People often spit the word ‘blogger’, to denote their distaste and distrust. The bloggers of our imagination are dilettantes, second hand journalists, or fake-news peddlers.
They’re giving bloggers a bad name.
But even with the ones you can trust, beware.
Do you ever have the feeling, out on the bike, that you’re being watched? Is someone taking rather too much delight in every mangled puncture repair or poor wardrobe choice? Do they carry a notebook in their jersey pocket and furtively jot things down?
This is research.
They are a blogger.
And you are the subject of their next published post.
Minor transgressions – a smear of chain grease on your calf, or turning up pre-ride with a dirty bike – you might get away with. Perhaps a half-mention in a passing blog post but nothing more.
Serious errors – repeated failure to get your round of coffees in at the café, or the wearing of those red Katusha bib-shorts of which you’re so fond – might lead to worse.
Within forty-eight hours your abject failure to be a cyclist splashed online for the entertainment of others.
Get it wrong repeatedly, and you might find yourself the subject of a whole category of blog posts. Such a sullying of your reputation is difficult to come back from.
There is a solution, of course.
If you’re tired of being used as mere fodder for your friend to draw hits to his website, you must fight fire with fire.
Remember: the blogger’s success rests on his words, but also his reputation.
He can only sling all this light-hearted mud in the direction of his fellow cyclists if he himself is as paragon of cycling virtue.
If he is eeking out comedy capital from your inability to fix a puncture in less than seven minutes, he’d damn well better be able to do it himself in three with a flourish, a flick of the wrist, and a witty anecdote or two.
Get yourself on social media, and tell the world the truth.
Regale the Twitter-sphere with tales of your friend the blogger and his phone calls home for collection mid-ride, his creaking bottom bracket, and that US Postal Service circa Lance Armstrong jersey that you KNOW he wears under his winter kit from time to time.
That’ll shut him up.
Disclaimer: any resemblance to actual individuals is purely coincidental
(Image: pixabay.com)
ROAD THEORY 
In the autobio mode?
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I categorically deny ownership of a US Postal jersey
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