This is the story of little Røyken Cykleklubb. But maybe it concerns you too. If we add goodwill, we count 27 members. Things are not going well with the club. The way things go badly speaks to the zeitgeist. More on that later. For me it started in 2012. The children had grown up. I had gotten my first road bike. The neighbor sat on the board. He said that one of his teammates had been prevented from taking part in the cycle race Enebakk Rundt. There was a free seat. I had taken part in the training sessions. But I wasn’t going to enter any competition. I said no thanks. The next day I was on the team bus. There was an abrupt introduction to cycling as a team sport. In taking the wind for each other. About cycling like a roller and sharing lying down first. It is the heaviest. About giving the right sign. She who is behind you does not see what is in front of you. About what we do, the whole collective helps each other. About how we cycle uphill, downhill, about cycling on the flat. About letting cars pass. About being part of a larger traffic picture. It was the start of a long, informal, and rarely put into words, training in the culture surrounding cycling in groups of several people. No one said much. I learned about my mistakes from the looks of the others and in the laughter they greeted my participation with. I learned by imitating the others. This is how it turned out. I had a way to go. The club recruited young and old adults, maybe a few more men than women, but still. We came from all possible places around what was Røyken municipality. We had few other hit points. 2013 was the year with the most activity in the club. That year we made a cycling team that took part in what is referred to as the unofficial Norwegian team cycling championship, the Styrkeprøven from Lillehammer to Oslo. We finished far behind the best teams, but we did much better than any of us could have done on our own. We learned that what we get together is much greater than the same achievement we do individually, even if the personal effort is just as great. It is a lesson that is useful for far more than cycling. It became longer and longer between each time the club had joint training sessions, and it became a long time between the Sunday trips in the club uniform. This development had started, but when the pandemic sent us all home it was reinforced. Today, the club’s real community is our club page on the Strava mobile app. Is this so dangerous? That our little club has been reduced to likes on the mobile phone? No, maybe not. But then it was the spirit of the times. Without us being aware of it, the course of life of our cycling club has fluctuated in step with the participation in the whole of Cykkel-Norge. In 2013, when the activity was greatest in the club, the cycling association sent out 80,000 licenses at the same time. You must have a license to cycle touring. The license is both your insurance and it finances our national cycling community. Last year, in 2022, the number was reduced to less than 20,000. Participation has plummeted on all the big tours we’ve been so happy about. Just take the Test of Strength. When we cycled from Lillehammer to Oslo in 2013 there were 4452 participants, this year it was reduced to just 657. In addition, many of our tour rides have been cancelled. But there is more. The club has not only moved in step with the spirit of the times. The club expresses the spirit of the times. In May, the club wanted to mobilize again. Could we recreate the Sunday walks we’ve had so many of? Now a few more months have passed. What have we achieved? – We have had two Sunday trips. The modern community is digital. Before we cycled together, now we cycle separately. The community is reduced to exchanging so-called “kudos” as the trips of the others in the club appear in our app. It does not move us to physical interaction. Calls for a joint trip have been met with digital silence. On the same Sunday that we have called for joint participation, former club participants have posted their own cycling trips on Strava. Trips they have completed separately. What if our little story concerns more people in voluntary sports work? You and I cycle as much as before. Now we do it individually. Maybe we’ll do it with a friend. One we know well from before. Aren’t we losing something important? Shouldn’t these small, insignificant local volunteers bind us together and teach us to know the great community? Can we maintain an open democratic society only as a sum total of close private ties between close friends with overlapping social backgrounds and a good knowledge of each other’s political views? Where are we going to meet the others, the ones we don’t know? I wasn’t going to compete, but joined a bike race. Through that I began a training. I learned a way to be a participant in a community. I had to conform and participate so that a larger collective could function. Today we have a public prosperity the likes of which we have hardly seen anywhere. We volunteers are offered public support to attract vulnerable groups to participate. There is support to make volunteering sustainable and environmentally friendly. It’s great. It just has to continue. But if this is not just about declining interest in cycling, then it is about the core value of participation itself when we do sport together. This is about volunteering. Our little story tells us that we must look after and save the voluntary effort and give it space so that it can take care of its important social mission. Let me end with a note of hope. It will not stop with our two Sunday trips. We have been in the local newspaper and on Facebook and invited all local cyclists to join Røyken Cykleklubb on a trip to Sweden until June next year. Then the club turns 30 years old. We will celebrate that with what is perhaps the biggest bike party of them all. Twenty thousand other cyclists from all over the world come to the Vätternrundan every year. Maybe you will join, you and?
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We used to cycle together – Ytring
