A Sunday In Hell (1977)

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While I'm waiting for...sources...to upload the women's Saturday in hell from earlier today and gearing up for the men's race tomorrow, I decided to give this movie a rewatch. It's excellent: deliberate and attentive in a way that matches the pace of the sport, a voice and eye that lets the natural drama of the race shine through without over-embellishment. A lovely time capsule of the cycling world of 50 years ago.

Plus ça change...

Guys cracking their bare heads open on the pavé will have you wondering how more riders didn't just drop dead before helmets became the norm.
For some reason the steak for breakfast bit always gets me. Carbohydrates hadn't been invented yet in '76.
Old-timey diagnostic medicine being 80% taking people's pulse, 15% poking them and 5% miscellaneous also always gets me. Also, 40 is nothing compared to Induráin, whose RHR at his peak was apparently under 30.
Them wheels: waferrr-thin, holding up like ten kilos of bike and another maybe 80 of (pre "maximizing watts per kilo by minimizing the denominator") rider.
The break gets like ten minutes of leash, though at that margin it seems to my modern eyes more like they get the run of the dog park. Pacing: also not yet invented yet in '76.
In 2025, a reigning TdF champion starting in Paris-Roubaix is insanity. In 1976, it's just "oh yeah, Bernard Thévenet is here too".
Just a little thing, but the lack of English is noticeable. Teams communicate in French or Italian or Dutch according to their nationality, the race officials and TV broadcasters in French. The world feels a little smaller and slower.

...plus c'est la même chose:

Feed zones, somehow exactly the same.
Likewise the marshals marking out the route, not that there's any real reason for the technology of "guy with a sign and a whistle" to have been superseded.
The doomed early break ridden for exposure was not, for some reason, something I thought had such a long history.
The little electric razor or epilator De Vlaeminck uses on his legs at the beginning was another "wait, they had those in the 70s?" moment.
Just the vibes of the riders? Usually young men of older generations come across to me as seeming older than their years by modern standards (I've been listening to a lot of Joy Division lately and Ian Curtis is a stellar example of this), but something about the way the guys carry themselves here is recognizably that of 20-somethings. De Vlaeminck in this film has the eyes of a boy, is the best I can do to further verbalize or explain it.
This was hard to fit into the "things that are different"/"things that are the same" template, but the film diplomatically omits that by this point in his career, Mathieu van der Poel's granddaddy was firmly in his Do Drugs To Keep Up With The Young'uns era. Another callback to my post about God is Dead, since Poulidor and VDB were both under the auspices of Mr Homeopathy Horse Doctor Bernard Sainz.