It's a matter of your basic natural talent. It's a healthy time to start at 13 or 14. The great thing about cycling is it's a fitness sport. When you're a teenager you want to do something healthy. It probably kept me from messing with my friends and doing stuff that I shouldn't have been doing.
Cycling takes a certain discipline to try and race and do well.
There's a lot of sports w here you can kind of fool around and still perform, but in cycling you can't. As I raced I kind of understood that really every culture has their idea of what sport is. Americans probably can't believe that Europeans don't like baseball more. But I've learned to grow with that. But I've actually grown quite amazed at the acceptance of cycling.