A bicycle dragged through mud on purpose would look, at first glance, like affectation. A hobby for people with the leisure to invent hardship. Orwell’s instinct was always to scrape the varnish off things and see who paid for the shine.
But then he would notice the details that refuse romance.
No freewheel means no pretending. The machine does exactly what the rider does, no more, no less. Stop pushing and you are stopped. Push badly and you are carried badly. There is no polite mechanism translating effort into comfort. Cause and effect sit together like plain words in a short sentence.
He would approve of that clarity.
Tracklocross strips away the ornamental language of sport. No glossy surfaces, no aerodynamic promises, no chrome vocabulary of speed and victory. Just a rider, a simple machine, and ground that answers back. In this, he would sense an honesty rare in modern pastimes. A rejection of spectacle in favour of function.
Mud is not symbolic here. It is mud. Cold, adhesive, inconvenient. It clings to the frame and gums the drivetrain and makes forward motion inefficient. To ride through it is to accept friction as fact, not metaphor. Orwell valued precisely this refusal to let words drift away from material conditions. Difficulty should feel difficult.
He would like the lack of grandeur.
Tracklocross rarely occupies official spaces. It slips along canal paths, edges of fields, scraps of land between infrastructures. It uses what exists rather than what has been curated. This would read to him as quietly democratic. Not exclusive in the way polished sports can become, but open to anyone willing to get dirty and go slowly.
The pace would matter. There is no elegant glide, no detached coasting. Progress is granular, made of repeated small efforts. This would echo his belief in the dignity of ordinary labour. Not the dramatic gesture, but the sustained one. The revolution of the crank like the turning of a page, the lifting of a tool, the daily act done again because it must be.
He would be wary of style.
If the mud became fashion, if the hardship became branding, he would turn away. He distrusted any suffering that could be tidied into an image. But when the ride is simply what it looks like, a person moving themselves across imperfect ground by their own effort, he would see a kind of moral hygiene in it. No euphemisms, no abstractions.
Language and machine would align.
A fixed gear is syntactically strict. You cannot add clauses of convenience. No conditional coasting, no subjunctive spinning. Every sentence is declarative. I pedal, therefore I move. I stop, therefore I halt. Orwell believed good prose should work the same way. Direct, unadorned, resistant to fog.
There is also politics in the terrain.
Off road, away from traffic, the rider slips briefly outside systems designed for speed and throughput. The journey becomes inefficient by design. In a world obsessed with productivity, choosing a slower, harder route reads like a small act of dissent. Not loud enough to be slogan, but steady enough to be stance.
He would notice the solitude without isolation.
Tracklocross is often done alone, yet rarely feels lonely. Paths are shared, tracks re-used, traces of other tyres crossing your own. A quiet commons of effort. This would appeal to his belief in ordinary solidarity, the untheorised bond between people doing practical things in difficult conditions.
No heroics, no podiums, no anthems.
Just breath in cold air, legs turning, tyres cutting soft earth. The kind of activity that resists propaganda because it is too specific to be mythologised. You cannot easily lie about how hard it is to pedal through wet grass on a one-gear bike. Your body edits the exaggeration.
He would see in it a discipline of attention.
You cannot drift. The ground demands reading. Ruts, roots, stones, patches of thaw and freeze. Each metre asks a question and expects an answer now. This vigilance against inattention mirrors his insistence on intellectual clarity. To look properly, to name accurately, to move deliberately.
Tracklocross would not be escape for him.
It would be a way of remaining in contact with the physical truth of effort. A reminder that motion costs energy, that terrain resists intention, that progress is negotiated rather than assumed. In that friction between will and world, he would find something worth preserving.
Not a romance of mud, but a respect for it.
Not a cult of suffering, but an acceptance of work.
A plain machine, a stubborn path, a rider who cannot coast through either language or life without first pushing the pedals.
Fiefdom Tracklocross 
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