The climate of the Mekong delta is not kind to a pasty Englishman; since getting off my bike and returning to our hotel room where the air conditioning wasn’t working, I hadn’t stopped sweating. Until I started shivering about midnight. In the meantime I had decided to skip dinner but forced down a steamed bun and a beer (optimal nutritional choices). That night I was sick seven times, I slept in a shower with the water keeping me cold. My teammates were caught between concern and exhaustion.

Less than 24 hours later I was racing around Saigon’s district 7, a crit at over 51kph fuelled entirely by “golden cow” energy beverages, which isn’t much fun; neither is being about 5cm taller than the next tallest bloke in the peloton and smashing your boys bits into the saddle so hard that you break the shell. None of these is an optimal way to start your Saturday. But when there are hundreds of Vietnamese school kids going absolutely bonkers by the barriers, a flotilla of motorcycles which would make the Hell’s Angels envious, and a peloton that made up for having the same average height as the inhabitants of the Shire by one of the most friendly, diverse, and enthusiatic crowds I have ever raced in, you’re still having fun. Or at least I was; my intestines were still not in their happy place.

I have been lucky enough to race on four continents now, and the experience we had in Vietnam was one of few in which the whole environment – from the food, to the race, to the roads, to the climate, to the hotel, to the weird tapioca beverage they served at dinner – contributed to the overall stranger in a strange land feeling. But, as the team name suggests, Team Traveller’s finest embraced the novelty and dove in head first. Not only did we get in some fun racing, we tried our best to really find our way into the real Vietnam, speak to the people, eat the food, and of course, ride the roads.

Saigon, if you haven’t been, is essentially a city of 8.5 million people, all simultaneously participating in a Cat 6 criterium on motorbikes with lawnmower engines. On arriving (and we very nearly didn’t arrive, thanks to some visa shenanigans) we hadn’t slept for 48 hours (aside from a snatched hour in Taipei’s transit lounge) and we could barely keep our eyes open. But once we got in the taxi we could barely keep our heads inside the minibus (this wasn’t helped by our driver’s insistence on pumping up the Backstreet Boys, which I had mistakenly shown recognition of). Everywhere mopeds flowed around cars, other mopeds, street food stalls, enormous potholes, and the occasional traffic commisar in pristine white gloves trying to control the herd.

Having sampled Vietnam’s fantastic (and fantastically strong) cafe sua (rich, chocolatey espresso and creamy-sweet condensed milk), we built and rode our bikes, whereupon we inspected the supermarket and returned loaded down with with things we hadn’t ever eaten before. In many cases this proved enlightening, and in certain cases (hello, squid jerky) it proved deeply worrying. The next day, Jordan and I – joined by our teammate Martin, a fellow Brit – made a trip to the market in the middle of town. After Martin had finished mocking me for looking like a “gap year tit” we stocked up on tailored suits for $60, neon underwear (it’s important for the team to be matchy-matchy, right?) and photographs of Vietnamese people marvelling at Christmas trees in tropical temperatures.

The race presentation came and went, and with it one of the more interesting race buffets I have ever had the pleasure of(over)eating. I never knew I liked congee, or crunchy pork “fiber,” I’ve never bolused for what I thought were noodles only to find that they were actually tiny eels, or had a drink which was supposed to have mucilaginous globs floating around in it, or seen a steam table full of chicken heads. I’m sure if I was a serious bike racer I’d have been on the rice and grilled chicken. Good thing i’m a gap year tit then.

The first day of the race took us, via some large potholes, an enormously beautiful suspension bridge, every small child in the whole of Southern Vietnam, and several fairly spectacular faceplants to Can Tho. Can Tho is the capital of the Mekong Delta province, it’s a bustling market town with none of Saigon’s tourist industry. Lying on the ground after the stage (enjoying what would become a daily ritual of ice and vomiting), little children touched my white chest and brown arms, laughed at my beard and scrambled for my bottles. At dinner the Filipinos (Team 7-11, no less) laughed at my unfamiliarity with the food, the Malaysians showed me how to sequester bananas away for later, and the Vietnamese slurped their pho while I spilled mine.

I won’t bore you with race details – I rode my bike and didn’t win (you’re shocked, aren’t you). Sometimes I tried to attack, it didn’t work. Efforts sucked the life out of me in the heat. The air felt thick in my lungs and left a black coat on my legs. I drank more than I ever had before, and I rushed to a barber to have the beard removed. I looked up “shave” and managed to say “I would like a shave, manicure, face pack, and please vacuum my skin while you’re at it.” Afterwards I felt cooler, cleaner and I looked a lot more like a bike racer.

The  race could not have been better run. I have been in many races in the US and Europe which could learn an awful lot from the marshalling (not least in terms of dance moves), hotel organization, catering, and race vehicles we received. Yes there were issues with the UCI commissaire, but that’s not the fault of the organiser and it’s a story for another day. Suffice it to say that cycling is succesfully clamping down on the issues which are ruining the sport’s public image and expelling those who are the worst offenders. I want to publically apologize for my refusal to adhere to the WADA sock doping rules and the fact that my team contained more than one nationality, apparently these warrant being not allowed to race, unlike certain other offences.

Our race finished with a criterium in downtown Saigon, and having applied appropriate hosiery we took the start line. I hadn’teaten for three days. Fortunately not eating had spared me the food posioning which had struck everyone else on our team who had troubled the race buffet 12 hours previously. With all but one of us struck down we set about putting on a show.

