Even on 8 April 2023, Alison Jackson was no different from usual. On that day too, if someone had asked her, she would have said that, ever since she was a child – and probably even now – she had always wanted to be a country girl. Her father would sometimes take her brother around every corner of their farm in Vermilion, western Canada, and she, watching them, would simply say: “Please, Dad, let me do it.” For Alison, the fields were those of the surrounding prairies. Bicycles, on the other hand, weren’t part of the picture. In fact, she found one herself, abandoned and rusting in a barn. It belonged to a labourer her father had hired some time before – he had brought it along thinking it might come in handy and had forgotten it when he left. After all, in such vast spaces, it’s hard to get around on a bicycle unless you’re trained. And in the prairies, there’s plenty of space but little time, no company, and no one to spark your passion.
Alison Jackson found someone like that in dance: her name was Miss Ryan, and she taught her to dance like a real ballerina. On a bicycle, however, she had to figure it out on her own, and, it must be said, even today she appears rather clumsy on that machine – at times awkward, at times inefficient.
People like her have to fend for themselves. They have to improvise, because otherwise the race goes elsewhere, just like the narrative – because few knew Alison Jackson before that day, and everything would have stayed the same if it weren’t for the fact that cycling is a madman’s game. Cyclists are mad, when it comes down to it. In this madness, an athlete with Jackson’s characteristics attacks 130 kilometres from the finish of the third edition of the women’s Paris-Roubaix, alongside a group of eighteen riders. These are the kinds of moves that almost never work because they make no sense. They’re designed not to work, not to make it to the finish. They’re done because it’s understood that against those who will contest the victory, there’s no chance. So, it’s worth going early to avoid being invisible, because otherwise, many wouldn’t even know you were there.
Athletes in this position have energy to spare. Jackson has energy to spare. She once said in an interview that only the smallest, only children, can keep up with her vitality. She plays with them, challenges them with cries of, “Let’s see who sits down first, let’s see who gets tired first.” She claims she always wins. Anyone who knows anything about childhood knows how hard it is to beat kids at this game.
In the end, that day, first the eighteen and then the seven who went on to contest the victory in the Roubaix Velodrome thought exactly the same way – they were playing that game with the peloton. The bunch was like an adult, too sure of its own convictions, the kind that, deep down, looks down on the little ones, convinced they’re the only ones who’ve figured it all out. They don’t know, or they’ve forgotten, that there’s another level of understanding. That children know things we don’t. The escapees, even those like Alison Jackson, know something more about cycling, even if no one ever believes it. They’re allowed to go because, after all, they won’t make it. But sometimes, they do.
And a Canadian girl, who wanted to be a farmer, by putting her bike ahead of Katia Ragusa’s and Marthe Truyen’s, takes home a cobblestone – one of those embedded in the paths between the fields from Paris to Roubaix. One of those that probably broke a gear or two on that first rusty bike when it was still being ridden by the labourer. Not towards Roubaix, but across the prairies, towards Alison’s father’s farm.
“I wanna rock,” the song says. “I won a rock,” sings Jackson, who, if she read this piece, would say we’re overdoing it, that she had fun, and that you can laugh and joke even about the hardest things. That, truth be told, they’re fun, and for that very reason, you should be happy to face them without thinking you have to save the world. In short, like a true cyclist.