In the world of professional cycling news, Juan Jose Cobo won the overall classification of the Vuelta a Espana. Vuelta a Espana translates to “Tour of Spain” and it’s sort of like the Tour de France only not as watched or contested. Still, Cobo wining the race is HUGE and I’m incredibly excited for him. He was on the brink of retirement after racing for the now-defunct Saunier Duval squad, which folded amidst much doping scandal and drama. To come back from that and win one of the three “Grand Tours” is fantastic.

I was surfing around various bike racing websites on the interwebs this morning, looking for live updates so that I could find out who won the stage (Peter Sagan) and the overall (Cobo) and was struck by the headline “Cavendish motivated for Tour of Britain”. Why . . . ? Let me tell you!

Well, because it seems as though ever couple of weeks there is a really, really well-known and well read bicycling news website reporting that exact same story, albeit with different names. (blank racer) feeling motivated for (blank race). I find this incredibly humorous. To me, this is like reporting that “Muuqi is motivated to drink the coffee that he himself ordered and paid for”. Or “woman excited to go for a walk after putting on her walking shoes and heading out her door”. Or maybe “elm tree on Main Street inspired to stand calmly in one place and blow with the wind”. Also “sky finds motivation to be blue most of the time and also other colors, too”. Or “Muuqi reads headlines to learn about the days’ news”. Or maybe “dog is inspired to sleep, usually when it’s sleepy, but is awake a lot, too”. Something to that effect.

You get the point.

I think that this is all so funny that I almost spat out my coffee this morning upon reading the Cavendish headline. Maybe this is the way of all writing and reporting, but with cycling in particular commentators, writers, bloggers, tweeters, even riders themselves, fall back on over used . . . or . . .perhaps well tried and true ways of phrasing things. To Phil Liggett, famous amateur racer turned journalist, every racer on a solo breakaway appears to be either “dancing on the pedals”, “deep in the hurt locker”,  or, “in total agony!!!”. There are books dedicated to his “Liggettisms”.

This both makes me laugh and smile. Laugh because it’s funny that we say the same things over and over to describe totally different (and yet similar) events. Smile because it’s endearing and it’s comforting.

This morning’s headline made me chuckle in particular because I would hope that Cavendish is “motivated” for the Tour of Britain. Especially because he’s from the British Isles and he also gets paid (a lot of money) to race his bike. If he’s not motivated to do a race, I would hope that he would either find the motivation or not do it. Unfortunately that’s not always the way things go on the pro race circuit, as a job is a job is a job, even when it’s pedaling your bike really fast (and in Cavendish’s case winning a lot of races).

I could spend a lot of time here typing up terms like “program” and “palmares” and try to explain how they’re used and why. I could tell you how racers talk about their legs as if they’re their own entities, saying things like “I had good feelings in my legs today and everything just worked out.” None of this really matters, though.

I’m glad that Cavendish is motivated to do the ToB. I hope that a lot of the racers in the world are motivated to do the racers that they are signed up to do. I hope that my friends and family are motivated to do what it is that they are doing. If they are not then I hope that they can be content for now and find something motivating in the near future. We all need motivation, and today mine came in the form of a cookie-cutter headline. Sometimes that’s all a person needs