Cycling as a Vocation by Daniel Katz | An Interview with Marco Pinotti of BMC Pro Cycling

Cycling as a Vocation

Daniel Katz

“It’s really important to go to school because cycling is so…” He searched for the right word. “…precarious.”  He could have also been describing the gyroscopic effects that failed him in the 2012 World Time Trial Championships, but Pinotti is far too objective. “You don’t know if you’re going to make a living from cycling until you’re 25 years old. You can train for seven—seven or eight years—and you find out…” A telling pause. “Everything you do in life it takes 10 years to become excellent. You’re not finished as a rider when you’re 23.”

Marco Pinotti has been in the news recently not just because of his balanced responses to the recent doping revelations but also because of the release of his instructive book, The Cycling Professor. Marco is that clean rider in the cloud of dirt, the confidently spoken rider in an era of tenuous silence. While he is certainly not bounding for attention, he speaks with purpose and substance. Pinotti has a college degree in management engineering which is a blend of mechanical engineering, business, and marketing. He is thwarting the image of most pro cyclists who have had only devoted themselves to one task.

But cycling is his vocation.

The term “vocation” connotes something heavier and more important than the words “job” or “occupation.” The idea of a vocation encapsulates a sense of duty to a calling. Whether this calling is spiritual, or simply a sense that, in the random acquisition of genetics, a person can be predisposed to excel at a certain task, most cyclists will tell you that they ride because they are supposed to. Pinotti understands this; he understands that there is a certain responsibility, that for some reason, he gets to ride his bike for a living. He has to ride his bike for a living.

Cycling as a business

Marco Pinotti  looks at and understands cycling from this perspective, as a job in a sport that is all too influenced by a weak economy and laissez faire standards.

“I tell you straight, I was lucky. I was attending University 5K from where I live. 15 minutes by bike. I think you can do it. I did it in 5 years, I didn’t lose any time…Maybe, maybe, sometimes you have to decide what to do. Maybe you can give yourself a year. …’Ok this year I want to do everything. I want to see if I’m good at cycling.’ [But] one year doesn’t change. It’s not like if you do one year as a pro it’s gonna jump, no big jump in cycling, it’s progressive improvement. I wouldn’t say stop for one year with school and go with cycling” His engineering mind leads him to train with intelligence and conviction, but his demeanor suggests traditional Italian cycling passion.

“I find it quite amazing we still get paid riding our bikes.” The standard answer of living a dream didn’t come next. “Because nobody is gonna pay anything to see the races. It’s not like you go to a football stadium to watch. If you think about it, it’s still quite amazing you can make a living. Aside from the big events, it’s only people who have a passion, it’s not a big amount of people.”

It is simple, professional cycling cannot be entrenched by mere zeal. Pinotti was familiar with the scene in North America in which several teams folded, leaving riders panicked and abandoned. “About 60 riders without team, no? We don’t have protections at all. I guess Europe is more tradition it’s easier for management to find resources for management or sponsorship.” The Italian comes out through the pitch and emotion in his voice, but the opinion is backed by reason and experience. “There are no protections,” he concludes. “I’ve been dealing with this problem since I turned pro. It’s a precarious job. You have one year, two years maybe you can plan if you have an injury. You’re out. If you compare to other sports it’s all a matter of money. The more money they have the stronger the union is.”

The more money they have the stronger the union is. There are sports in Europe. Like soccer…it’s another level. Motor sports are a little the same.  Beyond that all the sports are the same; look at tennis, the top 100 players can make a living. All the rest are just surviving.”

At some point in the interview, an excited Pinotti apologizes. A woman’s voice in the background summons his attention. While not part of the interview technically, it offered a certain clairvoyance. To an untrained ear, the conversation sounded intense and very Italian. But it was a mere banality, discussing the logistics of his young son coming home from school. Something most people have to deal with. It is something that makes that labor union that much more important, the retirement savings that much more crucial, and the amazing athlete that much more human.

