The Tour du Hipster

Where are you in your journey as a cycling fan if your favorite race is the Giro d'Italia?

Photo Credit: Charly Lopez, ASO

This is one of those stupid busy weeks on the cycling calendar. Both the men and women are in grand tours this weekend. Demi Vollering leads the Vuelta, ahead of Anna van der Breggen, who’s actually doing pretty good! She won a stage! I owe AVDB an apology for implying¹ all spring that she’s washed and should get back in the team car.

And Friday morning, as you read this, the men’s Giro d’Italia will be getting underway in…Albania. The Giro doesn’t start outside its home territory nearly as often as the Tour de France does, but it’s hit some interesting places over the years. And unlike the Grand Départ of the Tour de France, the Giro isn’t afraid to venture into Eastern Europe.

So we’re getting a hilly stage into Tirana, a time trial, and then a medium mountain stage on Sunday before a travel/rest stage on Monday. I don’t know if you knew this, but the Albanian language is pretty interesting. It’s a linguistic isolate, meaning that it’s not related to the Slavic and Romance languages that surround it geographically. It’s the sole surviving language in its branch of the Indo-European family—a quality Albanian shares with Greek, believe it or not. So, you know, it’s not Basque, but it’s still pretty unusual. Anything beyond that I learned from the construction worker’s ex-wife in Inside Man.

Primož Roglič is the favorite here, I think. He hasn’t raced much this year, but the last time he was on a bike he won the GC and two stages at the Volta a Catalunya, beating a field that included Juan Ayuso, Egan Bernal, Richard Carapaz and Mikel Landa, who just so happen to make up the bulk of his competition here.

Roglič also has a really strong field of domestiques, including last year’s runner-up Dani Martínez and 2022 winner Jai Hindley. So the current Red Bull-Bora squad includes podium finishers from six of the past seven editions of the Giro. That’s pretty strong.

Arguably not as strong, top to bottom, as the UAE Team Emirates lineup, which features Ayuso, Brandon McNulty, Adam Yates, Jay Vine and Isaac Del Toro. In other words, the whole shebang, except for Tadej Pogačar. UAE made the wise decision to invest not only in the best rider in the world, but in surrounding him with the strongest squad possible, and as much as I admire their commitment it is a drag that they’ve bogarted a bunch of promising stage racers and never let them off the chain.

So we’ll see if they can take a chunk out of Roglič, I guess.

Tom Pidcock is headlining this race for Q36.5; based on his form so far this season, he’s a really interesting GC dark horse. Worst-case scenario, I’d expect him to stay proactive and win a stage or two. And if Wout van Aert is over his pre-race illness, he and Mads Pedersen should have a real doozy of a battle for the points classification. That could end up being more fun than the GC if both of them are on it.

The other night, something came up² that reminded me of one of my favorite columns I ever wrote: A call for cultural re-evaluation not only of Coldplay, but of their most derided and hackneyed single: “Fix You.”

My argument then was fairly simple: Rejecting a cultural object with popular appeal can be the first step toward building a truly personal artistic sense. But if that process stops at mere contrarianism, that apostasy becomes nothing more than another form of orthodoxy.

I guess that’s as simply as I could put it while still using the word “apostasy” in relation to Coldplay. Read the column. Rejection-as-orthodoxy is something I’ve thought about a lot. I came of age as a thinking person at the height of the performative cynicism of the Bush Era, and as an arrogant teenager who was really into music, I can say from experience that I was more performatively cynical than most. Rockism is a powerful drug.

With the Giro underway, I was thinking about the proto-hipster mindset in cycling terms. One of the first steps for a developing cycling fan is to declare that the Tour de France is overrated, and the Giro d’Italia—a race with identical demands, and similarly venerable history and traditions—is actually the race to follow. I soon realized that I could express the development of a cycling fan by what their favorite race is.

Phase 1: Tour de France

• It’s the only race I watch

• Lance Armstrong

• Greg LeMond? Is that a thing?

Phase 2: Giro d’Italia

• The Tour is for casuals

• Maglia ciclamino is more fun to say than any of the special jerseys for the Tour

• More surprise winners

• More snow in the big mountains

Phase 3: Paris-Roubaix

• Stage racing is for casuals

• It’s the hardest race, so if I say it’s the best that’ll prove I’m tough

• Big rock

Phase 4: Vuelta a España

• The perfect narrative coda to a long season

• Pits the protagonists of the Tour and Giro against each other

• All mountains other than the Angliru are for casuals

• Throws up some wild unexpected winners in a way the two big brother grand tours could never dream of

• Contrarian opinions about all grand tours being created equal

Phase 5: Liège-Bastogne-Liège

• You’re fully committed by this point to waking up early on the weekends and blowing off work in the mornings to watch every race, and you’ve come to appreciate the wall-to-wall excellence of Ardennes Week

• Paris-Roubaix might be physically tougher, but Liège-Bastogne-Liège’s constant up-and-downs leave no rest for the weary

• It’s hilly enough that climbers and GC guys can give it a shot, which makes it more accessible than the cobbled classics

Phase 6: Tour of Flanders

• The perfect mix of climbing and cobbles

• Biggest party atmosphere on the world tour³

• You watched all the Flanders Classics behind-the-scenes documentaries⁴

Phase 7: Strade Bianche

• The cycling hipster triple point

• Gravel is a cool gimmick

• Legitimately some of the best scenery on the tour, and an iconic finish

• You’re stuck on the Mathieu van der Poel-Julian Alaphilippe-Egan Bernal podium from a couple years ago and are convinced this is a race a rider from any specialty could win

Phase 8: The Tour de France (again)

• Strade Bianche hipsterism is for casuals

• It’s the biggest race for a reason, and the best riders plan their entire seasons around it

• There’s a saying in football that the conference championship games are usually better than the Super Bowl, and it’s true

• On the other hand, do you really want to be the guy who goes around telling people the Super Bowl is overrated, and if you really appreciated football you would’ve tuned in two weeks ago? Of course not. What an asshole

Phase 9: Il Lombardia

• You’ve gotten over that thing about telling people the Super Bowl sucks

• “Why don’t we have more one-day races for pure climbers?”

• You’re so wrapped up in cycling season you can’t let go when it’s over

Phase 10: Tour of Flanders (again)

• But this time you insist on calling it Ronde van Vlaanderen every time

• The more your friends roll their eyes and the more your spouse threatens to leave you, the thicker and more florid your Dutch accent gets

Phase 11: The World Time Trial Championship

• Tactics make mass start races too random. I want pure power against the clock

Phase 12: The Tirreno-Adriatico individual time trial stage

• The world championships are too random. The course changes and there are hills, so it’s more than just a pure power test. This totally flat out-and-back eliminates all the variables. This is truly the race of truth

• You start to hallucinate Filippo Ganna

Phase 13: Cyclocross

• You know, road cycling would be so much more fan-friendly if they held it in a stadium where everyone could see the course

• It’s where all the best riders come from nowadays anyway

Phase 14: The Tour de France (again again)

• I mean, it’s the biggest race of the year for a reason…

1. Or just coming out and saying it

2. I was listening to Coldplay. “Shiver” still rips, I apologize for nothing

3. I don’t think I’m ever going to actually do serious European cycling tourism (I have a job, but not one that pays me well enough to fuck off across the Atlantic for weeks on end) but if that ever happens I am going to post up outside a bar along the Tour of Flanders route

4. I know that sounds snarky but they really are outstanding. I’ve recommended them before