The stands were full. At the Bromont velodrome last Friday, in the light streaming through the bay windows, Guylaine Larouche pushed herself to the limit for an hour. In life, no matter the reason, we always struggle badly against ourselves. Still: she set a new Canadian record.
Do you have any idea what it’s like to drive like that, nose down, swallowing up the miles for an hour, suffocating with pain?
Guylaine Larouche is 66 years old. She belongs to a world, ours, where the idea of performance has passed the age limit. While a time comes when the body disobeys, some, like her, take the gamble of continuing to train it. What does it mean to be an athlete, at an age when, not so long ago, everyone was rather invited to rock themselves? It is no longer extraordinary, in any case, to find elderly bodies capable of considerable sporting efforts while the threat of two rocks weighs on us: cancers and degenerative diseases.
Unlike other athletes, Guylaine Larouche does not seem to be limited to denying the reality of her aging body, in the promises of an illusory youth that elite sport and its excesses would consecrate and celebrate. However, sport was the great business of her life. She always did it with passion. Why should passion stop?
Guylaine Larouche’s first passion is speed skating. Last year, in Quebec City, at the World Masters Games, all eyes were on Gaétan Boucher. The cameras were all about him. The former Olympic medallist, the hero of the Sarajevo Games, has also reached sixty. His body has changed, but Boucher is back on his skates. Guylaine Larouche, at a similar age, has long performed better than him. But no one talks about it. A multiple-time speed skating champion, she recently triumphed over the best in the world in Innsbruck, Austria.
Here she is on her bike. An hour at full speed, on the smooth wooden track of a velodrome, is like boarding a plane without wings. It is jumping into the void of oneself, until being caught, at the moment when one seems to crash, by the sweetness of existing.
Guylaine Larouche rode a bike she borrowed last Friday. She also found someone to lend her lenticular wheels. On the starting line, her thin tires were fully inflated, with a pressure of 220 pounds, her mechanic assured me. No one measured Larouche’s internal pressure. That could have been revealing. She seemed calm, very calm, serene, even. Far in any case from the pathological narcissism that often drives athletes obsessed with their sole discipline, governed by an automaton’s thought.
The day before, on the same track, Montreal billionaire Sylvan Adams, 65, also tried to get close to the hour record for his age category. The Bromont velodrome bears his name following a $2 million donation, even though the vast majority of the funds that made its construction possible — about $20 million — came from the public’s pockets. In Tel Aviv, Israel, another velodrome is named after Sylvan Adams.
The Bromont facilities are new. What strikes you, upon entering, is first the presence of wood. A light wood that does not come from the forests here, but from those of Scandinavia. We have wood to sell, but not the machinery that is needed, it seems, to transform it. An image of our half-country.
Sylvan Adams’ record attempt at the Sylvan Adams Velodrome was cut short after a few minutes of fruitless attempts. The Fédération québécoise des sports cyclismes had dispatched all the necessary officials to certify the performance. For Guylaine Larouche, nothing. Only volunteers, only too happy to help her. The concept of equality, often celebrated, has a long way to go before it faces reality.
Guylaine Larouche still broke the Canadian record. Drooling, clenched teeth, biting her handlebars to contain her pain, she achieved her goal. She rode 40 km in one hour. Plus 50 meters. So 40,050 meters. That’s a lot. To beat the world record, in her age category, she would have had to swallow 725 meters more. At that point, on the sharp edge of pain, how to extract a final burst of energy from her already raw flesh?
I don’t really care about records. However, watching Larouche go all the way on Friday, I cried like an idiot. A Radio-Canada cameraman, seeing my face drowning in tears, wanted to film me. I told him to go away.
We experience our carcass every day. We drag it around. It ages. It bends us. It betrays us. Back pain makes us suffer, like a foretaste of the worst. Before our eyes, the world ages and we with it.
At the finish line, after the gun signaled the end, Larouche said a few words about disabled people, their courage and determination. I was a little far away and I didn’t catch all the details, except the spirit of her message. In 1996, at the Paralympic Games in Atlanta, she won a lot of medals, including a gold, for tandem cycling events, with a blind athlete.
At 66, she is still riding. I challenge you to follow her. This winter, she will skate. The fact remains that, no matter how hard we try, time and illness create chasms between us and our bodies. One day, they no longer belong to us.
Have you read Olivier Haralambon’s remarkable book? In A man’s bodyhe dwells, after a cycling accident, on the fact of aging, on this particular time when one is no longer quite young, but not yet old either. A magnificent writer, philosopher of sport, Haralambon looks at our envelope of flesh which gradually distances itself from us. “Over the years, the body that malfunctions tends to exist on its own, leans towards what is not us. It emerges by itself. We cannot hide from it, although we do not know who suffers the most from it, it or us.” It is a great book. As also seemed great to me the tenacity of Guylaine Larouche. Some of our politicians, those who leave the track before the last lap, would perhaps benefit from taking inspiration from it.