It’s important to note, though, that lack of funds is not a symbol of injustice, at least in the sports world. Professional sports are driven by demand, just like any other business. If advertisers see viewers and product leverage, they’ll invest. Viewers bring in money as advertisers see the advantages to gaining a foothold in the given sports market. Subjectively, cycling is a beautiful, marketable sport. Objectively, the money isn’t there, the infrastructure isn’t there. Separating the background noise from the objective interpretation is difficult.

Pinotti knows the sport must be more marketable. But how do you make the sport more marketable?  “To make it more marketable you need to make the sport look interesting. What is more marketable is the big events,” Pinotti contends.  “I think it’s too much power now in a couple of key players in the sport. Like the owner of the Tour has a lot of power. The owner of the Giro has a lot of power. It’s because they start earlier. It’s a sport like in the U.S. what you miss is really a tradition. As soon as you have an event last 4-5 years and then disappear there can’t be a tradition. You need 25 year events. One generation.”

You have riders doing the races generation after generation.

This is part of the UCI’s drive, though, to make cycling more marketable. In the massive proliferation of information and the globalization of cultures, it seems only logical that cycling follows and does the same. It cannot remain Eurocentric as a sponsor driven sport, and the UCI is pushing for this spread. But can cycling be pushed by money and exotic places rather than tradition established through the love of sport? Qatar and Oman say maybe, maybe not. Driven by money and not by crowds, it is a local attraction at most.

 “The World Tour is a nice concept. But they are trying to make the race all over the world. At the same time they need to let all the races in each country grow up. When they reach this level [Major, professional events], then they can go to bigger events. You cannot create events from nowhere. And force teams or riders to go there and race, you have to in the beginning, I think what Tour of California is doing is a good thing. If it would be a ProTour  event  all the [WorldTour] teams would have to come.” Race attendance should be driven by demand. “And maybe teams don’t want to do California. And then you still don’t have room for local riders. Then local riders can’t compare themselves with the big stars. So the races…it’s something modeled like Tour of California is more beneficial for the countries.”

The money, the crowds, the races, the sponsors, and the teams all favor men. The gender gap is real and defined in cycling, and if men have a hard time making  it, women are in a place of desperation. But Pinotti sees women’s teams and women’s cycling as something that can be good for the sport and for the sport’s companies as a whole.

“To develop cycling, it’s good to have a women’s team. It’s good to have a women’s team linked to the {WorldTour] team. That could be a good way to develop cycling. They need the structure of races and support of the sponsors. It makes sense for the sponsor to see women’s cycling developing. Half of the population is women, who can go by bike; it’s a big market for them. For bike manufacturers for clothing, they should all get benefits from the development of women’s cycling.”

Pinotti seems realistic enough to realize there are just fewer women in cycling, and often, sports in general. It seems a lot of this, though, does have to do with the economic and career prospects.

“Evelyn Stevens and Vos, are good personalities. Women’s cycling has a problem, women, generally speaking, women might be scared of [what] I don’t know…not women who do cycling… The model of women’s cycling doesn’t go together. For general welfare is good. But too much competitive cycling…”

The blame in cycling’s poor performance is often put on one organization.

This is not to say the UCI is doing a poor job in the least. An alternative scenario suggest that forcing races, in women’s and men’s cycling, means that while some races may not take off, if even one does, then it’s worth it.

Conflation of ineptitude, malice, and a tricky world

The UCI has taken a lot of flack as an organization, and upon being asked if a new governing body is needed, Pinotti emphasizes this is not so.

“I think the UCI has been doing a decent job globalizing cycling, but for sure they can do better. The thing is, I only see cycling as road cycling.” Pinotti knows the UCI handles more than just road cycling. “They’re a big organization, it’s a little bit…some matters they have not handled perfectly in the last few months. We need a governing body like the UCI, we need a change, but we have to understand the good they have been doing.”

Those matters it has handled over the last few months have caused chaos in the sports world. It would be an incredible oversight to pass over the doping topic, cycling’s nadir.  

