The Camera Never Lies – Opinion

“Dick Face?”

I put the question to Colin, the photographer, but he shakes his head in response. Nope.

“It’s definitely not Dick Face,” he says.

“Bass Mouth?”

Colin is jabbing at the review button on his Nikon. “No, not that either, but it’s…. it’s something.” He’s hunched over, peering intently at the back of his camera.

I stop to catch my breath and replay the event in my head.

“Crazy Eye? Aunt Betty? You Stole My Car?” For the life of me, I can’t pinpoint which it might be.

“I think it’s Psycho,” he says, nodding now. “Yeah, definitely Psycho with maybe just a bit of Crazy Eye mixed in there around the edges.” Colin straightens up, gets the big camera in position. “But mainly Psycho. Let’s try it again. And, you know, just…try and relax.”

I pedal the bike, all sweaty jersey and leaden legs, back up the trail for the 167th time that morning and marvel at just how hard it is to have your picture taken without looking utterly spastic.

Or maybe I should re-phrase that. Personalize it. Own it. Okay, here goes: It is hard for me to have my picture taken whilst riding a bicycle. It is so difficult for me to look properly relaxed and natural on a bike that there’s actually an extensive and unflattering photographic lexicon to describe my varying degrees of awkward and ugly.

It is not, however, hard for everyone to have their picture taken. Some people do not look as if they are f*cking a football or enduring an exceptionally aggressive enema while they navigate a tricky corner at speed. Some people are, in fact, born to this photo model thing.

Consider one Richie Schley. There was a period in the late `90s when that guy seemed to be on the cover of every magazine. Here’s Richie riding a log on the Shore. There was Richie catching an ungodly amount of air somewhere in Turkey, arms spread eagle in the air, a serene smile on his face. Here’s a shot of Richie, calmly tempting fate on a scree slope in Kamloops. There was Richie eating a falafel behind a dumpster and still somehow winding up on the cover of Bike magazine or Mountain Bike or…you get the idea.

Every month I’d sit down at the light table, photo loupe in hand and squint at hundreds of 35-millimeter Fujichrome slides. Stacks and stacks of the things. There were (and are) no shortage of brilliant photographers out there and no drought of talented riders, but there was something about Richie Schley on a bike that was undeniably beautiful. Sure, he could ride trails that blew everyone’s minds at the time, but he had a way of making it look…I don’t know—right. He just looked right on a bike. We’d shake our heads and keep looking for a different cover photo. There were, after all, great images of Wade and Brett and all sorts of other riders, but the images of Schley kept rising to the top. And we kept putting him on the cover. And so did a whole lot of other magazines.

Did this mean that Richie was the best rider of that era? I suppose you could argue this was the case, but I don’t think that Schley would even suggest this were true. Besides, what does “best” even mean in a sport that’s dedicated to carving the line that feels best to the rider in question? Does being the boldest rider make you the best? If that were the case, Bender would have won the crown. There wasn’t a risk that guy wouldn’t take, but here again, Bender never claimed to be the best at anything either. He was doing his own thing. Richie was doing his own thing. We all are, I suppose, out there on the bike doing our own thing. Individuality of expression is, in some ways, part of what defines mountain biking; it’s what sets mountain biking apart from sports where people wear matching uniforms, abide by thick regulation books and are chased about on the field of play by people with whistles and even lamer uniforms.

So, no, it’s not about being “the best”, whatever that even means. Richie Schley was (and still is) supremely talented, but he also just plain looked good on a bike. Some folks do. Watch a video of Luke Strobel absolutely terrorizing a corner. Is there anything prettier than that? I don’t think so. Is he fast? Very. Is he a Dominating-the-World Cup-Today kinda fast? Not at the moment. Again, we have an incredibly skilled guy who also happens to look good on a bike.

There are, of course, hundreds of men and women out there who make riding a bike look effortless and graceful and just flat-out awesome. Chances are you’ve run into a few. You look at them sailing through the sky, ripping a berm, or floating above the gnar and your jaw drops because they look the way you feel when you are at your very best.

You know that moment when everything clicks during a ride? When you feel like King Kong swinging from the Empire State building, swatting airplanes from the sky, being the baddest goddamn monkey in the whole world? Those supremely talented people are all a symbol of what we can ultimately become. Many of us—probably most of us—feel that kind of invincible…. as we hunch grotesquely on the bike, our faces frozen in what looks like a rictus of pain, our knees akimbo, our weight all wrong, our elbows locked, our supply of Pretty-On-The-Bike completely exhausted the moment we climbed aboard it.

Or, then again, maybe it’s just me.

I hear the camera clicks firing away as I wind the bike back up to speed and blow by Colin. There’s a big, hatchet shaped rock in the line that I never noticed on my previous 166 passes. The rock looms, I preload and lily pad over the thing with all the grace of a wet sack of laundy being dropped out of a five-story window. I stay upright and clean the section, but I also know it wasn’t pretty. Click-Click-Click-Click-Click-Click

The camera never lies.