As I’ve probably mentioned before, though I’m too lazy to find out where, there was a time when I couldn’t BELIEVE how amazing it was that I could turn on OLN or whatever it was and watch the ENTIRE Tour de France in between bass fishing shows or whatever else they showed:
Now I’m Old™ and Over It© and when I turn on my Smart TV® there are like 50 different races on for my streaming delectation at any given time–and yet I hardly even watch them, instead doing weird Old Guy℗ stuff I never did when I was young, like watching baseball, or just farting myself to sleep on the couch–or, increasingly, both. In my defense, part of the reason I don’t watch is that, due to Europe’s socialist policy of setting their clocks six hours ahead of ours (thanks Klaus Schwab!), the races are on in the morning, and in the morning I have two choices: go for a ride, or watch other people go for a ride. So I always choose the former.
However, this past Sunday it was raining rather heavily and so I opted to watch other people ride for a change–and there were at least three races on, amongst which I toggled for about an hour. One was the UCI World Cup cross country mountain bike race in Val de Sole, and the other two were road races in Andorra and Denmark respectively. I was enjoying myself, too–until the commentators on the Danish race started talking about sustainability in the sport of cycling, at which point I turned off the TV in disgust. (Though with today’s diminutive remotes it’s hard to really do that emphatically, since it’s like tapping on a stick of chewing gum, if you can even find it in the fart-filled sofa cushions.)
I’ve complained about this before, though I’m too lazy to find out where. Regardless, while there’s virtually nothing I care less about than sustainability in professional cycling, what makes me most angry about it is that if they really meant any of it (which they don’t, and they shouldn’t, because it’s stupid) all they have to do is the following, which would instantly make the sport like a thousand times better:
- Make all the riders use metal bikes that they must keep for at least 10 years
- No support cars, no feed zones, just café stops (the patron of the peloton can organize that, like when they all informally agree to stop and take a leak)
- No camera motos, just cameras on the riders’ bikes and a few drones
- No Lycra, no helmets, wool clothing only
I realize I basically just described a combination of Unbound Gravel and L’Eroica, but I’d totally watch that.*
*[I am lying, I probably wouldn’t watch it, especially if it’s on in the morning and conflicts with my riding schedule.]
Meanwhile, speaking of pro cycling, former OLN star George Hincapie is launching a new bicycle racing team:
This is the most exciting thing to hit American cycling since the Letle Viride tour schedule was announced:
Apparently George has his sights set on the big one (that’s the Tour de France, not an opening slot on the Letle Viride concert tour):
“I’m very excited, nervous, anxious to be embarking on this project,” he said in a conference held last week with a small group of cycling media.
“But most of all, very passionate to be starting what we feel like could be a renaissance of American cycling and building what we hope to be America’s Dream Team, racing in the Tour de France in hopefully five years or less.”
Jeez, George. Your team is going to ride the Tour de France in five years?!? Sorry, but they’re going to need to ride it a lot faster than that. I’m talking three weeks here, at a minimum. Come on, George, if they’re still out on the course in five years the organizers are gonna call the broom wagon!
More alarmingly, Hincapie co-owns the team with someone named Dustin Harder, who I’m assuming must be an adult film star:
The battle for sponsors was a drain, making him wary of future projects, but team co-owner Dustin Harder convinced him to try again.
“I’ve been working on this for the last five or six months,” team founder and principal Hincapie explained. “The idea sort of sort of started on the cobblestones of Paris-Roubaix. We did a little fun recreational trip there, and Dustin approached me about a dream of starting an American cycling team.
“Fun recreational trip,” eh? When a guy named Dustin Harder approaches you on the streets of Northern France looking for a good time I guess it’s hard to say no–though this endeavor is clearly putting Hincapie’s famous math skills to the test:
According to Hincapie, the team lineup will have “minimum 50 percent Americans, but most likely about 60 percent Americans.”
Later he crunched the numbers, and a subsequent press release announced that the final figure will be 75% Americans, 45% non-Americans, and 20% undecided, which is just under the threshold that would trigger the tariffs.
But while I may not watch professional cycling, I don’t watch cycling YouTube even harder, mostly because the thumbnails are the exact opposite of clickbait for me. For example, I don’t care how he stopped drinking, though I assume it involved not opening his mouth and pouring alcohol into it:
I barely watched so I didn’t get far enough to see if it was the standard smug cyclist version of “sobriety,” which is bragging about how you cut out the occasional post-ride beer in favor of incessant cannabis consumption augmented with micro-doses of psilocybin.
Then of course there are the rhetorical questions:
YES! They will. Road tubeless will never be the same. Scratch that, the ENTIRE WORLD will never be the same. You’re really on to something, and I can only imagine how much cannabis and psilocybin you’d have to consume to talk about pink inner tubes for over 15 minutes.
But YouTube isn’t just talking, there are also daredevil feats, like riding a rim brake bicycle for over a year:
OH MY GOD YOUR’E BACK ON A RIM BRAKE BIKE AND YOU’RE NOT DEAD? What next, are you going to ride it on gravel?
Yes, gravel–it’s the new fixie:
How much braking do you have to do when you can ride for six hours without encountering more than two motorists?
Alas, increasingly the only YouTube videos I can watch are ones that are actually useful and informative. Like the ones where some guy with social anxiety, a mild speech impediment, and a six year-old Android phone shows me how to install a bike part. Now that’s my idea of a YouTube personality.