Pinotti came up through what is now known to be a very dirty time. He got through relatively unscathed but the thoughts of what could have been…

This interview came to be because of a Twitter interaction between Pinotti and Stage 17-Cylance Cycling team director Mike Roecklein. Pinotti had responded to a tweet from Michael Roecklein, who had noted that Pinotti probably won a stage of the 2006 Tour de Georgia, since all the riders in front of him were confessed dopers. It was a pivotal stage, and Pinotti might have had a different career if, in fact, he had been declared the winner. To Roecklein’s surprise, Pinotti tweeted back. The twitter interaction has since been deleted, but Pinotti noted that he was told by a director early in his career that he could one day become a grand tour champion. It has only recently been revealed that the cerebral Pinotti was truly capable. The last thing I wanted to do in my first interview was bring up doping right away, the elephant in the room, with a man who had his career altered, amended, and upended by a doping era.

But it’s necessary. Marco again speaks with conviction and attentiveness, still keeping the background noise of emotion separate. Even with such a controversial topic he jumps into the conversation, although, he contends, greener grounds lay ahead.

The Doping Brainwash

“When teams …” a pause to think. “When you’re 16,17,18 or 20 years old, it’s easy to brainwash you. If there is somebody who can nurture you and teach you what the good values are, what the bad values are..it’s really important. When you are 30 years old you think you are mature enough to decide. At that stage you can brainwash some riders. If you tell somebody that, ‘oh, bike racing is also the drugs and the training,’ then [the young rider] grows up like that. You don’t see any other option. You have to do it.”

It seems, to the outside observer at least, that there is an underlying issue of morality. Young minds are acquiescent to new ideas flowing from authority figures or heroes. This puts the onus, on the mentors to serve as the figurative city on the hill. What the mentor states something as raw, absolute truth, the young rider will absorb it as such. And it’s also a matter of image.

(I would leave out the “For Marco”, and the “in Pinotti’s mind”. Unless he’s saying it, you don’t want to attribute it to him. It’s okay for the author to draw his own conclusions, or extend Marco’s points)

“People say we have to put more control for the younger riders. I don’t agree with that. Well, I agree but—If you had unlimited resources you could test first ten riders in every race in the world. But you don’t have unlimited resources. So you have to put controls where you have the biggest gains, the biggest events. So the pro level, they have to be controlled.”

Doping controls and testing are expensive. Some estimates have tests costing roughly $800 per sample. Pinotti, privy to the limited resources available for testing, contends that the image is important and serves as a deterrent as much as a truly preventative measure.

“It makes sense to put [the testing] at the top of the pyramid where the gains are bigger. It’s more beneficial. If a guy dopes earlier, then he has to stop immediately. At the lower level, you have to work on culture, on values, on trainers on the people around the cyclist.”

In other words, the ideology needs to be reshaped and tweaked. Ideology is dangerous and useful. It can be ingrained in a rider, making facts nearly irrelevant if they contradict accepted ideology.. Hence, if the ideology is that cycling is a clean sport, the odd doping positive won’t dispel that belief. If the belief is that cycling is a dirty sport, successes are believed to be only achievable through uncleanly means.

Most certainly, there are questions about the long-term effects of doping and the moral implications of doping at a lower level to get a spot on a pro team.  Doesn’t this constitute taking a spot of another rider who did it clean? There was an underlying theme in this portion of the interview that the greatest deterrent was creating the image that cycling is clean. It’s also so much more than who gets first or who gets last. Cycling must be understood in the sense that it is more than a job, even at the highest levels, it should be a vocation.

“As a younger rider you have to have a model of somebody doing it clean.” Pinotti is adamant, his voice rising in determination and certainty.  “Otherwise, if you grew up in the sport and your director says you have to do this or stop, all the big pros dope, then you feel like you don’t have options.”

However, Pinotti says with the introduction of smart testing, with a cultural shift, where the image of cycling is that of hard work and fluid sport, then doping will be far more unlikely.  

“Then this rider is clean, I tell you 100%, this race is clean because there are more controls, it’s not worth it for you to dope. It’s possible to achieve results with your own strength and skill. We have to make a model so people grow up following other people.”

He takes the pressure off controls and bureaucracy and the UCI and plants it firmly on you and me.

