The 10 Best Acts of God For a Cycling Race
What kind of crap do you want to watch people ride through?
When Stage 1 of the Critérium du Dauphiné came and went, I’m not ashamed to admit that I felt a little foolish. In my preview post on Friday, I’d earmarked that stage as one for Uno-X sprinter Magnus Cort Nielsen, who’d been indomitable on such parcours throughout his career but had thus far failed to score since moving to his new team.
But the stage came and went without much involvement from Cort. Another Danish classics rider, Mads Pedersen, won the bunch sprint. An opportunity missed, I thought.
Stage 2 showed that I should’ve had more patience.
On a parcours culminating in a stepped series of longish but moderately difficult climbs, FDJ and Bora put the throttle in notch eight, just barely catching lone breakaway survivor Bruno Armirail in the final 150 meters. From there, Cort—who’d been able to hang with the climbers where Pedersen and the other classics specialists had faltered—burst out of the bunch to win by daylight, followed by Primož Roglič, the punchiest of the GC contenders, and Matteo Jorgenson, who might not be a GC contender at all, but instead a classics rider.
At least, that’s what I was told. You could barely see a thing through the fog.
Cycling, like most outdoor sports, is dictated by the weather. And there are certain weather conditions that really bring out the best in every competitive event—and they could be good or bad. Who doesn’t love a football game played in the extreme cold of Lambeau Field in January, or a wet-dry Formula 1 race, or a baseball game played on a perfect 78 degrees-and-partly-cloudy afternoon in June, with a persistent but mild breeze blowing out to right center?
The foggy finish on Stage 2 of the Dauphiné got me thinking: What environmental conditions make for the best cycling races?
10) Darkness
Infrequently attempted for obvious reasons, though the Vuelta a España loves to flirt with dusk. Judging by the start times of some Spanish soccer games I assume it’s illegal to have a sporting event that ends before 11:30 p.m. local time?
Anyway, they flew too close to the sun last year. Or too far away from the sun, relative to the rotation and curvature of the Earth. It sucked. Let’s not make a habit of it.
9) Heat
Me? I hate heat. I’m much, much bigger and hairier than your average pro cyclist, so I perspire abundantly and would not mind even a little if the outside temperature never broke 70 again for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, we’re ideologically committed to cooking the planet so heat is one thing we’re sure to get more of in the years to come.
And it’s a great teacher of humility in cycling. You know what’s harder than doing cardio? Doing cardio when you’re being sous-vided in your own bib shorts. The heat has been a major deciding factor in Jonas Vingegaard’s recent Tour de France dominance; despite coming from Scandinavia and being the pastiest man alive, he thrives in heat. Perhaps thanks in part to advances like cooling vests that you’re seeing more and more across many pro sports. Though personally, I’d be just fine if it were acceptable to fill a pair of pantyhose with ice cubes and stuff the whole thing down your shirt, the way cyclists on the move do.
The thing is, that while heat often comes with stunning and vivid televisual colors, and you can tell that it’s hot just by watching, you can’t actually see heat on TV.
8) Altitude
The same with altitude, though it’s even more decisive a factor in grand tours. And the Tour de France is embracing it, going to super-high-altitude climbs like Col de l’Iseran and Col de la Loze in recent years. This summer, on Stage 19, they’re heading up the Cime de la Bonette, which is blacker than coal and features the highest paved road in France, some 2,800 meters above sea level. Altitude starts to become an issue over 2,000 meters, as a rule of thumb.
But while the mountain vistas are always incredible, again, you can’t see it.
7) Fog
I always associate fog with Mike Woods grinding up the final climb of Stage 17 of the 2018 Vuelta. He’d just dispatched his rivals and with a few meters to go the camera flipped to the finish line view and he just…wasn’t there? Some of that is because the rampas inhumanas of the day was particularly inhumanas, and it took Woods like a solid minute to turn over his wheels over the last 50 meters.
But also you can’t see a fuckin thing in the fog. I love the epic cinematic look of a rider emerging from the mist like the Royal Navy at Jutland, but this being a sporting event I’d probably rather see what’s happening clearly.
6) Thunderstorms
Simple rain is going to come later on this list, but there can be too much of a good thing. I don’t want people hydroplaning off the road into a tree or getting hypothermia, and too much rain can completely ruin a time trial.1
5) Snow
Okay, so when I said I didn’t want people flying off the road, I wasn’t telling the whole truth.
4) Cold
And when I said I didn’t want people getting hypothermia…
The way cyclists react to the cold really drives home one of the central conceits of the sport, which is about turning the body into a machine. Food and water go in, the legs spin, the bike goes forward. But gauging food and water intake is difficult when so many calories are required to keep the body—which in cyclists has been stripped of all the fat and hair the rest of us use to stay warm2—from freezing up and shutting down. Jan Ullrich learned that lesson on Stage 15 of the 1998 Tour, where he couldn’t find the right metabolic balance and got freeze-dried.
Marco Pantani, fueled by espresso and more drugs than would be considered appropriate for a Martin Scorsese movie, profited to the tune of a stage win by two minutes—nine minutes up on Ullrich, an unthinkable margin for a stage today—and the yellow jersey.
3) Mud
Again, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing, but cycling fans go apeshit when everyone’s covered in crud after a wet Paris-Roubaix. There’s something visceral and primal about wearing the very Earth you’ve just ridden over, athlete leaving their mark on the ground and vice-versa.
Mud is so beloved we’ve got whole new disciplines—mountain biking, cyclocross, gravel racing—to cater to people who think being covered in sweat, blood, and residue from energy gels just isn’t gross enough. These offroad adventurers will not rest until they, like a three-year-old eating an ice cream cone at the beach, are unrecognizable from filth.
2) Wind
Let’s go back to the very first thing I wrote on this site: These aren’t people, they’re birds.
To quote Billy Graham: “I've never seen the wind. I see the effects of the wind, but I've never seen the wind.”3
Headwinds, tailwinds, and most of all crosswinds. The direction and severity of the wind can blow riders off the road, split up the peloton over innocuous-looking roads, and determine the fate of breakaways. It’s not quite as obvious as precipitation, but if you know ball,4 you know the value of wind.
1) Rain
And finally, the giver of life.
Not too much, as I’ve said, but enough to keep riders on their proverbial toes, to accentuate the ostentatious suffering every athlete goes through. To make distinct the difference between those who take out capes and gilets to protect them from the elements, and those who choose to get raw-dogged by Mother Nature.
It’s rain, of course, that leads to mud, and comes with wind. But the best thing I can say for rain is that it changes the texture of the tarmac so completely that riders learn to be weary of lane markings. Where else does a little water make paint scary?
See my earlier reservations about heat
And by “quote Billy Graham” I mean “quote the dcTalk song that samples Billy Graham”
Not sure that idiom translates to cycling. You know wheel? Know gear?