In gravel racing—the sport’s hottest category—the killing has exposed a lot of dirt.
www.newyorker.com
acutename posted this link up thread
It’s rather long but my oh my….
JMO
…last year the couple bought an investment property in Lockhart—a town, south of Austin, that has begun to attract what Tolley calls “artist-esque” people. “Owning property together—I was, like, Whoa, that’s a big step for Colin,” Tolley told me. When Tolley and Armstrong talked, he said, she seemed happy with her relationship. “She was in love with Colin. She wanted him to be—you know—the one.”
….Rockwell recalled that, whenever Strickland had to explain his relationship with Armstrong to people who didn’t know them well, he gave the impression that Armstrong was a difficult, volatile ex from whom he couldn’t quite disentangle himself. “It was, ‘We’re stuck in this business relationship,’ ” she said.
….Strickland also referred to their relationship almost as something to which he’d acceded. He said that he’d had to see past “stupid things, like, you know, the kind of clothes she wears.” In an aside to his lawyer, he said that there were a lot of people he “could’ve been spending my last three years with”
…Her (Rockwell) memory of a brief affair with him, that year, is an unhappy one. “I don’t want to present it as if I had zero interest in him—he was an attractive, successful man in the sport,” she said. “But, looking back, there was this massive power imbalance and dependency—these things that you can’t really see at the time, when you’re just chasing this one goal, blindly, doing whatever you feel is going to get you closer.”
When, at the end of the 2018 season, she told him that she wasn’t renewing her contract, he responded with what she called a tirade, telling her that she’d never find success. “His reaction wasn’t to try to coax me, or offer me more, win me over,” she said. “It was to try to bring me low enough—to a point of maintaining my dependency on him.”
…
Armstrong, in a conversation with Tolley, once described herself as being too jealous to ever have agreed to be in an open relationship.