“The responsibility is not all the on the governing bodies. It’s every single person. Cycling is made by people. So every single person shares a small amount of responsibility. You can’t change the world by yourself. You have to change what you can then start nurturing people close to you, it’s like a chain reaction … for some people it’s the money. They want to be under the spotlight. It depends. For me cycling was a way to achieve health and physical and mental peace. It depends on how you rate your values.”

But nonetheless, people will cheat. How should these people be handled? How does the sport’s governing body target those who test positive?

Pinotti promotes a near zero tolerance approach with exceptions for tainted supplements or strange and ambiguous test results. For the most part, though, he says moral hazard needs to be avoided. “For some people, it would help to have a longer ban. Generally speaking I’m for no second chance. But not every case is the same. In the case of blood doping, when you really look and it’s not a mistake…I’m not for second  chance.”

Again, he has to speak about domestic matters, his wife chimes in and Marco politely excuses himself. It makes a person think about what he could have done, to have more money and more success. It speaks volumes about the man who chose to take far too many tenth place finishes than he deserved over taking an ethical dive.

It should be noted that this interview occurred just before Armstrong confessed, but it is doubtful that those heavy confessions change anything for Marco Pinotti.

“It’s a price that we have to pay, cycling deserves it in some way, this one. It’s not that people want to know about doping…It’s because there have been so many riders involved. It’s the first thing that came to their mind. It’s not something you can separate from cycling if you look at the past 15 years of history. People used to say why don’t they look for soccer, or track and field…I don’t care, I’m in cycling, I’m happy that they’re cleaning up the sport that’s been trying to solve this problem. I don’t know if the other sports are worse or better, I don’t have the knowledge to say this sport is not clean. But I’m happy that cycling is fighting. Even if it’s the price we are paying. In the long term we will see the benefits of this time, in the long term. In the short term it would be maybe better to hide everything. Then it would probably come out in four or five years again. People ask me about doping, I don’t know anything.” Pinotti laughs.

“I only know what you read in the newspapers. Maybe in ten years doping will just be part of the books.”

The Books:

Marco wrote his very instructive and analytical book, The Cycling Professor because too many people asked the same questions over and over again. Those questions were also asked in this interview, admittedly. He started writing a diary in the local newspaper in 2005, his first Giro. Ever since, he has written a column for every Giro he has participated in. He was approached by an editor after the column became one of the most read items in that paper.

“I learned how to write during everything that happens during the stage race. I started with a laptop and now just a tablet. I learned about writing with this experience through this newspaper.”

Later approached by an editor who was interested in converting the diary into a book, Pinotti began writing diary entries with the book in mind but never truly had time to compile it. Finally, nearly three years later, plagued by a broken collarbone, Marco could espouse cycling knowledge.

But the editor was not interested in doing an English version so Pinotti tackled this himself with the help of a translator, putting his entrepreneurial side to the test, using the Amazon pilot publishing program.

The extra time in compiling the book allowed him to include a chapter on the Olympic games.

And the English version is updated for his experience in the 2012 world championships, which ended, for Pinotti, on the ground in a warm rain.

“Cycling is a hard sport. Anything you gain because you really want it. People think doping is a big part…with cycling you need the legs. It’s not like soccer or other sports. You have to reach the top of the mountain. It’s me, my bike, and my strength. It really develops the strength of character.”

Pinotti notes in his book that where he lives in Italy is actually a terrible place to train. There is a lot of traffic and bad roads. He begrudgingly admits he had to do the same climb six times just to get training in. But that notion of the bike, the road, and his calling, keeps him moving forward.

International Racing, U.S. Group Rides and the Raison D’etre

But Pinotti is a man who has traveled a lot, has ridden a lot of roads, and experienced all sorts of cycling culture. He has ridden in the United States on several occasions including in the Tour of California, team training camps, and track world cups. For many U.S. riders, group rides are institutions, a melding of cycling enthusiasts and racers as well as speed, anger, and fun. To Pinotti, these group rides were something special.

