I Like Bike Racing Now
Not sure when this happened but I care about the Tour de France and pro cycling now. For the past week I’ve been getting up early and putting on the race so I could see the finishes in real time. I’ve spent weeks reading and watching cycling content. I’ve been following podcasts and watching documentaries. I actually know a bunch of the names and history of the riders now. I am still very much a newbie fan, but I haven’t gotten this invested in a new sport in ages. Hell, I’ve even managed to formulate a hot take already: I don’t think Jasper Phillipsen is that bad. Dude has been painted as a complete villain thanks to some aggressive tactics in last year’s tour and all the forums and comment sections I’ve wandered into act like he’s personally kicked everyone’s dog. I think pro cycling has a big unwritten etiquette culture and anyone who actually does whatever they can to win what is a race is now public enemy number one. From what I can gather Sprinters are the diva Wide Receivers of the sport and everyone hates a guy with cockiness and attitude. Jasper is definitely egotistical but I don’t think he’s that bad and most hyper competitive athletes at that level tend to either be insanely humble or douchey.
I’ve actually been a hobby cyclist for a long time, since college. I got it from my dad, who’d always go riding off on his own after work. He bought me a basic mountain bike for college and I rode that thing up and down the eerie canal trail in Rochester during a lot of my free time in school. At least when the ground wasn’t covered in 2 feet of snow. But I never cared about the actual sport. I inherited my dad’s lone-wolf nature of just going out and riding for hours in a sort of zen state. I mostly ride not for fitness but for exploration and have spent the years since Covid hit trying to ride every road in the city and keeping track on a map. I still have my cheap mountain bike. After 16 years it’s become a Frankenstein of new parts and adjustments and I now use it as my commuter/errand bike. I use a classic road bike for the good stuff now.
So how did this happen? Why do I suddenly care whether Jonas Vingegaard lost time on Galibier to Tadej Pogacar because maybe he’s still nervous on fast descents after his horrible crash a couple months ago? I was wondering about that. The answer is the Netflix show. As well as some other factors, but it’s mainly Tour De France: Unchained. I highly recommend it.
I remember giving Netflix’s QUARTERBACK a middling review last season and I’ve spent years dunking on bandwagoners like any proud sports gatekeeper but I’ve always been fascinated by what brings people into sports in the first place, and I firmly think the answer is having someone to root for. Not a team and certainly not the sport itself. A person, and their story. When I was a kid and actually liked baseball, it was because of Cal Ripken Jr, with his legend of the streak and how he changed the position of shortstop. When I got seriously into football beyond just sorta growing up with it, it was mainly due to Eli Manning and his struggle of being the younger brother of the guy on my nerf football packaging. When I moved out west and started watching the NBA, it was because of Damian Lillard’s heroics against the Rockets to finally lift the Blazers into the playoff series win column after 14 years. Once you break in through someone’s story, you can often find so many more to follow.
I haven’t connected to the story of any MLB player in a long time. It’s not that there haven’t been worthy stories out there, but it also doesn’t help that the Orioles haven’t been worth watching for 2 decades. Even last year all that hype to get swept in round 1 like chumps. I’ve been trying my butt off to get into hockey but I keep having trouble finding that person and story that latches me like a fish taking the bait. Basketball hasn’t been much fun for a couple of seasons now as the Blazers slowly imploded and Dame left. I guess I do love Jokic and how he doesn’t give a shit about being the best player in the world compared to his horses. But I have been watching the WNBA this year, and that’s because we got some people and stories that are captivating. As for soccer, I think my body physically rejects it like an allergic reaction. I will die on the soccer is bad hill and nobody will ever touch me because they can’t use their hands.
This brings me back to the Netflix Tour de France show. Like I was with QUARTERBACK, any long-time snob follower of the sport will find plenty of faults with the show. How it omits a lot of nuance. How it fails to adequately explain or brushes over things that deserve more recognition. How it edits events and interviews to paint broad narratives for easier viewing. How it will bring new viewers to the sport who are still pretty ignorant and ask dumb questions that we have long internalized the answers to and could not be bothered to explain. Bandwagoners can be annoying when you know your stuff. But we all started somewhere and it’s easy to forget how exciting it all is when you first break into a new interest. The technical know-how can come later. The arguments about strategy and equipment can wait. Intricate deep knowledge about historical trivia will come as it may. We need more stuff like Unchained to bring us into the sport as it currently airs. 30 for 30 type documentaries are great for stories that have already happened, but something that tells you what is important and worth following right now? We need more of that.
I’m probably going to find the RECEIVER show pretty mid when it drops. But for some folks out there it’ll be the breakthrough. Bandwagoners are like puppies. They really can test your patience but the fresh burst of energy and new love they offer is worth nurturing no matter how many times you come close to losing your mind.
