Joe Parkin’s ‘Come and Gone’

By Ian Landau

Just as he did in A Dog In a Hat, the first installment of his two-part memoir, Joe Parkin’s Come & Gone takes us “inside the pro peloton” (my quotes, not his) for a road rash and all, hard-nosed look at life as a pro bike racer.

Dog, of course, looked at the supposedly glamorous life of the European professional. Although I think anyone who follows pro cycling these days has a pretty good idea that life ain’t cocaine and podium girls for most euro pros (not everyone’s Tom Boonen), Dog did a fairly good job of depicting what it’s like to throw reason to the North Sea winds and attempt to eke out a living as a bike racer in Flanders. (For a current look at such an endeavor, check out Sal Scotto’s updates from Belgium.) In a word, it kind of sucks.

Come and Gone picks up Parkin’s career when he returns to the States in 1991, after “six years in a rain cape” (to quote the title of his blog). Naturally, he figured he’d cross the Atlantic and become a superstar. As he writes, “People—including me—assumed that someone who had raced in the professional ranks in Europe should be able to step back into the domestic racing scene and win races at will. In my case, that simply was not true.” Why? For one, things were more organized in Europe, more down to a routine. In the U.S., Parkin found, his routine and his role in races was totally undefined; left to drift, his results suffered.

Mentally, it surely didn’t help that his first U.S. team, Scott/BiKyle, out of Philly, paid him $4,500 for the season (plus a bike, clothes, shoes, and some equipment). But let’s face it, domestic pros aren’t racing for the money. And to be fair, Parkin doesn’t blame his lack of results on being poorly compensated.

Parkin’s lot wasn’t all bad. He won a few races, and at the 1992 Kmart Tour of West Virginia he found a glimmer of his old superdomestique Euro self by helping the Coors Light team defend Scott Moniniger’s leader’s jersey.

This was the time when Armstrong was coming to prominence, and Parkin did cross paths with the Texan. Mostly, Parkin recalls races where Armstrong slaughtered the field. But one nice anecdote is during the 1994 Tour du Pont, while Parkin was riding for Coors Light, when he was featured in USA Today. The day the profile ran, Parkin recalls, Armstrong congratulated him on it—the only rider to do so.

After a gratifying season in 1994 riding for Coors Light, Parkin once again found himself teamless when the beer maker killed its cycling sponsorship. So he turned to the MTB side of the sport. In the fat tire world, he did find more success, but not quite enough to raise him to the level of superstar. One character who pokes his head into the narrative in 1996 is current world road champion Cadel Evans, a teammate of Parkin’s on the Diamondback Racing squad. But the book isn’t about Joe’s brushes with fame; it stays firmly fixed on his own travails, of which there were many.

In the end, Parkin quit racing in 1998. He attempted to race that season as a privateer, but his legs and his heart just gave out. It simply wasn’t fun anymore.

Like A Dog in a Hat, Come & Gone is a breezy quick read. Parkin is an entertaining writer, and anyone who’s ever pinned on a number will know all too well the frustrations and the joys he describes.