Movie Review: Bicycle Dreams
A Film by Stephen Auerbach
Official Site: bicycledreamsmovie.com
Overall Impression: 9/10
“The Race Across America is an epic, 3000-mile bicycle race from the Pacific to the Atlantic. First held in 1982, RAAM is considered the most challenging sporting event in the world. Top riders finish in under 10 days, riding over 300 miles per day and sleeping only a few hours per night. Amid the sleepless grind, riders must endure the searing heat of the Mojave Desert, the agonizing climbs and descents of the Rockies, the driving winds of the Great Plains, and the twisting switchbacks of the Appalachians before the final sprint to the finish line in Atlantic City. With little prize money at stake, the fundamental goal of the race is simply to finish, a challenge half of all riders fail to meet.”
- Description of the RAAM from the Bicycle Dreams website
We had the privilege of receiving a copy of Race Across America documentary Bicycle Dreams from publisher Auerfilms recently. Bicycle Dreams contains coverage of the 2005 race, honing in on a few select personalities as a display of diversity in RAAM participants. Edited and presented in a format familiar to watchers of modern documentary films, Bicycle Dreams is easy to follow and enjoyable to watch. My wife, a complete non-bike-geek, appreciated the movie quite a bit. Beautiful landscape shots really show us the land RAAM racers are traveling through along each step of the way. Filmmaker Stephen Auerbach has done an excellent job with Bicycle Dreams.
Bicycle Dreams excels at giving the viewer an up close and personal look at RAAM racers – their personalities, motivation for attempting something so insane, along with insights from families and support crews as each mile inches along taking the riders closer to the finish in Atlantic City, New Jersey – or a failure somewhere along the way. And indeed, merely finishing at all is enough accomplishment for most participants.
That is the central crux of Bicycle Dreams – the RAAM is so physically and mentally difficult, even life-threatening, why do it at all? Auerbach attempts to explain this in his interviews with the cyclists themselves, for the most part. Each has their own motivations for racing: desire for sponsorships, the personal challenge of testing one’s true limits, to raise awareness for pet causes like cancer or AIDS. The financial troubles some of the participants go through in order to finance their RAAM trip are truly disturbing, in some cases – whether it is enduring less-than-ideal family living conditions or physical conditions that would normally exclude even the thought of participation for most people. One RAAM cyclist in particular had an emergency medical condition that ended his race and resulted in the loss of a portion of his lung in a prior year’s race, and then came back two years later to try again.
While Auerbach attempts to portray the RAAM cyclists in a favorable light, their attempt viewed through the lens of an amazing physical and mental challenge that can only truly be understood by participants and worthy of our admiration, in the end both my wife and I were still left wondering, “why?” It seems that risking your life and financial situation for many of these racers is just flat out exhibiting poor judgement and misplaced life priorities. A multi-time winner of RAAM, Slovenian Jure Robic, lives with his wife and son in a tiny urban apartment. He does, in fact, have sponsorships from his athletic success, but since his costs for race participation are so high, he is never financially in the black. In other words, to fund his apparent obsession with events like RAAM, his family’s financial state and living conditions suffer. Many other RAAM participants have similar stories – spending the equivalent of several years’ salary to race, for example. Even if financing the race was not a concern, as was the case with one multi-RAAM finisher, the inherent danger of the race certainly was – without giving too much away. The impression I came away with was, for many, being a RAAM cyclist is a selfish endeavor. The comments of a certain French racer mid-documentary rang true to us: “it’s just not worth it… I have two kids who are waiting for me.”
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