You Can’t Win The Tour de France if You Ride Lugged
The omniscient New York Times has an article on why no French rider has won “le tour” since 1985. The money quote is:
“Their mentality is, well, you should just get on with it because Bernard Hinault won the Tour like that and you should be grateful.”
Of course, Ancy McLarmstorg’s über scientific approach is distasteful in its own way, but it gets results. Practical realism has been the defining aspect of the last two centuries of civilization, winning every war and enriching every economy that shed romanticism and ideology, and doing “what works.”
From a personal perspective, having a “throwback” tour with lugged bikes and no ear piece radios would be a public relations coup that might put big time cycling past “le doping” once and for all.
Where’d everybody go?
Exposed cables, rim brakes, field/road repairs done by the riders themselves, etc. The hardcore “win at whatever cost” freaks wouldn’t like it, but who cares?
Bicycle racing would be more interesting if the cyclists had to perform their own maintenance and repairs on the road. Cycling is almost exclusively about being an athlete these days. Hence why I don’t race, and I rather tour. In any case I’m never in a hurry.