly any of us manage to avoid some periods when the main theme of our lives is obscured by details, when we involve ourselves with persons who are insufficiently characterized; and it is possibly true not only of individuals but of nations.”

Roglič, Pogačar, Mohorič, Mezgec, Polanc, Tratnik. These men have earned their places in the cycling history books just as rightfully as any other. They have been with us for years, will continue to be with us for several more. They have their predecessors and, in due time, they will anoint their successors. They unequivocally define our era. It’s high time we realized that, since the first cycling club was founded in Ljubljana in 1906, through the tumult of two world wars and the heady days of socialism, the Slovenians have always been there, riding their bikes.

It is us who rarely bothered to search for them.

1. I’ve read Daniel’s essay in The Road Book and found it to be well-rounded and engaging. I’m merely using the moniker he chose as a jumping off point to make a broader linguistic argument rather than making a qualitative statement about the essay itself.

2. Despite all the hullabaloo, Gino Mäder’s supreme dream in life was not, in fact, to win a stage at Paris Nice, and when I profiled him for ProCycling at the Vuelta he expressed repeated exasperation with the preoccupation the press continues to have with that incident and the perception of Roglič as being at best uncouth and at worst downright malicious.

3. Rouleur sent journalists to Slovenia as early as 2018 and produced what is to this day the most complete profile of the recent rise of Slovene cycling.

4. from the poem Drunk With Change, I Lie on the Ground. Quoted from Nothing is Lost: Selected Poems. Princeton University Press, 2004.