Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

"Men riding bicycles"

I don't get much done in July, thanks to the Tour de France, and specifically thanks to the coverage on OLN.

It was not always thus. I used to assume that bike racing was pretty boring, and tv coverage seemed to consist of a long shot of a sunflower field...then a huge group of guys in ugly clothes would ride through really fast...then back to sunflowers. Whoo hoo.

I actually bought a bike and started riding myself in 1996, and by osmosis more than anything I started to pick up little bits of racing understanding. In researching cycling (I don't do anything without reading up on it) I read a book by Greg LeMond, and I watched the cycling during the 1996 Olympics. I paid a bit of attention the Tour in 1997, but it was in 1998 that I really got into it. On the Internet I found online diaries from Bobby Julich and Frankie Andreu, and reading their day-by-day experiences made it click for me.

Before that, I figured: it is a race, so everybody racing has the same idea...ride as fast as he can and try to be the first one to finish. Duh.

Reading the diaries explained it...the roles of the different riders on a team, the stages vs. the overall, the sprints and the mountains. And the politics...in 1998 the riders had a sit-down stike in the middle of a stage to protest the raids from police looking for evidence of doping. I was fascinated, and hooked.

Lance Armstrong's incredible return to the Tour in 1999 hooked a lot of other people here in the U.S. Even my mom has been watching OLN, not only because she's hoping Lance wins his fifth, but because the race commentary by Phil Liggett, Paul Sherwen, and Bob Roll is as instructive for noncyclists as it is riveting for die-hard fans. The other day she was watching the live feed when my two-year-old nephew toddled in and said "Oh! Men riding bicycles!"

He didn't sit still long enough to learn "green jersey" and "Victor Hugo Pena," but maybe next year.