{"id":420,"date":"2007-07-30T21:41:59","date_gmt":"2007-07-31T01:41:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/2007\/07\/30\/le-tour-est-mort-vive-le-tour\/"},"modified":"2007-07-30T21:41:59","modified_gmt":"2007-07-31T01:41:59","slug":"le-tour-est-mort-vive-le-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/2007\/07\/30\/le-tour-est-mort-vive-le-tour\/","title":{"rendered":"Le Tour est mort. Vive Le Tour!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Something was missing, this morning. It started off in the usual routine – grab a Diet Coke, sit down at my desk, check messages. Start the Slingbox client to have today’s stage on in the backgrou . . . oh.\u00c2\u00a0 Le Tour<\/a> is over. And I miss it already.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure how this happened, me becoming someone who values watching a sports event. I’ve never been much of a spectator – you couldn’t drag me to a football game, baseball games are only enjoyable for the lazing in the sun, and in any event, I’d much rather spend my time doing<\/em> something than watching it. But something is different, with the Tour.<\/p>\n

I ascribe much of it to an ability to identify with the riders. Not that we’ve anything actually in common, of course. Alejandro Pettachi can bump against 50mph on a flat sprint – I’ll be lucky to get much past 30mph.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m ready to take a day or three off after a hard century ride, but the entire Tour peloton does it for three straight weeks. But there is something there – some familiarity.\u00c2\u00a0 I do know the fear of high speed mountain descents.\u00c2\u00a0 The desperate efforts to hang on to the back of the peloton in a race.\u00c2\u00a0 But there’s something more.\u00c2\u00a0 And I think Ursula captured it pretty well<\/a>, over at PodiumCafe:<\/p>\n

Sports are so popular because they are a distillation of this courage\/suffering struggle. \u00c2\u00a0With sports we can sometimes catch a glimpse of this struggle and the attempts to overcome it. But where sports comes up short to often is that we spectators usually only see the final sprint, so to speak. \u00c2\u00a0The games of most sports are too short to see \u00c2\u00a0the full struggle, the full futility of what the athletes are attempting to do. \u00c2\u00a0We only see the glory. \u00c2\u00a0True, we see “losers” but these athletes don’t really lose, because coming in second is not a loss. \u00c2\u00a0They still finished with style. \u00c2\u00a0Sure its disappointing to come in second but really is oh, Zidane really suffering for coming in 2nd last year? \u00c2\u00a0How about the Chicago Bears? \u00c2\u00a0The silver medalists at the Olympics? \u00c2\u00a0Not really.<\/p>\n

Of all the sports and the sporting events the Tour de France (and the other two Grand Tours) comes closest to life. \u00c2\u00a0The TdF goes way beyond a marathon to where its hard to even see the beginning of the race when we are at the end. \u00c2\u00a0In the TdF everybody loses, even [Tour winner Alberto Contador]. \u00c2\u00a0 Everyone suffers humiliation, a million humiliations for three weeks. \u00c2\u00a0The Tour is too stupidly hard for any of the racers to do otherwise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We don’t watch the Tour because we want to see the humiliations.\u00c2\u00a0 We watch because we can identify with the struggle against them.\u00c2\u00a0 We watch because the riders don’t give up.\u00c2\u00a0 The keep at it, trying to overcome those humiliations again and again.\u00c2\u00a0 Mile after mile.\u00c2\u00a0 Stage after stage.\u00c2\u00a0 Year after year.<\/p>\n

Le Tour est mort.\u00c2\u00a0 Vive Le Tour.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Something was missing, this morning. It started off in the usual routine – grab a Diet Coke, sit down at my desk, check messages. Start the Slingbox client to have today’s stage on in the backgrou . . . oh.\u00c2\u00a0 Le Tour is over. And I miss it already. I’m not sure how this happened, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cycling","category-personal"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}