2003 July 8

European sports week

I find myself watching European sports this week -- the Outdoor Living Network (the Unpopular Sports Network) is showing round-the-clock coverage of the Tour de France, interrupted only by the Running of the Bulls. Apparently they run the bulls every night of the Fiesta de San Fermin, so it's on every night this week at 7:30.

Okay, so there's not much to be said about an event where the report reads: "Three gorings and a serious head traumatism in the second running of the bulls" . . . "something that is not unusual," except the obvious comment that maybe Europeans are not so soft as American rednecks like to think they are.

Meanwhile, the Tour de France is strangely not so different. The finishes of stages (at least the flat ones) seem to involve a few desperate breakaway riders trying to stay in front of a massive implacable pack, and spectacular 60-km/h crashes in dense traffic -- it's a hell of a sight watching a bent bicycle pinwheeling eight feet into the air. And Stage 1 ended with a fifty-bike pile-up, riders going down like dominoes. One survivor of that actually broke his collarbone and is still in the race, the madman.

But honestly, it's the rest of the race that I like watching. Like a long nordic race, there's something soothing about watching long lines of athletes metronomically coursing across pretty countryside. Yes, they may in fact be travelling 50 km/h and up, but often you can't really tell. The race is just a colourful snake winding through the countryside, with announcers nattering on about one rider or another, and couple time-differential numbers in the margin: gaps between the leader, breakaway group one, and the peloton. Hypnotic.

My only real request is for the riders to lose those godawful hornrimmed sunglasses.

By far the best ad for the Tour goes: "Time waits for no man . . . so it must be hunted down, and beaten."

Comments

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Posted by: Tina Marie on February 28, 2005 04:31 AM
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