The crit was a points race which saw me fulfilling my calling as a “take me from the back to the front guy” and “attack on the non-sprint lap dude.” By the end of the race our merry band was down to half our original numbers with our only “healthy” rider severely in Mojo (maybe it’s true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?) as Martin and Jordan were regurgitating dinner on the backside of the course as the crowd looked on, baffled. Jean Michel managed to make it back to the hotel before the confined spaces of the elevator provided the perfect location for a botu of projectile vomming, which didn’t endear us to the other 200 people in the race who had to get back to their beds.

After we were finally finished we spoke to the spectators, an old man pinned a communist youth badge, we hugged our mechanic, and handed over a signed kit. We gave our last remaining PowerBar bottles to the assembled kids and signed autographs for people who clearly had no idea who we were. They shoved TV cameras in my face and I spoke the only words of Vietnamese I had learned – “thank you” – luckily they fit pretty well with how I felt (and I would never say “Now where’s the crapper I need to spew my guts out” on live TV, even if I could do so in the local lingo) . We spent a week on the beach, it was fun, we returned to Saigon, we stayed in a run-down hotel and, on our last night, we ate street food and it was, as always, delicious, cheap, and, true to form contained something’s head/foot (a chicken this time).

With half the team gone and my roomate safely tucked up in bed, I went for a walk, where I get the impression from the muffled giggles that 190cm long-haired white men don’t frequent the neighbourhood. Crouching my way along the pavement I saw a man of about 40, he beckoned me into his home and, being incapable of fearing anyone who offers me watermelon, I slipped into his smoky, one-roomed home. We ate the watermelon (I will admit the arrival of a machete on the scene gave me the willies), and a Coca Cola bottle filled with rice vodka emerged alongside this man’s father. Soon enough handsignals, his few words of French, a basic knowledge of recent history, and play acting had explained he had served in the Vietnam war, and not on the losing team! For an hour we drank tiny shots and he made the rat-atat tat noise of a machine gun while hugging me every few minutes. And so ended my time in Vietnam, in the hands of the Viet Cong, drinking their vodka and eating their watermelon. Such is the rich tapestry of life and the joy of travel.

Obviously there have been other stories in the media concerning less distinguished racers. As you may have gathered, just about anyone who was anyone in the 90s was probably charging. If this surprises you, you may wish to reconsider your decision to bury your head in the ground and when you pull it out, do me a favour and don’t act like an ostrich. Whether you chose to ignore doping or you chose to believe that it was something which everyone apart from your wristband-touting heroes did doesn’t matter anymore. Everyone now knows what everyone already knew, but now everyone has to deal with it.

Charging has been part of the sport for longer than I have, I’m sure it will remain part of the game long after I’m out of it. I’ve written before about why it doesn’t make sense to me. After 7 weeks off the bike I have loved every second of my training recently, I have had the chance to do some of the most beautiful rides in my life, including a 7-hour dirt road, navigation-impaired, ice-cream-fuelled adventure around Los Altos. The gorgeous Mt. Tam Dam loop and a spin around the vineyards of Paso Robles which reminded of my beloved Catalan countryside.

Anyway, long story short, I cannot conceive of NOT riding my bike, a lot, and being happy. As such I can’t see why anyone would do something which so manifestly puts in danger their ability to do that. If you’re lucky enough to get the chance to get paid to ride your bike, putting that in danger is a pretty serious risk to take. Let’s face it, most of the guys now serving bans aren’t exactly shining paragons of mental wellbeing.

I find it interesting that so many people who are so far removed from a world in which doping is a possibility, let alone a choice, find it so fascinating to delve into the minutiae of not who doped (if you’re still asking that question, you’re naïve in the extreme) but how they doped. Is this the same impulse which sees us reading brutal accounts of murders and robberies? As a society, do we feel better about ourselves if we compare favorably to other people in other situations who made different choices? If this is a moral issue, then what do the ways and means matter? IF you’re the kind of person who claims that the revelations about another member of US postal or T Mobile or ONCE stopped you riding your bike, then you’re not riding your bike for the right reasons anyway, and you were going to stop anyway, and you’re likely not reading this anyway.

Ultimately, lots of people who were really good at cycling cheated to get a little bit better. I rode 200km today, in a sportive, with lots of guys who wore headbands and camelbaks and had helmet mirrors, they seemed to enjoy the ride. I know I had a fantastic time. I think we all need to take a step back from looking at cycling merely as the Tour de France, and at cyclists merely as the members of US Postal squad from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s. Instead we need to take our discourse and our own thoughts about the sport away from the 1% of riders who are good enough to ever have to think about maybe doping, and focus on the 99% of guys for whom bike riding is fun. Now admittedly this is unlikely to be the subject of a bestselling book ghost written by a guy who makes a living writing books about people who cheat at bike racing, but it might remind you why you watch cycling in the first place.

Let’s face it folks, bike racing isn’t that fun to watch, but bike racing is fantastic to do. You watch a race to put yourself in that place, to remember the roads from your last race wherever it may be, or to imagine them if you’ve never had the chance to ride them. You watch a race, because you love riding your bike. So next time you’re watching a race, try not to think about who is charged up and who is clean. When the camera focuses on the riders, think about how much they’re suffering, how they go from a tunnel of noise to a coffin-like silence in kilometers, how they hurt from fingertips to toes but they keep going, how the sweat runs into their eyes or the cold burns their fingers. Because that’s why you’re watching the race, because you know what that feels like, and that’s what cycling is about and that hasn’t changed, and it won’t change.

You’ll notice that a fair few of the journalists, writers, and media types who like to degrade cycling, to say it has no credibility, and try to run down the sport and it’s athletes may not have every suffered from their toes to their nose, they have probably never felt what it’s like to rip down through a corner at 75 kph or climb with a metronomic tempo and feel unstoppable.

Might I suggest that you, dear reader, next time you feel like being a snarky commentator, go and be a bike rider instead. I assure you, it’s more fun.