Chapter 25: First Shot Fired

John

That was definitely a first. Rhonda crawled out from below my desk and gave me a shit eating grin, while I piled my privates back into my pants. I had never had to call her in for an emergency blowjob before.

Why I had deluded myself into thinking that we could go for more than two months without the dastardly duo making a big old splash, I didn’t know. It must have been a momentary lapse. According to what I knew, Mark was currently on the way to Berlin, starting the process of dying in a car accident and coming back as someone else, while Lydia and Meri were on their way to Switzerland for altitude training.

But, in the few days before that they had pulled off another stunt, just by taking a team photo. According to Byron, our newly-hired expert, these photos were standard in Europe. The entire team stood side by side each rider holding their bikes. The point was to present their kit, which usually changed more or less every year with sponsors leaving and new ones coming in.

Even Byron couldn’t remember any previous instance of any team having ever done so without presenting the actual kits, but having them painted on their stark naked bodies instead.

And fuck me! That was a fine looking lot. Mark was an expert in painting in such a way that the naughty bits were well obscured, but still, you could see nothing but everything at the same time.

I had seen Meri and Lydia before, during the charity run, and that had worked me up to the point where I plundered Rhonda’s ass something fierce in the evening. But here we were looking at seventeen very fit, very well-shaped, and very naked ladies with nothing but Mark’s excellent artistic skills preventing them from being completely exposed. That had been the point at which I had to beg Rhonda for some relief.

Needless to say, the name of this otherwise rather small and unknown team was the talk of the day. Media from around the world flung gobs of money at them for the right to publish the picture. And my friend Bill had called me that I better be in good shape tonight as he was planning to get us both hopelessly drunk.

The paint in his newly established Benelux dependency was hardly dry yet, and he had already been inundated with media attention and inquiries for his company’s services. That was the sweet thing about Dutch cycling fanatics. When they liked a team, they threw money at its sponsors.

Lydia

The media attention was almost frightening. As world class track and field athletes Meri and I were used to it, but we had been worried that our team mates would resent us for the media attention that followed. We were wrong. They were reveling in it. I think Femke had put it best:

“Had I known that all it takes is showing my tits, to finally get noticed as an athlete, I would have done so earlier.”

She had hit the nail on the head. Yes, the attention came from all of us posing naked with our kit painted on our bodies, but the media’s attention was on our sporting achievements. I could imagine that would have been different in America. Our media would still have been on about a bunch of women showing their tits, and what a scandal it was.

Nobody would have known – or given a shit – that we had beaten two first-tier teams to the win and second place in a relatively obscure Belgian race had we not generated the necessary attention with out stunt.

One could lament that fact, after all, no male athlete had to parade around his dangly bits to get some media attention, but I saw it as an advantage. Nobody wanted to see a male cyclist’s gentleman’s sausage, but put our tits on display and people get interested. In a way that gave us more influence than they had. We could make up for the media advantage that male athletes had, just by being prettier than them.

And thus we found ourselves in a small Swiss mountain village that currently felt like it had more media crews in it than inhabitants. Some of my team mates had serious problems getting used to the altitude. The air was much thinner up here and something as simple as walking to the shops and back could become a seriously exhausting exercise. Meri struggled quite a bit. For me that was nothing new. I was used to two or three periods of altitude training every year.

Normally we would have stayed in a small hotel, but our stunt had caused such a financial windfall for the team we could actually afford a last-minute change of venue. We found ourselves in one of these mountain resorts that specialize in hosting teams and athletes for altitude training – cycling teams, soccer teams, tennis players, the lot. They had soccer pitches, tennis courts and – more importantly – staff like physiotherapists and the like. We had a physio on the payroll, but we were seventeen girls, so a bit more backup would definitely help.

Mark

I normally don’t like hotels, but one of the advantages was that you got – to use a technical term – a shitload of programs on TV. With the media buzz created by our body painting stunt I wasn’t surprised to find a report on a Swiss TV sports program about that Dutch women’s cycling team, and it wasn’t only a short report, it was a full twenty minute feature. For once I could understand the commentary, and I liked the Swiss style of speaking, a more old-fashioned style of German that was at time almost hilariously formal.

Well, the guy wasn’t exaggerating. Meri pedaled up front, her mouth wide open, gasping for oxygen. Right now you wouldn’t have thought that this grimacing person was a stunningly beautiful woman, well, when she wasn’t red-lining her body up a Swiss mountain pass.

I realized just how long a mile is when the road goes relentlessly uphill. It had felt as if Meri had killed herself at the front of the pack for twenty miles, when in fact it had been two miles. The longer the climb went on, the more the commentator got into it as if he was reporting on a real race, not just a team’s training ride.

Yep, the guy got seriously excited. Of course, this being a training ride, mom didn’t do any celebration when she crossed the line first. The dude should probably have watched the Olympic marathon, then this would have been completely foreseeable. It was basically just a carbon copy of what she had done with Fedorova less than a year ago – let her attack, reel her back in and leave her in the dust. That was basically mom’s standard recipe to deal with her only real weakness. She couldn’t do quick changes of pace.

They did some more general style reporting about the team, interestingly enough barely ever mentioning why everybody was suddenly so interested in them. That was about to change when I saw that they were about to do the interview with mom. This was going to be interesting.

“Ms Karrass, thank you for agreeing to this interview,” the Swiss reporter began.”Your team has created quite some interest by posing for the official team photo with body paintings instead of wearing the actual outfit. In fact you wore nothing at all. You are not a stranger to glossy photographs yourself. Is there a strategy behind it?”

“In a way it is,” mom answered, smiling at him. “We all feel comfortable in our skins, and we had access to a great artist. As you have alluded to, it was not the first time for me to pose with a body painting on my skin. But in the end the reality is, female athletes generally get less media attention than men, especially in cycling, so we decided to be shameless about it and use the fact that not too many people are excited by a naked guy on a bike, but a few naked girls do the trick. I doubt we would be having this interview if we hadn’t done that.”

“Touché, Ms Karrass,” the interviewer admitted with a slightly abashed laugh. “But I get the impression that there is more to this than just mere attention seeking.”

“You shouldn’t interpret too much into it. We had fun doing it and we knew that European media would, once we had their attention, take a closer look at the team, not just our breasts. Trust me, this would have been a little different in the States. If anything, this is perhaps a none too subtle message to some of our competitors, because I can guarantee that some out there would never dare do something like that.”

“Of course, not everyone will be comfortable posing in the nude,” the reporter argued.

“It’s not about the nudity, Anton. The point of a body painting is you can see all, but at the same time actually nothing. No, what you see in that picture are seventeen healthy, female bodies. And some out there know that if they would do such a photo, people would see a not-quite as healthy or even female a body.”

“You are talking about hormones and other drugs?” he inquired.

“Endurance sports have always been vulnerable to performance enhancing drugs, be it to increase stamina or to aid regeneration. The thing is though, you’re messing up your body, and no trophy or medal is worth it. I’m thirty-three now, and without any humility at all, I can say that I have a body, healthy and unmessed with, that I can afford to have fun showing off.”

“You were born in the G.D.R. and competed for the country in your younger years. They have come under intense scrutiny in the last two years since details became known about their state-sanctioned doping methods. Did you come into contact with any of it before you fled for West Germany?”