aflatmirror

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out the route, not that there's any real reason for the technology of "guy with a sign and a whistle" to have been superseded.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.

Today was stage 4 of Paris-Nice, Visma's second dress rehearsal for the Tour. It's funny, much as this is a relatively slow motion, punctuated equilibrium kind of sport on the level of individual days of racing, so too is it when you're looking at how the state of the field--the form of riders and teams--evolves over the course of the season.

( ... )

The first couple races of the World Tour are here with the women's and now the men's Tour Down Under. I don't know if the vibes were off at first with the racing or with me, but I felt like I was just kinda going through the motions until today, when stuff finally clicked.

( spoilers below )

I'm ignoring the trainwreck of the United States with two things: knitting, and the Tour.

I got into cycling last year with the first season of Au coeur du peloton/Unchained on netflix (I know, I know, cringe, etc). I can't even ride a bike in real life, but as an ad for the Tour de France and a starting point for people new to the sport, it totally worked on me. We attempted to watch it on TV that year, but we ended up with a huge backlog of unwatched DVRs and I mostly followed it via updates on like CyclingWorld.com etc. This year, I found the road cycling subreddit and used that to follow the Giro d'Italia, and I have...found methods of watching the Discovery+ coverage as of yesterday.

As the last several years have all been, the GC seems to be a contest mostly between Tadej Pogačar on UAE, who crushed the Giro like a soda can at the bottom of the ocean, and Jonas Vingegaard on Visma, who's won the last two years but suffered a horrible crash in April and is still something of a question mark; the fact he's here at all is unbelievable, and it's uncertain still how fragile that recovery might turn out to be. Today was a first taste of the Alps (much earlier than usual because the Paris olympics necessitated a route change-up) and JV seems to have had a bit of a rough day. But he says the team had expected him to have lost more time than he actually did today, so remains to be seen.

I really like both of them! Pogačar is probably hated most for being so dominant-yet-impossible-to-hate. He has a great sense of humor, he loves his teammates, he handed out bidons at last year's Tour de France Femmes. He's just a natural showman, great fun, immensely likable. In contrast, Jonas always seems to me like a quiet, awkward kind of guy, humble but nonetheless driven. As I said above, he almost died a couple of months ago, and the determination and resilience to be here at all is insane.

Uh, who else do I like? I'm a fan of a lot of the older guys for some reason (rip to Thibaut 😢, he's not dead he just retired), so I was happy to see Geraint podium at the Giro and Romain Bardet win the first stage of this Tour. I was also thrilled for Biniam Girmay's stage win yesterday! I always root for him as a black rider in an extremely white sport. I like that Adam and Simon Yates are twins (as a twin myself lol), I think it's cute that David Gaudu has a Twitch and I always call him "the little Twitch streamer". I dunno, I like all the guys except for a handful (Philipsen and Pidcock kinda rub me the wrong way, Tiberi uh. murdered a cat with a pellet gun. Those are the only ones off the top of my head).

I was gonna talk about knitting too, but I ended up writing this whole thing instead. Not that there's all that much to say, I'm finishing a pair of socks for a friend, I just cast on a Prismarine scarf where the pattern and yarn were a Christmas gift, I'm planning a bottom up set-in-sleeve sweater but stumbling at the fact that knitting stockinette flat makes me feel like a terrible knitter who can't control their tension at all