The Spin: Mind Over Matter

As Dan Martin rides half of the Tour de France with two broken vertebrae, John Whitney asks what makes cyclists so hard?

- John Whitney

Most look as though a strong breeze would topple them, yet pro cyclists prove themselves time and again as sport’s toughest. Dan Martin’s heroic Tour de France ride to Paris, where he overcame a stage nine crash to still finish sixth overall, is the latest in a long list of against-the-odds rages against the dying of the light, the Irishman possessing the gait of a man three times his age whenever he climbed off each evening. Geraint Thomas cut a similar figure at the2013 Tour. He’d crashed even earlier in the race - the very first stage, in fact, in Corsica - and had to be lifted from his bike by Team Sky soigneurs, such was the impact of his broken pelvis. Against all odds - against even his mother’s wishes - he finished and was no passenger either, still managing to be a key wingman to Chris Froome. Of notorious suffer-lover Tony Martin, his former directeur sportif Brian Holm once said that “with more people like him the Germans would have won at Stalingrad in 1943.”