Winning Isn't Everything
On the retirement of Lawson Craddock
I feel remiss not having noticed, or internalized, or remembered this news earlier, since it apparently hit the wire in July.1 But Lawson Craddock is retiring. Has retired already, in fact, since his last meaningful professional race was more than a month ago at this point. Craddock is by no means a superstar; his decision to hang up his helmet was only a footnote in Alasdair Fotherhingham’s retirement roundup on Cycling News, which is where I found out about it.
And that is probably appropriate. If we weren’t in the dead of the offseason, I might not have written about this at all—certainly not for an entire article. But Craddock’s career illustrates something I like about cycling, which sets it apart from other sports.
Craddock was an all-rounder, a generalist in a sport where glory is reserved for specialists. His standout discipline, insofar as he had one, was the individual time trial. He won back-to-back U.S. national time trial titles in 2021 and 2022 and finished a surprising sixth under wet and treacherous conditions at the world time trial championship in 2019.
I was about to say that these are by far his most significant professional results, but that’s only true from a certain perspective.
Craddock came up through the Trek-Livestrong development pipeline in the late 2000s and early 2010s, alongside Nathan Brown, Ian Boswell, Gavin Mannion, and a bunch of other Americans you probably only remember if you played a lot of Pro Cycling Manager several years ago. But when the time came to join a senior pro team, Craddock hooked up with the Dutch Giant-Shimano outfit2, rather than one of the American teams—Garmin-Sharp3 or BMC or Trek. In the black and white colors of Giant-Shimano, he finished a surprising third at the Tour of California in 2014.
Now, when a young rider had a high finish at the Tour of California, it presaged great things for non-Americans. The last two riders to win the race before it went under were Egan Bernal and Tadej Pogačar. (It was the first World Tour GC win for both riders.) Dani Martínez, Sergio Higuita and George Bennett also podiumed there. For Americans, it was a bit of a mixed bag. Not like Andrew Talansky and Tejay van Garderen had terrible careers, but neither ever podiumed a grand tour.
This being 2014, I was too callow to realize that Craddock finishing third at the Tour of California, even at the age of 22, did not necessarily augur a future full of yellow jerseys. He never won an elite race after that, the two national championships notwithstanding.
Craddock’s versatility, however, made him a valuable grand tour domestique. The tweenerism that kept him from contending for GC turned out to be an asset for a stage-hunting team. Craddock could time trial well enough to pull a breakaway along, and climb well enough not to get dropped on intermediate-mountain climbs. He could sprint well enough to serve as a leadout man in a reduced bunch, if not well enough to actually win a sprint for himself.
In 2016, he finally hooked up with what is now EF after all, and spent half of his 10 seasons at World Tour level racing for Jonathan Vaughters. It’s where he achieved his two most famous results, in races he was not particularly trying to win.
Craddock’s first start in a grand tour for EF was the 2018 Tour de France. The way the race numbering system works, the defending champion’s team usually gets single-digit numbers, the returning second-place rider’s team usually gets numbers in the teens, third place in the 20s, and so on. The designated team leader gets a number ending in one, with remaining riders assigned numbers in alphabetical order.
Because Rigoberto Urán had finished second on GC the year before, EF got numbers 11 through 18; Urán wore no. 11, Simon Clarke wore no. 12, and next in the alphabet was Craddock. Cyclists are traditionally a little superstitious about the number 13,4 so the rider who draws that number will usually pin it on upside-down to reverse the voodoo.
Craddock might as well not have bothered. On the very first stage, he crashed and broke his scapula. That’s usually a race-ender, but Craddock, famously blooded from head to toe, decided to keep going. This was the summer after Hurricane Harvey had left Houston, Craddock’s hometown, chest-deep in water for the best part of a week.5
Craddock had pledged $100 of his own money for every stage he finished, to fund repairs for the velodrome in Houston where he’d started racing as a kid. Doctors informed Craddock that while the fracture would be painful, he would not cause further injury by continuing to ride. So he figured it’d be ungallant to quit after one day, and rode on.
He ended up winning one of the most prominent honors of his career, the Lanterne Rouge, by finishing dead last in the race. Craddock made it all the way to Paris, four and a half hours behind the winners and more than 20 minutes behind the second-to-last finisher. And as his story spread back home, he raised $225,000 for the Greater Houston Cycling Foundation by the end of the Tour. That figure swelled to some $280,000 in the months that followed.
Cycling fans love pain and suffering. They love to talk about it, glamorize it, treat it as redemptive on a level otherwise familiar only to masochists and Protestants. I’ve said this before, but I’m slightly uncomfortable with that line of rhetoric. In addition to redemptive suffering being the thin end of the wedge for a variety of harmful scams—most notably capitalism, but also masochism and Protestantism—I look at how some cyclists67 talk about pain and can only think that they’d do themselves a world of good by getting off the bike and on a treatment plan of therapy and antidepressants.
It’s rare that you can point to someone pushing foolishly through pain and coming out with something more than a moral victory. My mistrust of inspiring sports stories is almost as great as my mistrust of redemptive suffering, but there’s a bike track in Texas that might not be there today if one of its students hadn’t finished the Tour de France when a rider with any sense would’ve packed up and gone home.