That got weirdly introspective but it’s July and christ every year I debate just taking this whole month off. Anyway if any of you are Touries (that’s what I’m going with you can’t stop me) here are my Tour opinions:
-Team Pogi. Jonas is very good and Visma is a great team but they are boring. Wout Van Aert is the coolest Visma rider by far. Pogacar is just extremely likeable and more fun to watch
-Jasper gets way too much hate but I do prefer seeing Biniam Girmay in green this year, Jasper had his turn last year
-I’m glad Mark Cavendish got his record so everyone can shut up about him now
-I actually hated the gravel stage. It was chaotic fun but it felt extremely unsafe for the riders with how much dust the security motorcycles were kicking up into their air. It’s probably really bad for you to be breathing in all that dust while huffing and puffing for 5 hours.
-NBC’s coverage is kinda shit
-There is a dude nicknamed Tim The Tractor because he’s extremely steady and pulls the peloton a lot. He is now my favorite guy
-I think it’s stupid that the first few stages every year aren’t even in France. They started in Italy this year. Fuck off, Italy already has its own grand tour. Keep it in France.
-The green jersey color sucks now, bring back the Kelly Green. Also the white jersey sucks, you can never really tell who it is in a crowd either.
-It cannot be understated how much of a douche Lance Armstrong is. Not even for the cheating but for how horrible he was to everyone. Perfect example of a guy who used his unique and amazing story to sort of betray everyone.
-INEOS Grenadiers is the coolest team name
-The other main reason I’m invested in pro cycling now is probably due to an anime of all things, Yowamushi Pedal, which taught me how cycling as a team sport generally works and just makes me feel really happy when I watch it. It should also still be on Netflix.
Here in the UK we have the wondrous Gary Imlach presenting ITV’s Tour coverage. He was the frontman of Channel 4’s NFL shows in the 90s alongside Bob Golic, including the wonderful BLITZ!
Clever, dry, and funny, his dialogue remains as slick as ever at 63. We’d have him back permanently in a heartbeat. (Even if he is an Eagles fan.)
EF Education-Easypost is my team, all the way back when they started as Slipstream (Allez Argyle!). Built as a team where transparency in blood work in top priority, they use to post the results of their testing publicly.
Not the best team, with only one podium finish, but I like the philosophy they have.
Not into the tour. I am a huge Francophile though and cycling is huge in the culture. I expect you to soon start smoking and drink inordinate amounts of wine. Bonne Fete Nat!
I spent a long 4th of July weekend at someone’s lake house and I happily answered all their questions. It’s fun explaining the nuances of the peloton, and having raced bikes in the past, watching them be in a state of constant anxiety watching 100+ guys on bikes going 30+mph 10 wide across the road constantly switching places and moving around will always be fun to see. Forget about sprint finishes, they’re practically covering their eyes.
Also Pogacar is inhuman. The way he attacks on a climb, lets any chasers just get up to his wheel before he immediately does it again, rinse and repeat until they give up and off he goes is absolutely absurd. Doubt he loses the yellow without some bad luck playing a part.
The gravel sections were clearly included just because of the correctly predicted chaos that would ensue. On the other hand that was a really good stage race-wise, which I’m not sure would have happened without the gravel sections.
You lose your orioles fan card. There’s so many great storylines in baseball the past few years, if you choose not to seek them out that’s fine, but baseball is not the problem, you are.
I was kind of surprised reading that bit about the O’s. Yeah, they had a disappointing end to their season last year but they’ve been really good as of recent. Definitely a fun enough team that you’d think it’d get someone back into watching baseball.
Fuck off with the gatekeepy lines like “Losing a Fan Card”. Its tired. Someone not having the same level of investment and mental commitment in a sport but still considering themselves a fan of a team/guy is fine. After 20 years of apathy I view the O’s and baseball from a nostalgic distance and they are gonna have to do more than have a fun regular season or two to get me to care with more than a mild passing curiosity. If, say, they win it all this year I will in all likelihood reach a higher level of investment than past years, and that’s fine. I’ll get less emotional payoff for the win than someone who stayed in the trenches for 20 years for sure, and that’s fine too. Fairweather fandom gets villainized and being a loyal fan during the dark ages gets held up as a virtue in sports fandom but now that I’m older and witnessed many droughts I think the reality is that losing interest during dry spells is natural and suffering for the cause is kind of overrated. It’s okay to turn away from something that doesn’t make you happy for a while and come back when it does.
Wait it’s not just baseball now, what about UEFA Euro and Copa America-
“ As for soccer, I think my body physically rejects it like an allergic reaction. I will die on the soccer is bad hill and nobody will ever touch me because they can’t use their hands.”
