Product Description

When a normal situation suddenly changes, Belgians call it 'een hond met een hoed op,' a dog with a hat on. Joe Parkin, an American bike racer who left the familiar comforts of home to compete at the highest professional level in Belgium, was that dog in a hat - something familiar, yet decidedly out of place.In his searing, no-holds-barred memoir, Parkin describes the true life of the professional bike racer. His plainspoken prose puts us in the whirlwind of this hardest of athletic educations, starting with the first visit to his team doctor, where, strapped to a metal table and monitored by humming electrodes, men in white lab coats coldly divine his future as a pro.Parkin pulls no punches. "A Dog in a Hat" celebrates the glory of bike racing, but Parkin tells the hard reality of the life thrillingly - the drugs, the payoffs, the betrayals by team-mates, the battles with team owners for contracts and money, the endless promises that keep you going, and the sheer physical agony of racing day after day.Despite the pain, despite the suffering, "A Dog in a Hat" is a beautiful book. It is one racer's story of his love affair with professional cycling, set in the hardest place in the world to be a bike racer. It is a story untold until now, and one that Parkin's readers will never forget.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7128 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 205 pages

About the Author
Joe Parkin was an amateur bike racer in California when he met Bob Roll (Bobke II), who advised him to move to Belgium to further his cycling career. He represented the United States at the World Professional Cycling Championships and the World Cyclocross Championships. Following his road racing years in Belgium, he returned to the United States and began a successful second career as a pro mountain bike racer. He currently resides in Golden Valley, Minnesota.

Customer Reviews

Funny and sobering...
Being a Flemish cycling enthousiast(after all, our love for cycling is a genetic feature of most Flemings...) I was really curious to read the story of this "Yankee at the World Centre of Cycling". I must say I was positively surprised by his no-nonsens approach, with easy to read, well written chapters and a nice set of glossy colour pictures. The odd Flemish expressions and curses thrown in, add a nice local flavour to the stories and enhance their credibility. Joe is very straightforward, outspoken and - I want to believe - honest in his analysis of the tough small inner circle of life on the racebike in Europe, especially Flanders, where he came to look for a career in professional cycling. The backroom politics, backbiting amongst riders donning the same jersey, the relation with the directeurs sportifs, the way races are "pre-arranged", all confirm the fact that the only message for naive newcomers is to accept the unwritten rules of the peleton or get destroyed... Joe doesn't dodge the tricky issue of organized doping either, which shows how doping had become generally accepted in cycling and inherited by one generation of riders to the next one. The book is a real page turner and reads like a 53 X 11 gear during a descent. Most recommended to anyone interested in sports in general and cycling in particular.

A Dog in a Hat
This memoir would not have been published a decade ago. Then, cycling books were idealized, all sunflowers, suntans and white teeth. If the Festina Affair was some kind of milestone, more recent events have stripped the veneer from pro cycling to expose a drug-fuelled sham. Its aspiring saviours face a huge challenge.

Joe Parkin wanted to be the best. Arriving from the USA as an innocent, he witnessed in Belgium the darker side of cycling at his first pro event with riders openly injecting themselves as part of pre-race preparation.

Parkin was a nearly man. Fate, or ability that fell short, kept him from the big win that would make his name. But he kept trying, absorbing Flemish culture and speaking the language. He was accepted.

Kermis - or kermesse - racing is the staple diet of Belgian cycling. Jim Ochowicz told Parkin that kermis riders were 'a dime a dozen' and that he should have ambition for the big races. Parkin himself found his dressing room peers generally dim. However, he was a man trying to do a superman's job. It wasn't long before dope claimed him, too.

The drudgery, race-fixing and duplicity of riders, managers and sponsors -and not merely in the second stream - comes through Parkin's words. There's not much glamour for the journeyman professional. He stayed just a few years in Belgium and then did not return. Who could blame him?

a cat on a hot tin roof
I bought this book after reading a review in procycling magazine.I wasn't dissapointed.Its a great read,well written and an honest and open account into pro cycling.I couldn't put it down.Its worth putting on your wish list or getting it for a xmas present.