A Bike Derby Memory for OSCA’s 50th Anniversary

To the Editor:

You find yourself limping along at the tail end of a grim and meaningless century, a century that has witnessed the ascension of the capitalist state over the individual, and more often than is comfortable you feel the walls are closing in. Instead of the soma predicted by Huxley, you are fed on McDonald’s and the Home Shopping Club. America’s spirit lies ravaged by obedience and disillusion, and hear in “the heart of it all” lies Oberlin, where while the forces of darkness fight for the soul of a nation, a wavering cry for freedom will go up, as it has gone up before, tomorrow afternoon in Harkness bowl.
The Bike Derby embodies what is described by commentators foreign to our culture as Oberlin’s “quirkiness.” The contempt for convention and rejection of normative standards that are Oberlin’s hallmarks find no higher expression than in the destruction of vintage bicycles; part performance art, part athletic contest, part tragedy, the Derby defies classification. To ride is to transcend the mundane, and to lose oneself in the archetypal mask of the hero.
The Derby is nothing less than the collection and amplification of the peculiar tensions bred by life at Oberlin, a college where roughly 2,800 socially dysfunctional people plow their way through mounds of schoolwork and stress and share an almost universal will-to-opposition. On the surface they often seem to be merely over tired and a little on edge; at bottom they are turgid with anarchy and unexpressed emotion. To ride and feel the life force that surrounds this spring ritual is to give expression to this anarchic will, this frustration and desire that lies neglected through the long and miserable months of a North Coast winter.
The Derby transcends mere competition. It is heir to the tradition of the Dionysian mystery cults with their orgiastic rituals performed outside the boundaries of normal society. Anything is possible and the riders do indeed become anything. Any past participant will tell you that as they made their final preparations for the Great Combat, adjusting a helmet buckle, or perhaps hiking up their cellophane and blowing a kiss to a derby queen, that a spirit descended upon them unlike anything to be found in the translucent religions of today. Their hearts soared and began to beat with the hope of glory and the fear of ignominious defeat. They had entered a realm of imminent possibility; fulfilling, authentic and ultimately cathartic. All honor to the Bike Derby, may she never die. 

–Dan Murphy
OC ’93