It’s another dark and dreary Tuesday morning in the time of rising COVID-19 numbers and winter scaries. Desperately seeking a mood-booster, I dig deep and find it within myself to mount the Peloton bike my husband planted in our living room. I power on the tablet affixed to the handlebars and select a 30-minute pop ride. Soon, I am giggling out loud.
“Indisputably… Kevin is the hottest Backstreet Boy,” instructor Cody Rigsby says with grave seriousness, pedaling furiously through a playlist of BSB, NSync, Destiny’s Child and Dannity Kane. “But A.J. is the most talented… Fight me!”
Rigsby, 33, is strapping, built like a Disney prince, with a perfectly coiffed mini pompadour and power quads that bulge from his bike shorts, and if only for this half-hour, he is a respite from the corona blues, a one-man warp to simpler times, with the fashion to match: He is no stranger to neon and sometimes wears a single, dangling lightning bolt earring. Immersed in Backstreet Boy power rankings, the gloom of the pandemic momentarily slips my mind.
“No matter where you are in the world, no matter how much money you have… we are all feeling this collective pain and this grief,” Rigsby later told me via Zoom from his New York apartment, wearing a hoodie and a Mickey Mouse baseball hat. In fact, the day he filmed the boy bands and girl group-themed ride, he himself was struggling through the early sundowns of daylight savings time. But imagining riders across the country, following along in dens and home gyms, he says, “it motivates me to be the light.”
As gyms and boutique fitness studios shuttered, Peloton boomed—the company’s revenue is up 172% over last year, according to one report—and Rigsby, with his unwavering cheer, sass and and flair for nostalgia, has emerged an instructor uniquely suited to a bleak moment, a rainbow in our collective cloud.
“I hate to say this, but someone called me the king of quarantine,” he tells me. “I was like, ‘I’ll take it.’” As a friend and Cody devotee put it: “I would be a much sadder human during this time without him.” Rigsby now records his classes (not just indoor cycling but strength, meditation and, pre-pandemic, deliciously fun dance cardio set to Marky Mark jams) in an empty studio at Peloton headquarters in New York, due to coronavirus security protocol. But there are legions of members tuning in—either to take the class live or at a later date. By the time I stream the boy band bonanza a week after it first airs, more than 100,000 Peloton members have tuned into the class for q-t with Cody (thanks to his continued presence in my living room, I consider us to be on a first-name basis).