“In 2006 on the track, we were training in Carson [California]. I remember the training was so busy! I remember in Palos Verdes, one traffic light ever 20 meters. After, I went to Simi valley, I did the Simi ride, with 100 peoplle….I would love to do group rides in Italy, but it’s not possible, too busy. Maybe group rides in Tuscany. In the U.S. the cycling culture, is small and relaxed. I like the U.S. way. I really like it. I remember in California, people are more with their feet on the ground.”

And what about Tuscany, the grounds of which many perceive to be the cycling holy land? It is known as a place to drink wine, eat good food, ride through vineyards and circuitous roads and most importantly, to  live life slowly but ardently. 

 “Tuscany is maybe a good place.” Marco concedes, sort of. “The best place to have a training camp is Southern California.”

“I love it, because it’s fun. I don’t know what else to do. I love it truly. I would [only] stop training because I live in a shit place to train. I have deep roots here, family. When I go in training camp and racing, I’m the first to start training, the last to stop training because I love it.”

In the Olympics in 2012, Marco finished the Time Trial in the top five, proving he is one of the best in the world. However, the international fervor and pure tradition of the Olympics, trumps any result for Pinotti. Just being selected, being considered one of the best in the world, and being in London set on a pedestal for days  was bigger than anything.

“It’s not about the results, it’s about being in the Olympic games. I wanted to be at the Olympic Games. Even the last rider wants to be there. It is the achievement I am the most proud of.”

Pride in a result isn’t enough to satisfy a bike racer, or any competitive person for that matter.

The title of this article is an adaptation of the Vocation Lectures by sociologist/political economist Max Weber. Delivered in 1918 and 1919, in a war-weary Germany, it consisted of two parts: “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation.” “Science as a Vocation” examines the life of going into higher education. He examines the bureaucracy of the higher education process (“science” here is used in traditional terms, essentially meaning academic study) and what it takes to move forward in academics. But he always adheres to the notion that to succeed, one must be committed to his/her beruf , a German word with the connotation of job, vocation,  and calling.

“And whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, and to come up to the idea that the fate of his soul depends upon whether or not he makes the correct conjecture…may as well stay away from science. He will never have what one may call the personal experience of science. Without this strange intoxication ridiculed by every outsider, without this passion, this thousands of years must pass before you enter into life and thousands more wait in silence…without this, you have no calling for science and you should do something else. For nothing is worthy of man as man unless he can pursue it with passionate devotion.”

These “blinders,” meaning the ability to have such a narrow focus that nothing else can distract from your attention, makes a scientist a scientist and a cyclist a cyclist. There will be tumult and criticisms and the rare interference from sentiment and a lack of objectivity in training, but a cyclist like Marco Pinotti will continue to ride, continue to apply the science of training and sport for its own sake. Sometimes it can still be about the background noise.

And ultimately, why does Marco compete? He stated that a big result at the world time trial championships, a medal, would be a defining point in his career, an exclamation mark to finish, to be content. The 2012 World Time Trial championships saw him chasing a bronze medal, but his ride was fractured by a high speed dismount ending in a thud and broken bones, that left and leaves him longing for a result that seems nearly inevitable.

But that won’t be the end of it, not for a cyclist like Pinotti, who does it for love and passion in a sport that’s too hard, too dangerous, too heart-breaking to have a career rest on one result. But that’s why we’re all cyclists, and that’s where us non-world tour riders can relate to somebody like Pinotti the engineer, Pinotti the family man, and Pinotti the thinker. For some reason we climb on our bikes each day to enjoy the road passing beneath our wheels. We all find that raison d’etre at the top of some climb or end of some hard effort: gassed, out of breath, seething with anger, relief, exhaustion, happiness or whatever emotion erupts out of the body and into the pedals. But for some reason we get back on, finished but looking forward to tomorrow’s ride, desirous of unknown eventualities.

“After [last] year’s world championships I crashed. Without the crash I would have probably gotten the bronze medal. Maybe I would have been satisfied. Without this medal I still have the hunger of something. That’s what keeps me going. That’s the thing, you fight for new goals because you still love cycling.”