Cycling’s holiest roller: The Vatican enters the sports world on two wheels

That’s because the crisp white-and-yellow on his back will represent the sport’s newest, and smallest, racing nation. On Sunday in Wollongong — against the likes of France, Belgium, and Italy — Schuurhuis is set to be the one-man cycling team of the Vatican.

He knows he isn’t exactly the holy roller you might expect the Holy See to put on a bike. For one thing, Schuurhuis is a 40-year-old Dutchman. But in one sense at least, he is among the rarest representatives the Holy See has ever sent out into the world. Pope Francis has canonised more than 90 individual saints during his pontificate. He has given his blessing to just one Vatican bike racer.

Schuurhuis’s list of professional achievements isn’t long. He has participated in lower-classified stage races in Asia and Oceania and his best result at the national championship level was finishing 40th out of 48 competitors in the time-trial in his native Netherlands. The Holy See, meanwhile, doesn’t currently offer a national championship. That said, Schuurhuis would probably do well in his adoptive cycling homeland. The official population of the Vatican is around 1,000.

“Cycling, and sport more broadly, has been a great pathway for me to be integrated into communities all over the world,” Schuurhuis said in a statement.

How Schuurhuis came to become the Vatican’s first representative at the cycling world championships is quite literally a matter of international diplomacy. And in this case, the diplomat is his wife. Schuurhuis is married to Chiara Porro, Australia’s ambassador to the Holy See, which qualified him for consideration under the rules of the Vatican’s sports association, an Athletica Vaticana official said.

“Pope Francis’ focus on sport as a vehicle for [connection] resonates deeply with my own life experience,” Schuurhuis said. “The language of sports is truly universal.”

And the Vatican is getting slightly better at speaking it. Beyond cycling, the city-state has also signed up to the International Padel Federation and joined World taekwondo. Officials say they are also seeking membership to World Athletics. But cycling, for now, is the standard-bearer. Pope Francis said as much in a 2019 speech to cycling delegates.

The sport, the pontiff added, “highlights certain virtues such as enduring fatigue (in the long and difficult climbs), courage (in attempting a breakaway or in facing a sprint), integrity (in respecting the rules), altruism and a sense of team.”

The Vatican’s recent interest in cycling is also set against the campaign for the beatification of Gino Bartali, one the sport’s all-time greats. Not only was he a two-time Tour de France champion and three-time winner of the Giro d’Italia — Bartali was also a devout Catholic who helped Jews escape Italy during World War II by secretly transporting counterfeit documents in the seatpost of his bike.

“We have no athletes who will win the Giro or the Tour, the Paris-Roubaix, Milan-Sanremo or the UCI World Championships,” Athletica Vaticana president Giampaolo Mattei wrote in an email. “But we have athletes who ride in the great group of world cycling, sharing an experience of solidarity and looking, as Gino Bartali always repeated, ‘For a medal to hang on the soul before the chest.’”

Beyond any medals — metallic or spiritual — the Vatican’s cycling team has jersey and helmet sponsors, like any other squad. It also boasts an unlikely partnership with the Ministry of Tourism of Malta, which Pope Francis happened to visit in April.

So the Vatican’s sports federation won’t be going into Wollongong looking like total amateurs. Besides, the country has participated in international sporting events before. This past summer, Athletica Vaticana already fielded athletes at the Championships of the Small States of Europe, where Cyprus is the resident powerhouse.

The Vatican also took part in this year’s Mediterranean Games, despite being technically landlocked.

But on both occasions, Athletica Vaticana was only invited as a non-scoring participant. For cycling worlds, it’s playing with the big boys. Schuurhuis will be in the same peloton as Tour de France champions and the winners of one-day classics.

The reality is that Schuurhuis will simply be happy to complete an elite race whose very scale dwarfs the country he is representing. At 165.8 miles, Sunday’s world championship course is the equivalent of pedalling around the entire Vatican 78.5 times.

-The Wall Street Journal