This past Saturday saw the start of the 1,475th Tour de France, which is of course a massive canoe race around Indonesia. I watched–and enjoyed–Stage 1 in real time thanks to the miracle of streaming television. However, it’s now Monday and I’m already hopelessly off the back, mostly because watching sports in the morning conflicts with my own bicycle riding schedule, and I’d rather ride a bike myself than watch other people do it. (Also, the days when people would pay me to watch the Tour de France are long gone.)
Nevertheless, I did see that there appears to have been some sort of tack attack:
And while I don’t know if it was climate-motivated, it’s only a matter of time before this happens again:
I’m not sure there’s any sport that hates itself as much as professional cycling. Sure, all of them have to fight (or at least pretend to fight) doping, but only cycling has truly eaten itself alive in the process, shedding fans like that redacted guy shed body weight after coming back from testicular cancer. The sport’s marquis event also literally repels fans, who can’t so much as take a selfie with a rider even now since it’s the last place on Earth you’ll still find masks and “social distancing.” And when a bunch of “climate activists” distrupt the Tour because it beats working during their summer vacation from college, the journalists whose very livelihoods depend on the race turn on the event itself instead of the profoundly selfish people interfering with it:
See, the Tour is so evil that it could not only undermine the bicycle as transportation but also the future of the planet itself:
This is completely delusional, because we all know that the biggest threat to “cycling and active travel in our cities” is the lithium-ion battery. That’s why we’re going from this:
To this:
Nevertheless, clearly everything is the Tour de France’s fault. See, 2022 is the hottest Tour de France he can remember, and obviously that’s the direct result of all the Tours de France that came before it:
I guess he’s not old enough to remember 1911:
Not only was it bad in New England, but it was so hot in France that over 40,000 people died, many of them babies. Meanwhile, that year’s Tour de France included a stage that was 470 kilometers long (!), and at one point this guy got hit by a car and fell down a ravine:
He finished third overall.
But can you really compare any of that to what a hot journalist in the age of air conditioning must endure, even if the reason he was hot was that he was working in a room with a metal roof in July?
And if you don’t believe the Tour is entirely responsible for our impending doom, then consider this:
I don’t know what any of that means, and I suspect he doesn’t either, but the upshot of it all seems to be that people are having too much fun during a bike race in the summer:
This is unacceptable, because we’re all going to die, and until that happens we need to flagellate ourselves constantly like medieval monks:
So what can we do? Well, according to the editor of freaking Rouleur, a publication about racing bikes, the Tour needs to get…wait for it…smaller:
This is a fantastic idea. I’m sure that when the Tour takes place for a single afternoon at a small local velodrome and people can only watch if they’ve accumulated enough carbon credits that the coverage in Rouleur will be highly compelling–and it better happen soon, because we only have 978 days:
Actually, that was 978 days as of July 23rd, 2022. As of today we only have 633 days left. Clearly Rouleur should act swiftly and decisively, and the first thing they should do is stop covering the race immediately in order to stop generating any additional interest in the event. They’re off to a great start, too, and since this past Friday they’ve only published about a dozen stories about the race…and no doubt all of them are well worth reading.
If we really want to make bike racing smaller then let’s start with the media.