The Year's Best Sports Writing 2021

Noel Kegel, riding in Kazakhstan the day of his chance meeting with Leon Whiteley. Photo: Noel Kegel.

Six years ago, I stumbled upon a story so mystical I thought it couldn’t possibly be true.

Barbara Malki, my friend and owner of Cahaba Cycles in Birmingham, Ala., told me she met a guy who rode his bike from Europe to Asia—a solo journey of 10,000 miles. His name was NOEL. On the way, he ran into another lone traveler riding his bike from Asia to Europe. His name was LEON. The colliding strangers—NOEL + LEON—found their mirrored names curious, but not that remarkable.

This sounded like an urban legend to me. Then Barb put me in touch with Noel Kegel, a very real person who owns a Wisconsin bike shop called Wheel & Sprocket. Noel verified the story and shared 10,000 time-stamped photos and a spreadsheet of GPS breadcrumbs that tracked his path from ocean to ocean. Then he introduced me on Facebook to Leon Whiteley, who was teaching English in China. Leon shared with me his day-by-day blog, which tracked his daily mileage and included a photo of meeting Noel in the middle of the Kazakhstan desert.

It took me five years of interviews, several thwarted attempts to Skype into China (where Leon was teaching English), and many hours of poring over GPS coordinates on Google Earth, to report and write the true story. Leah Flickinger and Matt Allyn, my editors at Bicycling, let me experiment with the story. I wanted to try a story structure I had never seen used: a palindrome.

I was so worried it wouldn’t work that I actually wrote two different drafts—one structured as a palindrome, and one with a chronological sequence—and let my editor choose which worked best. If my idea confused the reader and failed to serve the story, I was willing to abandon it. The only way it would work was if it was invisible to the reader. Seamless. A sleight of hand just for me.

My editors chose the palindrome.

The story ran as COVID-19 escalated into a global pandemic. I worried it would be lost in the hurricane of bad news. I hoped the would find it a little oasis of wonder and magic in the chaos of 2020.

I was very pleased when the story was mentioned on some of the Best of 2020 lists—The Sunday Longread, Longform, Apple News Audio, the New York Times Sidney Awards. It won a Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing and is a finalist for the Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sports Writing, which will be announced in the next few weeks. And I was thrilled when it was chosen for inclusion in The Year’s Best Sports Writing, the new iteration of the long-running series Best American Sports Writing.

The anthology comes out October 5, 2021. It includes some amazing stories, including Mitchell S. Jackson’s “Twelve Minutes and a Life,” a story about Ahmaud Arbery, a runner who went for a jog and was gunned down in the street. The story won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award for feature writing. It was also edited by Leah Flickinger.