The emotional journey of the author

What was that 17 years old girl like who had just watched a Tour de France stage (and liked it!)  29 years ago on a random summer afternoon?

I used to say, 1997 was a life-changing year for me in many ways, but now I can't recall moments would make sense even for readers knowing nothing about me except the fact I create online content about road cycling history. Only tiny banalities come to my mind, that I had my original dark brown hair, my brother was a little boy, my mother had her office in the back side of our family home, and we all started living together with my father's serious illness. (Well, actually, that's not a tiny banality.)

I probably liked baroque music and rococo paintings, but my serious, real affection for the magnificent 18th century hasn't been born. I read classic literature, mostly 19th century French novels (sadly, not the original, only the translated, Hungarian versions), and watched every British period dramas on the tv (again, not the original, but with dubbed voice). I'm pretty sure I took my preparation for my German language exam very seriously. And above all, I was glad that during the summer months I was free from all my anxiety caused by the terrible social  experiences in the school.

But I can't imagine that that 17  years old girl would have ever imagined herself as a sport historian (kind of) almost three decades later.

I always have had a close relationship to history. Also, working with fictional storytelling (either as a critic, a scholar, or a writer) seemed the most convenient activity for me, no wonder that historical fiction became the core topic of my entire life (both from theoretical and also very practical approaches). And because of working with historical fiction requires a very special knowledge about the little moments of everyday life and the most private interpersonal situations, I tend to research (especially in the recent few years) these slices of history.

But still,

feeling devoted to road cycling history seems an odd thing to me,

even after so many years.

I remember, before I started following road cycling events, I considered myself as football fan. It was rather a result of an escaping mechanism, an attempt distancing myself from the beformentioned bad experiences in the school. But even during those years I wasn't really interested in the history of football beyond some basic facts, like when was this or that club founded or what was their greatest triumph.

Cycling is different.

Maybe it's  just because during those long-long (and sometimes very boring) stages on the first week of a grand tour we  hear inevitably many stories from the past of this sport from the commentators.

But maybe it lies deep in the nature of road cycling competition that

it seems more narratable than any other sport.

The fact that a peloton rides from A point to B point using the public places of everyday life, makes creating stories easier than in case of sports confined in a certain place, like a football game in a stadium.

Also, because a road cycling race takes place in everyday settings, it turned out that

road cycling history is much stronger connected to history beyond the sport,

I can find some loose connection to my other interests. The born of the famous "Hell of the North" nickname of Paris-Roubaix, for example, I can connect to my researches on "lieux de mémoire" [sites of memory], a theory by French historian Pierre Nora.

Recently, reading about the history of cycling on daily basis has softened my decade-long loathing for Victorian era, and the second half of 19th century in Europe in general. The constant searching for a broader historical-social-cultural context of the birth of cycling took me back to the world of those classic French novels I used to read as a young woman.

And what really gave me a new push to continue working with road cycling history, that finally, after many years of intellectual strugglings I have found a useful connection between this topic and the history of my beloved 18th century.

In the era, when artificial intelligent can give us a very detailed answer to your even extremely complex questions in any kind of scientical field within a few minutes, it's important to stress out, that human learning is a deeply emotional activity. A journey filled with curiousity, doubt, amazement, or even prejudice.

When I was doing my PhD, one of the reasons why I have never completed it was the constant criticism coming from my professor, that my writing is "too readable", enjoyable. It might have been a valid criticism, if I would do my research in astrophysics or chemistry, that I should stick with my writing to explaining the facts on a possibly most dry way. But when it comes to analysing fictional stories, placing them in a broader cultural and historical context, when part of my reasearches is explicitly about the unreliability of historical sources due to the inherent, unavoidable (human) subjectivity, then I see nothing wrong to try the possible readers to involve in my writing emotionally. After all, that's the first and most important purpose why we write, isn't it?

In the 21st century, there is no need to hide, or even shame that both sharing and receiving information (a.k. a.) learning is driven (and very often misdriven) by human emotion.

With this long introduction-type of article I just wanted to show how unexpectedly road cycling history became an integral part of my intellectual life, and how after many many years I still try to understand why I drawn to this topic.

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