On Yer Bike for Soccer Aid

 "Don't watch this- it will only make you cross".

With these words my wife drew my attention to "On Yer Bike for Soccer Aid" last Sunday evening. It hadn't even started but, we have been together long enough now for her to know how I will react in most circumstances- so was she right on this ocassion?

The premise is simple enough- get a few famous people and break them into two teams - one "England", the other called "Rest of the World", despite it being two Irish folk, a Scot and someone from Wales. There is probably a lot of academic theses that could be written on that one element alone.

The teams then had to do a "stage" race against each other , one climb, one descent and one sprint stage, which all told add up to about 80kms. The overall purpose is to raise funds for UNICEF and not, of course, in any way whatsoever to allow the participants to promote themselves and their careers,not at all and you are a bad person for even considering that possibility...

The slebs all claim to have very little to none recent cycling experience, so along comes anti-establishment Knight of  the British Empire Bradders Wiggo to help them get used to road bikes they have never ridden before, using clipless pedals for the first time ever and STI gears which may as well have been beamed down from Mars. 

Basically the training appears to be Wiggins breaking them into their teams and taking each group for a ride up a slight incline, then down it again. And that seems it. Now the suspicion would normally be that the participants knew what they were getting into quite some time beforehand and had been preparing , and that there would have been more training off camera. However events on the ride seemed to convince me actually that was all they had. Even on the second stage, the descent, (so at least half-way through the challenge), one of the participants responded to being told to change up a gear by saying he still didn't know how. Now we all know from celebrity versions of quiz shows that large numbers of famous people are genuinely as thick as champ, but even so, following a climbing stage and still not knowing how the STIs work shows a severe lack of preparation, and wasn't simply a device to add "drama" and "conflict" because God forbid a TV show simply show what happened rather than manufacture scenarios. 

One of the participants ( a quick Google search revealed she was from Love Island) bailed on the first stage. Despite some encouragement from a team mate (a former boy band member and actor who seemed the most experienced of the lot when it came to cycling) she stopped and refused to go any further, before the road had even risen upwards properly. She then spent the rest of the show doing pieces to camera, without even the wit to look ashamed, and inevitably took a lot of flak on social media. To be honest I feel if she did go on the show to further her career, in a normal world her constant moaning and unwillingness to even try and see it through, and self-centred poor-me pieces to camera (which looked even worse when viewed alongside the UNICEF clips of children who really did draw the short straw in life) means she would never work again. However this isn't a normal world so I predict she will be UK PM or Irish Taoiseach within three years.

The first stage was cut short due to the rain, and some folk on Twitter seemed to think it should have been stopped as soon as the first drops fell, seemingly forgetting that if you don't ride your bike in the rain in Ireland or the UK. you aren't going to ride it very often. However if the riders were as inexperienced as they claimed to be, it can be easy for more seasoned cyclists to underplay the struggle this would have been, particularly for those folk not used to riding on 25mm tyres in the wet.

However as the show went on, it was clear my wife knows me very well as I got more and more annoyed by what I saw. It wasn't a great advert for cycling as, like some of those well-meaning-but-quite-annoyingly-twee GCN videos which are patronising to those who ride bikes, and not very inspiring for those who don't, making it look much harder and less fun than it really is. Also I can't see UNICEF/ Soccer Aid benefitting that much- donations were bound to have been negatively impacted by the ex-Love Islander on her own, never mind the fact that the Piers Moron-Morgan fanboys had it in for one of the other contestants due to his role in Trump's mate walking off a morning TV show (and I'm guessing the ex Mirror editor's fans also had an issue with Alex's skin colour too, if their Twitter posts were anything to go by). 

 

While it may be easy to blame the participants for the failings of the show, I tend to think this lets the producers off too easily. Surely the teams should have been given more than a few hours to get aquainted to the bikes, and maybe a week or two to find their climbing legs? It was clear looking at the logistics in place to run the rides ( proper start and finish lines, security outriders, police escorts etc) that the show wasn't thrown together in a couple of days, so why didn't the riders get more warning to help them prepare better? 

As I write, the whole Soccer Aid thing is still ongoing with other events, finishing with a soccer match involving more famous people so there is no figure as to how much this one show raised (or didn't raise). However I feel it was a good concept very badly executed and in the end the charity will be the one to suffer, and it won't have encouraged too many more out on bikes either.