{"id":717251,"date":"2026-07-29T12:40:25","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T12:40:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/717251\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T12:40:25","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T12:40:25","slug":"on-a-race-start-line-adhd-was-an-advantage-before-that-point-it-was-chaos-why-does-cycling-appeal-to-neurodiverse-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/717251\/","title":{"rendered":"“On a race start line, ADHD was an advantage, before that point it was chaos” \u2013 why does cycling appeal to neurodiverse people?"},"content":{"rendered":"

If Phil Cavell\u2019s first book, 2021\u2019s brilliant bestseller The Midlife Cyclist, was about what happens to the body of 40+ riders when we submit ourselves to unprecedented levels of intense exercise, the enquiry at the heart of this month\u2019s follow-up, The Cycling Addiction, ponders why we choose to do it.<\/p>\n

The idea of \u2018suffering\u2019 and making pain your friend is a state that cyclists habitually run towards, not from, and is central to the storytelling here. <\/p>\n

Cavell skilfully weaves evolutionary science, expert analysis, pro racing anecdotes and his own experiences as an amateur racer in the 80s and 90s to explain the motivations of all of us who\u2019ve pinned on a number, from gran fondos to category racing and all the way to the very top.<\/p>\n

\"\"Phil Cavell in 2021 during promotion for his first book, The Midlife Cyclist. Joseph Branston<\/p>\n

You could see it as a companion piece to Tim Krabb\u00e9\u2019s seminal novel The Rider, which followed the eponymous rider through the fictional Tour de Mont Aigoual race as he was pitched into psychological duels with rivals.<\/p>\n

Whereas the novel is allegorical \u2013 think Animal Farm on bikes \u2013 he wanted to get under the skin of our competitive motivations and instincts, and explain them through biology as much as storytelling.<\/p>\n

Fit with purpose
\n\"\"At work in his day job at Cyclefit. Joseph Branston<\/p>\n

The book started out when his editor suggested he wrote something that was \u201cless technical and just more fun than the last book. I thought the last one was fun\u2026\u201d he deadpans.<\/p>\n

That approach, however, \u201cjust wasn\u2019t for me,” Cavell reflects. “I\u2019ve got to be answering something serious or I\u2019m not engaged.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Midlife Cyclist underestimated how hard it is for people to change their behaviour. People are inescapably themselves \u2013 I see it with my own clients.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cavell, since the turn of the century, has been a bike fitter at Cyclefit in London and, as such, sees cyclists at their lowest ebb as they attempt to overcome injuries that have proved catastrophic to their ambitions on the bike.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes I can be the shock that changes them, but it is a frustration that a lot of the time I can\u2019t. This is where the book started. Why are people getting locked into modes of behaviour \u2013 positive, negative, damaging, or not? <\/p>\n

“What\u2019s driving that? And on the other side, what can people do to understand themselves better, ride at a higher level and stay healthy?<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause of our work here, we see things when they don’t go well, when people are broken. I guess I bring that with me to the books that I write, I see all the opportunities for things to go wrong.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo the book is taking that on: what is it that motivates people, and how does that intersect with the bike? What does that mean in terms of good things for people and potentially problem things for people? <\/p>\n

“And that was the journey I went on, which eventually became this book. I lived it for a couple of years \u2013 the questions and chapters popped up as I went\u2026 it really was a journey.\u201d<\/p>\n

That journey became deeply personal in 2023 when, after starting work on it, Cavell was diagnosed with ADHD \u2013 attention-deficit\/hyperactivity disorder \u2013 at the age of 61.<\/p>\n

A family member was diagnosed with the condition, and in guiding them through that process and understanding much more about how it presents \u2013 inattention, distraction, forgetting things, being late for appointments \u2013 it seemed to Cavell that he was a slam-dunk for it, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t start this book ever thinking that I was going to talk about neurodiversity,\u201d he says. Pretty quickly as he went through the process of diagnosis, he knew that he couldn’t avoid it \u2013 not just as the context for his own life on the bike, but the fact that so many other neurodiverse people find peace and belonging in the cycling world.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs is typical, my reaction was that I wanted to understand everything about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back pedalling
\n\"\"Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond’s legendary internecine battle at the 1986 Tour de France is examined in The Cycling Addiction, particularly through the lens of the latter’s undiagnosed ADHD. Getty Images<\/p>\n

The book takes very much a retrospective look at cycle sport, through the lens of modern medicine and understanding. <\/p>\n

The Rider (published 1978), the 1986 Tour de France, the 1987 Giro d\u2019Italia and Cavell\u2019s own amateur adventures of racing at the old Eastway circuit in London are just some of the touchstones that he examines to understand cyclists’ motivations.<\/p>\n

So, you have Greg LeMond’s infamous battle with Bernard Hinault in 1986, viewed in part through the American’s undiagnosed ADHD, and ‘killer winner’ Stephen Roche’s vengeful destruction of teammate Roberto Visentini at the ’87 Giro.<\/p>\n

The ‘killer winner-flow seeker’ spectrum, covered extensively in the book, was informally created by Peter Keen, Chris Boardman’s coach during the peak of his career, in a chat with Cavell for the book.<\/p>\n

You can see it as an attempt to understand our “default motivation and behaviour within a competitive environment.” <\/p>\n

Killer winners, writes Cavell, require raw aggression and animosity to empower their best performance, while flow seekers only seek to hurt themselves and to “lose themselves in the moment of supreme focus”. <\/p>\n

The most recent pro cycling case study in the book is that fruitful collaboration of coach Keen and his apprentice Boardman \u2013 who, as a time triallist, sat very much at the flow seeker end of the spectrum.<\/p>\n

