By BEN MCCARTY
News staff writer
May 17, 2008

It’s a hard thing in sports, and life in general, to come to the realization that you are beaten.

Riding along in a car at the front of the race during stage two of the Mt. Hood Cycling Classic, I saw a rider fall away from the leading pack.

He was stuck in no man’s land. He did not have the strength to keep up with the leaders, but for the time being, he had just enough to stay ahead of the rest of the back.

Then he slowly began to drift back, and as the mass of sparkling helmets and driving legs drew closer, he disappeared into the pack.

As he disappeared, riders at the front were desperately trying to keep their dehydrated and sun-fried bodies going just a little longer.

Their gap with the rest of the field narrowed, as head judge Bill Wykoff called out the numbers at the front, and those that were dropping back into the main field.

Two minutes ... a minute forty ... a minute fifteen ... 55 seconds ... 40 seconds then Wykoff’s voice came over the radio, “We have one field of 70 riders ... I don’t have all the numbers.”

The riders who had stayed at the front for so long, and had pushed their bodies to the limit all day, were beaten.

“I like to think of more of a strategic chess match than as a race,” Classic spokesman Tre Hendrix, who was driving the car I was in, said.

The riders’ bodies were telling them they were done; no matter how much will power they applied or how they tried to trick their legs into going into faster, it wasn’t happening.

They were just as done as a chess master who, after playing his best against a supercomputer, looks frantically around the board for one more move, only to find one mathematically impossible. Checkmate.

For athletes who push themselves to be the best, it can be hard when they realize their best is not going to be enough.

Take Michael Jordan for instance.

Anyone who saw him in his prime, making ridiculous shots, defying gravity and taking his high flying, tongue wagging ways to numerous NBA titles could have no doubt they were seeing the greatest basketball player of all time. Contrast that with the final years of his career, when Jordan, believing he still had something left, suited up for the lowly Washington Wizards.

Sure, he could still hit an occasional jumper, but the Jordan of old, the one who could leave defenders marveling at his moves as he left them his wake, was no longer there.

Mercifully, after one last injury- plagued season during which he spent as much time on the sidelines icing his swollen knees as he did on the court, he called it quits.

Or look at baseball pitcher Barry Zito.

A few years ago he had the makings of a great ace with a blazing fastball and knee-buckling breaking ball.

Now he is lucky if he can throw the ball over 80 miles-an-hour, he has no command, and just two years into a seven-year mega-million-dollar contract with the San Francisco Giants, he has been demoted to the bullpen.

Perhaps Zito will reinvent himself, or come up with some magical mechanical fix to get his fastball back up, but in all likelihood he is as good as done, and the Giants’ tens of millions of dollars have been blown on a bust.

Or look at many of the great running backs of the last 30 years, guys like Franco Harris and Emmitt Smith, who, still in their early 30s, find themselves unable to run with speed and power of years past and limp to the finish line of their careers as backups in unfamiliar cities far from where they had their greatest seasons.

For athletes like those, that really was the end of the line.

For the riders struggling to get to the finish line of the Mount Hood Cycling Classic on Thursday, they were not done for good, just for the day.

But even for these young, strong cyclists, the day will come eventually when they will face the difficult time of seeing their speed not be what it used to be, and their stamina beginning to give out, and then begin to wonder about the unsettling possibility that their athletic careers may be facing a checkmate.

That is far from their minds right now, though. Those who straggled to the end of Thursday’s stage didn’t really have time to think about it.