Oh, ok.
(yet another drunken 3AM phone call)
Baseball: “But we swept the Yankees in New York!”
Me: “…and you got swept by the Tigers at home!”
Baseball: “But we were your first team! We’ve won championships! Wire-to-Wire! All those nights listening to Marty and Joe! How could you throw that away!”
Me: “I’m just tired of being hurt by a sport that doesn’t care!”
Baseball: “Why do you keep going back to the Bengals?! They haven’t won anything! They always find some way to screw it up! They keep breaking your heart and your quarterbacks! What’s the difference between the NFL and the MLB?!”
Me: “Because if the NFL was the MLB, Burrow, Chase, Higgins, Henderson and everyone else would’ve been traded away to Dallas, New York or Los Angeles by now!”
Baseball: “…well, yeah, but think of the draft picks and UFL Prospects you would’ve picked up! … [click] … Hello? HELLO?!”
The worst part of baseball is the discourse. You have a number of fan types that are all insufferable in their own ways.
The Stat Nerd: Who will pull any advanced statistic to somehow prove a guy is dogshit. “Well, with RISP, his wOBA has actually skyrocketed, but his WAR+ has stayed the same. Combined that with his hard hits on LIPS, he’s regresseing by roughly 20%” Ugh….shut up nerd and watch them hit the ball hard.
The Reactionary: I hate people who overreact to any small sample size and use that to make a generalization. It’s a game with 162 (!!!!!) games. Sure, your favorite player may be in a bit of a slump, but it happens. Guys get hot, guys get cold, it’s baseball. I can’t tell you how many Twins fans around me were claiming the season was lost when we were like 7 games under .500. Look at that, we’re halfway through the season and like 10 games over .500….ugh….nothing worse than being at a game with your buddies and one of them wants to throw in the towel before the 5th inning.
The Boomer: The guys who always talk about how much better baseball used to be. Always shaking their fists at the pitch clock or a bat flip. The kind of guys who get extremely offended whenever some unwritten rule gets broken. We all know a few of these….
The Shepherds (aka the Backseat Managers): The guys always looking for a scapegoat….and it’s usually the manager. Either the manager needs to get their heads out of the stat book and trust their gut, or the manger is making some dumb decision that even a child would know is bad if you look at the stats. The only thing that shuts them up is winning….and even then they’ll pounce at the first sign of trouble.
All this to say, glad you found your thing, Dave! I’ve been enjoying the Euros so far and it’s been a lot of fun (though extremely frustrating as a huge France supporter). This is the time to find your bliss!
and the discourse is better in football? the reason football has been replaced by baseball as my #1 is largely because of how bad and uninformed nfl discourse is
I’ve fallen out of love with football the last decade or so and it’s largely because of how unintelligent the banter surrounding the sport became. I’ve come to the conclusion that football discourse is basically there to let stupid people think they’re smart by overanalyzing a pretty easy to comprehend sport.
I think the bigger problem is that nonstop sports coverage in major outlets. It’s mostly hot takes now. Hot take culture took over sports and the NFL in general for places like ESPN and such, and social media/comment sections allow a lot of dummies to have just as strong a voice as smart people. You can still find a ton of great football discourse but it takes more effort now to sift through the noise into those niche spaces, which has only gotten worse as football gets more popular.
It’s also kind of a problem with growing up and learning more over time. The longer you follow a sport, the more you know, and the types of discussions you used to have at earlier times aren’t as mentally stimulating and begin to feel redundant and annoying. Right now as a new cycling fan pretty much all discourse I find is fascinating to me but if I stay invested in 10 years, I’ll probably find a lot of it tedious and bad because I’ll have advanced past the point where the discourse engages me the same way and be tired of seeing the same types of arguments over and over.
I think you have those types in any sport. There is also a tech type although you don’t get those in the big sports. I’m thinking g of car racing fans who talk like something from My Cousin Vinny. I’ve seen a bit of it with cycling too. (You get it with sailing and America’s Cup too, less sonce they made people use actuall boats).
Every type of fan you named here can be very easily transposed into football fandom lol, it’s not a baseball problem
That Netflix example did the same for the F1, created a lot of new fans
I will continue to enjoy baseball because the Padres are kinda alright at the moment.
Man you’ll love to hear about the Strade Bianche then
I went to one pirates game and baseball is more fun in person watching it on tv sucks
Am I the only one who watched the cricket world cup?
What exactly did armstrong do besides the cheating?
The thing with baseball for me is that there are far too many games. A big reason imo why people like football the most is because each game matters so much more than each baseball game.
