Color and (E)Motion
The annual pro cycling calendar has a reliable rhythm. An arc, really. An arc so long that it makes the NBA season seem concise.
We start in January with — for obvious reasons — the Tour Down Under.
Then follow — right around now — the southern-facing mini-stage races. These aren’t Grand Tours; they’re a week max, mostly in Southern Europe, though now the Middle East hosts a couple: the Tour of Oman and the UAE Tour.
Then it’s the Spring Classics, where excruciating battles for inches of road evoke the true, historic battles that were fought on the same land: Northern France. The Netherlands. Belgium.
Late spring through early fall are mostly reserved for the Grand Triumverate: the Tours of Italy, France, and Spain. Post Vuelta a España are a smattering of one-day races, and it all culminates in October’s World Championships, typically a brutal, 150-mile slog of attrition somewhere in Western Europe.
Those early-season tours on the Arabian Peninsula…I’m not a fan. This has nothing to do with concerns about sportwashing — or at least, this isn’t only about sportwashing. I certainly take issue with countries fogging human rights transgressions by sponsoring football teams and tournaments — and cycling teams and races. But for now, in this space, I’m writing simply about aesthetics. Because a bike race, at its best, is a spectacular portrayal of color and motion.
You’re not going to believe this, but in advance of every season, cycling teams release their new “kits” — uniforms — and pundits rate them. Take all those kits together and you get an anthropomorphized kaleidoscope, for a bike race is a wash of color. Take the bumblebee hues of Visma, add a dash of Ineos red-and-orange, a splash of EF pink, and the simple pale of Team UAE (typically scattered across the front of the race) and splash them across the canvas of the Alps in summer or a Flemish town in spring, and you have a stunning landscape to take in.
Then motion: the peloton doesn’t just move forward; it crests cols and plunges from Pyrenean heights. Over the course of a spring classic the racers will climb and descend dozens of times, and on its way to the finish will fracture, and collect, and whir into itself like the proverbial washing machine.
But the splendor of a bike race isn’t just visual; it’s auditory as well, thanks to the collective buzz of 150 freewheels, the whoosh of 150 bodies at 60 kilometers per hour — and the crowd’s exhorting chorus. Some races, over 100 miles long, will see spectators throughout, with crowds five deep along the closing straight — or deeper still along, say, the climb to Montmarte in last summer’s Olympic Road Race.
That’s what a bike race should look like — and, we can imagine, what one should sound like.
Contrast this spectacle with virtually any moment taken from the recently-conceived Arabian Peninsula races: the backdrop is all bleached tans and grays; the routes’ vast, even highways make for two-dimensional racing, all steady, all predictable. Crosswinds can provoke some frantic racing, but no crowds are following as the echelons develop; few people even watch the sprint finishes. More coaches and mechanics line the wide roads than fans.
Contrast that scene, then, with the palette, profile and people of next week’s Tour du Rwanda, and of next fall’s World Championships in Kigali, where 15 friends and I will follow the racing in person. We’ll watch well-known riders speed across a backdrop of novel tones — and yes, I’m writing about skin tones as well. Climbs in Rwanda are many and sharp; roads range from smooth to cobbled and even dirt; the racing will be thrilling to follow and beautiful to take in. And as my Rwandan friend told me, “The entire country will come out to watch.”
I understand that like virtually every professional sport, bike racing is about economics: about which riders can command the largest salaries, which sponsors can cover them, which countries can pay appearance fees. Always cheering for the underdog, then, I’m rooting for Rwanda to put on racing that attracts new fans, and that rewards curiosity and passion over dollars and cents. Let’s allow the desert tours to wither for lack of interest — and African cycling to thrive for its beauty and its buzz
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