The 2011 Cirque du France erects its big yellow tent tomorrow, and for some reason I’m having a hard time getting excited about following all its high-powered critters around with a broom and dustpan.
I used to videotape these deals. Not just Le Tour, mind you, but every bike race I could find, over the air, on cable or satellite. These days we have rabbit ears and stream the Innertubes, and I will watch pro bike racing when I’m on the clock and earning, period.
The sport can still be thrilling, even beautiful, in the same way that a chuckling stream is lovely to look at until you notice the rusty, half-submerged shopping cart, the dirty soapsuds, the trash littering the banks. Fishing it on weekends from the Mad Dog pirogue is bad enough. I can’t imagine swimming in it, day in and day out. Not anymore.
I work part-time for VeloNews.com as an editor at large, pushing pixels on Saturdays and Sundays to help keep the site lively and give the full-timers a break. It’s been years since I covered a race in corpus, and I’ve never been on site for anything approaching the grandiosity of Le Tour.
Still, I do have a few acquaintances in the pro peloton, people I like to watch for their work ethic and esprit de corps. We’re talking water-carriers here, not stars. And 20-odd years of helping cover the folks they work for has led me to distrust the theatrical, explosive assault, the stuff of must-see TV.
In all sports, not just cycling, the pros are supposed to make the impossible look effortless. But all too often, when a pro cyclist en route to a big payday casually generates more watts, day in and day out, than the Grand Coulee Dam, we’ve found out afterward that there was more than fresh spring water running through his turbines.
For example, how Riccardo Riccó manages to find a job in cycling doing anything other than patching flats and huffing glue in a Formigine bike shop remains a mystery to me. And Super Spaniard … if the Court of Arbitration for Sport eventually rules against him and the Spanish cycling federation over his clenbuterol positive from last year’s Tour — last year’s Tour! — he’s gonna leave more asterisks in his wake than Kurt Vonnegut.
Kurt Vonnegut. Now there was a guy who knew an asshole when he saw one. Too bad he never took up sportswriting. He could draw, too.
Mad Blog Media 
Is it really THAT time again? Yawn….wake when the cross season starts again.
Yiyyy! So I guess you will step into the stream this weekend holding your nose and saying “la-la-la”?
Nice how ASO had the cyclists parade like slaves before the public in the fake coliseum. Evidently, the public gave thumbs down to Contador. If these were Roman times I guess he would have been killed.
One thing I just remembered Patrick…..a year ago at this time (Saturday in July, Day One of TdF) I was actually watching the stage unfold in person.
No matter how much dislike I have for one known as TCWSNBN, the Tour is definitely something one should see in person before they pass on from this mortal coil.
In 2012 demand that the only way the barrel gets filled by a Mad Dog is by having him in country for a few days. Definitely worth the effort to get there and back.
My copy of Breakfast of Champions, given to me on my 20th birthday, many, many years ago, is lost somewhere on the East Coast. Dang. Gotta replace it.
Still holed up in Santa Fe waiting for the smoke to clear. It just occured to me that the Tour was starting. Wish I could get excited over it. All I want to do is get back home, let the dogs in the yard, and have a cold one out of my own fridge.
Some years the Tour becomes exciting ’cause fate or chance or maybe the Furies intervene to show planing, talent, strength or cheating ain’t everything.
In the last 10K today it looked like fate, dressed as a spectator in a yellow shirt, stuck it to a particular mortal early.
Le Tour is often a bore, but being at the roadside when the peloton comes past rarely is. We’re skipping Le Beeg Shew this year after seeing the Giro stage on Colle Finestre in order to come back and work on visa issues for our winter stay. Glad Khal’s house is something he CAN come back to and open the fridge! We wrapped up our first Sardegna tour yesterday and took the ferry to Genoa last night. We’re back at our HQ getting ready for our Legendary Climbs tour which starts soon. Big mountains, big meals and big glasses of wine await!
Evacuation order was lifted this morning at about 7 a.m. I guess I’ll get to go home and have that beer!
Congrats, K … it must feel great to be headed for the barn. I hope you folks have been getting some of our weather; it’s been raining and hailing here, which is hard on the roses, but it does diminish the fire danger more than somewhat.
Khal,
That is certainly a good thing. Enjoy the beer!
Patrick, thanks for all the mad pixel-ing over at VN this weekend!
Libby, you’re welcome. The Tour for a bicycle mag/website is like Christmas for a retailer — it’s the time of year when everyone makes the mortgage — so there has been some medium-heavy lifting involved this weekend.
Happily, so far it seems likely that my stints in the Big Yellow VeloBarrel will be limited to weekends during this Tour, which suits me just fine. I need to spend a little more time in my own saddle, which remains blessedly unleveled by UCI pootbutts. I got out for an hour late this afternoon and felt as though someone had filled my seat tube and tires with BBs, and maybe slipped a brick or two or three into my jersey pockets.
Khal, Glad you’re going home to a home. Happy 4th everyone.
Khal, Good to hear you’re heading home.
Patrick, This reminds me of when I used to work in the bicycle biz. I got sick of the races, and lost interest. Then I got a real job outside the bike biz, and now I’m hooked again. If I could afford cable I’d probably be unemployed by the end of July because I’d blow off my job during the Tour to watch the live coverage each day. I think its the distance; enough but not too much. And of course I’m now the consumer of the entertainment, not involved in producing it.
I’ll be glued to the screen tomorrow following Charles “Mr. Live Update Guy” Pelkey as they roll out. Will Clenbutador make up the difference? Will the Thunder God hold onto Yellow? Will Vaughters shave off his sideburns? Tune in tomorrow.
Jon, you’re right, no question. When I was still working for newspapers I was riding a couple-three hundred miles a week, racing 40-odd times a year and following racing the way a cat does a bug.
But after years of writing, editing and cartooning cycling, plus training and racing in my spare time, I gradually lost interest in which dope fiend crossed a line first. When it was a break from daily urinalism, racing was big fun — but once it was just an extension of the workaday world, it became less so. And frankly, I was never much of a sports fan. I always preferred doing to watching. Still do.
The good news is, I’m enjoying riding utilitarian bikes for fun and profit as an occasional road-test editor for Adventure Cyclist magazine. It’s a different kind of cycling, and thus a refreshing change of pace; new problems to solve, fresh hurdles to clear, plenty of things to learn.
Thanks to all for your concerns, and there’s a cold one in the fridge for any of you who drop by this way.
We’ve been getting some short rainstorms in the afternoon. Everything helps. Some babbling here: http://labikes.blogspot.com/2011/07/conchas-fire-aftermath-bear-facts.html
K, sounds like the cycling in your neck of the crispy woods is gonna be no fun at all for a while. Maybe you and Meena should get thee back to Durango for a while.
Meanwhile, we have at least one smallish fire going on up Bear Creek Canyon. The Gazette reporter gives lightning as a possible cause (without citing a source), but a commenter reported seeing a couple of campfires along Gold Camp Road. Jesus H. Christ. How stupid do you have to be to … whoops, never mind; I just remembered where I live.
We might actually be up in Durango this month for Meena’s birthday, in which case I’ll drop in on Joey Ernst. Yeah, its going to be a tough summer in BombTown. Somthin’ on the radio too about yet another fire near Caja del Rio, west of Santa Fe (we were just poking around there a couple days ago for lack of anything else to do). Shit never ceases….