It’s how he treated everyone around him. Armstrong was a huge asshole and he threw so many people under the bus during his crusade to keep his cheating under wraps. What he did to Greg LeMond always stuck out to me: Greg was a prior TdF winner who expressed some doubt over Armstrong being clean and Armstrong used his clout and influence to basically end Greg’s career credibility, and his bike line with Trek. LeMond is just one of the people Lance treated like shit. The 30 for 30 on Netflix goes over much of it, and if you can track down the old 30 for 30 called Slaying the Badger about Greg LeMond it goes into more of that particular story. SB Nation also did a good summary of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5PvZUQWtBQ
Considering how much doping happened in that era on reflection it’s harder to get mad at Lance exclusively for cheating. Half the riders were cheating and what he accomplished was still very impressive and his athletic prowess is still worthy of admiration. It was everything else he did along with the cheating, to cover up the cheating, that really sours people.
Weirdly enough, the whole spiel about what brings people to sports reminds me of how I got into… the NFL. Growing up, I watched football with my dad but he was/is a casual fan and I was even casual-er about it. Then during the 2019-20 season I somehow stumbled across the various “thematic groups of NFL teams” subreddits, like r/BIRDTEAMS and r/CatTeamBrotherhood, then links from those places led me to both Gridiron Heights and here, The Draw Play. Through all of that, I actually became familiar with the names and general stories of players beyond the mega-star quarterbacks, and once you have that skeleton of knowledge it’s easier and easier to build off of it.
So if you became a cycling fan because of a Netflix documentary series (and anime), I became a football fan because of internet cartoons and comics. It’s a weird way to acquire a sports fandom but fun as hell.
I won’t lie, I’m a huge Soccer Hater, but I have to admit that that watching these major tournaments has been pretty fun. I don’t understand the game for shit, but it’s kind of cool to see the differences in European styles of play vs North/South American and the matches have been pretty thrilling. Well, besides France and England who seem to want to play like trash for 88 minutes then turn up right when they’re on the brink of defeat… Are they the Steelers of Soccer? Is that even possible?
So my whole issue with cycling is the huge amount of cheating that goes on in it. Even discounting Armstrong since the 1964 tour 13 of the 24 winners have at least failed drug tests with several admitting to doping later on. Since 1997 you’ve been essentially guaranteed that at least one top 10 finisher is going to get caught having doped. I’m 100% confident in saying I can guarantee that within the next 5-10 years that at least one of the people you talked about will get busted for doping.
See, now I disagree with this statement…I almost accidentally started following the sport in 2014, and like Dave was somewhat surprised to discover that there’s actually something to it. Also, by then the sport was as clean as its been…like an airline that has a crash, they’ll become safest to fly for years because they’ll be so under the microscope.
It also works as ambient background travel advertisement, and as a desert rat currently suffering 110+ degrees, there’s nothing better than fantasizing about spending the summer in the Alps where it’s in the 50s and raining. Sheer heaven.
Having said that… if I fall behind a few stages, I know I can skip to the last 5 km of a sprint stage, and maybe the last 30 mins of a TT, and I know I won’t miss much.
I mean just going to Wikipedia and looking up the list of doping cases for major tourneys shows lot’s of people getting busted up til 2019 with one in 2022. I would imagine the last four years themselves are part of the reason for the lack of doping scandals since 2019. But yeah the sport hasn’t cleaned up and I doubt it ever will.
I’m amazed Yowamushi Pedal drove you to follow cycling. Sports anime/manga in general tends to be exaggerated, but Yowamushi Pedal was over the top in that regard. You can tell great sport stories without having characters doing unrealistic stuff (see Blue Box, for example), and YP is definitely not one such case.
For me the worst moment was when they spent a whole episode just to show the last 2 miles or so of a mostly flat stage, with the 2 breakaway leaders blabbering all the time while sprinting full speed. Also related: how annoying can Midosuji be?
The show still does a good job explaining how the sport works and how team dynamics work, how different riders have different strengths and roles on a team. It doesn’t need to be realistic to be a good sports story. Most sports anime are the same thing and have the same issues. I dont think the show is that unrealistic at all tbh, not any more so than most sports anime. The characters are the main reason I love the show and where most of the charm is. Biking racing isn’t a super complex sport at the end of the day so allowing the characters to chat and bounce off each other is what makes it work.
It does drag out those race battles at times, especially in seasons 3-5, mostly because the studio had less material to adapt and had to stretch things out a bit. Midosuji sucks but he’s also the show’s functional villain so it kinda feels like that’s the point?
Dave you really can’t give up the ideas of Kelly greens at all can you
POGA POGA POGACHAR!
I’m literally the exact same as you! Hardcore NFLer who thanks to TDF Unchained has found a wonderful hobby for the doldrums of July.