Motivation Quote by Bernard Hinault

Hinault’s line lands like a diagnosis from someone who helped build the mythology and now doesn’t like what it’s turned into. Coming from a five-time Tour de France winner, it isn’t nostalgic whining; it’s a veteran clocking a structural shift in how cycling asks to be lived. “Impression” is doing sly work here: he’s not claiming moral certainty, he’s describing a felt atmosphere, a sport whose air has changed.

The pivot from “game” to “employment” isn’t just about money. It’s about autonomy. A game implies play, improvisation, risk taken for its own thrill. Employment implies compliance: training blocks optimized to the decimal, team hierarchies, sponsor obligations, media duties, data dashboards that turn intuition into a KPI. Hinault rode in an era when riders could still perform the romantic script of the lone aggressor; modern cycling, with radios, power meters, and tightly managed tactics, often prizes controlled outcomes over chaotic heroics. Calling it “a job” frames the peloton less as a band of daredevils than as a workforce executing a plan.

There’s also a moral undertow. Cycling’s modern professionalism grew alongside darker incentives - the pressure to produce results on contract timelines, the temptation to treat the body like a machine with parts you can “service.” Hinault’s critique hints that when a sport becomes labor, the ethics get negotiated like workplace demands: deliver or be replaced.

He’s mourning play, but he’s also warning: once the romance is outsourced to marketing, riders become employees of a spectacle, not authors of it.