As Cavell sees it, this was the dividing line between the old cycling world of riding off feel and instinct and the world we\u2019re still living in today, of power meter metrics and tightly choreographed effort.<\/p>\n

Anything after this point, Cavell deemed outside the terms of reference in understanding our capacity to suffer.<\/p>\n

\"\"Chris Boardman winning the 1994 Tour de France prologue. Cavell asserts that the revolution in performance Boardman and Keen orchestrated is the world we continue to live in today. Graham Watson\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Like The Midlife Cyclist, some of the best stuff in The Cycling Addiction is the personal memoir side of Cavell\u2019s writing. <\/p>\n

He admits in the book to having, during his racing years, given little structured thought to how he could improve his fortunes on the bike. Would having a book like this available to him back then have helped?<\/p>\n

\u201cOne epiphany I\u2019ve had in my life is realising that a lot of people don\u2019t think like I think, so it would have been useful to know from as young an age as possible that people\u2019s brains do work differently,” he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think if someone had given me that epiphany in my 20s and said \u2018you\u2019re a pain in the arse, Phil, and I think possibly why you\u2019re a pain in the arse is because your brain works a bit differently to other people, and I love you, and you can be a lot of fun, but you\u2019re a pain in the arse\u2019 \u2013 that would have been good.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did have teammates who gave me a hard time, they could see the potential. Some were way more disciplined, structured and organised, in every part of how they raced. And they quite rightly would say \u2018why is it always you?\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy is it always you that turns up minus something or doesn’t turn up at all or got the wrong day? What is that about? <\/p>\n

“We’re all now running around and we’re a six-man squad and guess what, everyone’s trying to pick up your shit. And it didn’t seem to matter how much I tried not to create chaos around me, I just did.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut if I got to the start line and I had two wheels, a pair of shorts and bottles, it was a totally different story. That’s when my head would flip and [his ADHD] was an advantage. But at no point until I got there was it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The zone of interest<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to the question: why does cycling appeal to the neurodiverse?<\/p>\n

Four per cent of adults in the UK are suspected to have ADHD (even if only a fraction have a diagnosis), but Cavell quotes Professor Michael Liebrenz, a sports psychiatrist who works with Swiss Cycling, who believes over 20% of the pro peloton have the condition.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is through self-selection, where the traits of cycling are a perfect fit for the ADHD condition.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn every single level\u201d cycling helps manage ADHD symptoms, reckons Cavell. \u201cIt\u2019s freedom, it\u2019s silence, it\u2019s the moment when the world stops criticising you, the moment when you stop thinking that you don\u2019t fit, when you\u2019re struggling to adhere to the structures that everyone else find so easy, whether that\u2019s class or homework or remembering things. All that goes when that sense of freedom arrives.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor a lot of people, it\u2019s a happy place. Not just ADHD people but also the ASD community [autism spectrum disorder, is the other condition of neurodiversity that gets plenty of space in the book]. That they can access something, control it and feel at home.<\/p>\n

\"\"Greg LeMond (left) during the 1986 Tour de France. He found out he had ADHD later in life, long after retirement. Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cRetrospectively when I got the diagnosis, it just made total sense. Yea, I get it, absolutely. It was where the criticism stopped and I could enjoy private quiet space and enjoy the cocktail of dopamine and norepinephrine [neurotransmitters that switch on focus, among other things].\u201d<\/p>\n

In the book, Cavell refers to cycling as being one of the only things that \u201cshakes me from my default state of shambolic daydreamer\u201d and that the way his brain works enables him to descend a mountain at frightening speeds in a state of total calm.<\/p>\n

For a man who\u2019s suffered numerous catastrophic crashes on the bike in his life, he doesn\u2019t necessarily see this as a positive. Yet, getting from A to B in a bike race, it could often be an advantage, I suggest.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, it is until it isn\u2019t,” he answers. <\/p>\n

The diagnosis has enabled him to put mitigations in place, for life on and off the bike. He has taped his family\u2019s names onto his handlebars. \u201cIn the moment, you knock off 10%, let\u2019s come down to 70km an hour. My racing days are gone. I\u2019m aware now that one should feel a bit afraid in those circumstances.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the same in bike racing \u2013 I never felt afraid. I felt calm exhilaration, which had its benefits but also had its downsides. Now I know.\u201d<\/p>\n

What should a person who spots similarities in their own lives do? Cavell references the comments in the book of Professor Francesca Happe, a cognitive neuroscientist at King\u2019s College London, whose primary research focus has been on autism.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think she\u2019s bang on. Ask, is it a problem? If something’s not a problem, then you just take it on the chin that that’s kind of how you are and celebrate it, put in mitigations when you need to. But if this is historically a problem, then you may need a bit more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cavell had a different approach, having gone on the journey via his family member. \u201cWe\u2019ve been through the same process so we\u2019re able to talk and help each other with it. We understand each other really well,” he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s part of our vocabulary in the family: \u2018these two are going to struggle with this shit, aren’t they?\u2019 It’s humorously dealt with 99% of the time, but underneath there’s an acknowledgement that with these two, if we’re going to invite them to something, we need to diarise it, make sure they’ve replied, do they have everything? I\u2019ve struggled all my life with this stuff. So, for me, it\u2019s really helped.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Cycling Addiction: Suffering, Speed and the Search for Meaning on Two Wheels is published by Bloomsbury (\u00a318.99) on 30 July<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Phil Cavell\u2019s first book, 2021\u2019s brilliant bestseller The Midlife Cyclist, was about what happens to the body…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":717252,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-717251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-cycling","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=717251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/717252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=717251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=717251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=717251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}