No, Not Tim Declercq
The other tractor wins Stage 1 of Etoile de Bessèges, and cycling takes on the winds of Saudi Arabia and the mountains of Colombia.
I’m going to start with the least interesting item so I can get it out of the way: I got nominated for an award at my day job! In July, I wrote a column about a really bad press conference by MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, which expanded into an essay about the role baseball plays in shaping society and what our sport’s leaders owe us. And it got nominated for the SABR Analytics Conference Research Award for Contemporary Baseball Commentary, which I also won last year for an article about how MLB should expand to 48 teams.
Why is this relevant to a cycling newsletter? Well, apart from making the tenuous case that I’m good enough at this to be worthy of your attention, it isn’t. But if you’d like to go to SABR’s website and hit the button with my name next to it, I’d personally be very grateful.
If you’re new to cycling, you got an early introduction to a crucial part of the sport. Races get called off for protests all the time, particularly in France, where farmers blocked highways throughout the country throughout the week, resulting in the cancellation of Stage 1 of the first stage race of the French cycling calendar. The stage was the only casualty this year, in contrast to Stage 2 of last year’s Etoile, which was neutralized after an enormous crash took out so many riders there were no ambulances and insufficient medical staff to attend to the final 20 kilometers of the stage.
Cycling takes place on a semi-restricted course that’s too big to lock down even if authorities wanted to, so it gets interrupted by protests pretty frequently. At last year’s world championships, the men’s road race was delayed in progress by about an hour when five Scottish anti-poverty and climate activists glued themselves to the road in such a way that the riders could pass between them but the trailing support vehicles could not follow.
And that’s when the riders themselves aren’t in protest. As recently as 2020 and 2023, riders threatened to strike at the Giro d’Italia and forced changes to the route. Coming from a culture where if you skip a game in order protest for meaningful social change, the former president calls and tells you to knock it off, it’s pretty cool to see riders hold race organizers over a barrel like that. To say nothing of the farmers.
Unfortunately, highlights of both Etoile and the Volta a la Communitat Valenciana are pretty hard to come by, so Axel Laurance’s debut win in the former and another sphincter-tightening Matej Mohorič descent in the latter will go un-analyzed for now. Which is a pity, because I love a sphincter-tightening Mohorič descent.