Boris Johnson, Tadej Pogačar and Taylor Swift are the same person, apparently... the problem with calling all cyclists 'Cyclists'

Yep, you're reading that right. Boris Johnson, Tadej Pogačar and Taylor Swift are the same person. They all believe the same things, behave the same way, and they even dress the same. I don’t know how nobody has noticed this before, when it is so obvious to anybody who takes three seconds to look through the comments on any provincial Facebook group as soon as the word ‘cyclist’ is typed. 

Jocelyn, a member of the same beloved local provincial Facebook that I am a member of, has noticed that "...in my experience [they] make their own rules up. Then if there’s an accident/incident, it’s everyone else’s fault, and they become abusive."

Meanwhile, the ever insightful Rob mentioned: "They normally just make there [sic] own rules up."

He has a point. Tadej is certainly rewriting the rules of professional cycling, Taylor Swift has changed the rules around ‘childless cat ladies’, and Boris likes to have parties during lockdowns, cheat on his wife etc...

Of course, this whole thing is ridiculous, and there is no equivalence between those three people. One is a billionaire musical phenomenon, one is the new Eddy Merckx, and the other is a disgraced ex-Prime Minister; however, across social media and often traditional media too, they have each ridden a bike. So they are all the same. 

They are simply ‘cyclists’...

Sure, but that’s just semantics right? That’s like when you call people who drive cars ‘drivers’, or anybody who travels to work as ‘commuters’? 

Except for some reason the ‘cyclist’ is not somebody who occasionally rides a bike. It seems to be deployed as a collective noun for wronguns. 

For instance, Councillor Alan Amos from Worcester knows for a fact that "cyclists routinely flout the law. Because cyclists don’t have any identification, they continue to do so with impunity and never get caught."

This is an unhinged thing to say. Not because there aren’t people who ride bikes that don’t flout the law, but because claiming that cyclists are some kind of homogeneous group that do this more than any other group shows not just ignorance of anything specific to cycling, but ignorance of the basic human condition. 

How could you possibly establish correlation and causation based on the type of vehicle somebody uses for transport or fun? I would make an educated guess that there are more sheds containing bikes than not in the UK today, so is Alan claiming that most people who own a shed "routinely flout the law"? Or is Alan somehow saying that these people are law-abiding unless they are on a bike? Somehow the process of turning your legs and propelling yourself via pedals and chains is a gateway movement to criminality.  

I am going to be honest here, I can’t see many similarities between the person riding around the Cotswolds on a £12k S-Works Tarmac SL8 and the teenager in Croydon doing a wheelie on a £20 mountain bike they bought off Facebook Marketplace. However, people like Alan want us to believe that there is equivalence. 

Perhaps I am being a bit mean to Alan though, because it’s not his fault. His mind has just been pickled by the media. 

There was an awful story from the end of September about a man who was riding a bike on a pavement. He was told to get off the pavement, so he stopped, got off his bike and punched the man who spoke to him, killing him. The fact that the bloke was riding a bike isn’t particularly indicative of him being more or less likely to have killed somebody, but this is how it was reported: 

'Cyclist, 23, punched 78-year-old to the floor and killed him after widower told him off for riding on the pavement' — The Daily Mail

'"Cyclists Are The SCUM Of The Earth” | Elderly Widower Killed By Cyclist' — Talk TV

'Cyclist killed pensioner in row over riding on pavement' — The Telegraph

'Cyclist killed pensioner with one punch after pavement row' — The Times

'Cyclist who punched and killed pensioner during pavement cycling row, before “cowardly” trying to flee scene, jailed for five years' — road.cc

This man riding a bike is important to the narrative of the story, but in the same way that a bank robber might use a car as a getaway vehicle, or how the Hatton Garden robbers used public transport to get to theirs. I don’t remember any headlines from the time along the lines of ‘Public transport users rob jewellery shop’. 

It is bizarre that we have the media (usually right-wing media in my opinion, but I note that even here on road.cc the word 'cyclist' was used to describe the perpetrator) trying to use a mode of transport as their defining headline descriptor to show whether somebody is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Imagine if the same thing happened with other forms of transport, it would make journalists look insane. 

As it stands, we just have people like Mike ‘you can grow concrete’ Graham spitting hatred and bile against cyclists, with some of his videos carrying titles such as 'Cyclists Are The SCUM Of The Earth' and '"Selfish, Sanctimonious And Untouchable!” Mike Graham And Howard Cox Furiously BLAST Cyclists'. 

With this unhinged level of hatred out there against people who are simply using a specific form of transport, it’s no wonder people like Alan, Jocelyn, and Rob have their brains pickled...