You don’t have to be an avid cycling fan to be impressed with Tadej Pogačar’s incredible time trial on stage 20 of this year’s Tour de France. He bested the 2nd and 3rd place riders by a full minute, 1:21 better than 150 other riders. Absolutely unbelievable.
His countryman PrimoĹľ RogliÄŤ (a heavy favorite for the overall weeks before the Tour) had nearly a minute on him in the yellow jersey, going into a long TT ending with a climbing finish on La Planche de Belles Filles.
I just wonder how much different the Tour results would look if this TT was stage 3 instead of 20.
The Tour is on its second rest day, 15 stages into a brutal 3 weeks of hills, mountains, and even challenging “easy days.”
I’ve followed the sport pretty closely over the past 6 years, but not too far into the business behind it. This article goes deep into the economics of the race. The organizer, ASO, doesn’t disclose financial numbers, so this was an interesting look at some estimates of the money generated by the race. Also some good insight into how team budgets and sponsorships work.
With this year’s Tour de France delayed (as of now, til late August), the guys from The Move have been going over some of the best stages from the US Postal years. It’s a cool format, sort of like a commentary track over the exciting parts of the climbs and pursuits.
I especially enjoy the commentary from Johan Bruyneel, who was the team director at the time. The insider commentary on strategy is neat — hard to appreciate as a TV viewer of cycling.
Originally the Tour de France was in that bunch. It normally runs around the fourth of July and Bastille Day, but was pushed with the season nominally continuing in August. Now the UCI and race organizers decided to try something new, running the race in Zwift, a cycling fitness game with real tracks and worlds built in a VR-like environment:
The Virtual Tour de France starts on Saturday July 4, running across three consecutive weekends for a total of six stages. Over the course of the race, there’s a range of terrain from sprints to summit finishes, providing options for riders of all abilities.
I’m glad they’re doing something to try and capture some of the cycling spirit during this hiatus period. Expectations are pretty low that it’ll be that exciting, but as yet another forced experiment in virtualizing the world, we’ll see what happens.
This week’s links are all interactive notebooks on Observable. Their Explore section always highlights interesting things people are creating. A great learning tool for playing with data and code to see how it works.
Easily the most impressive interactive notebook I’ve ever seen. This one from Tom shows the electromechanical pathways of the German Enigma machine at work — enter a character and see how the rotors and circuits encrypt text.
Another great example of the power of interactive programs. This one lets you compute bicycle chainring gear ratios by speed setting. You can add multiple cassettes and chainrings to compare:
Have to include a map example. Here the author brings in DEM data then styles and generates it all in code with GDAL for data manipulation and D3 for graphics.
After a long ride today, I was looking at the stats on Strava and wondering how wattage calculations work to determine power. Strava has a built in estimate it uses for your power rating if you don’t have a power meter on your bike. From looking into it, their calculations look pretty sophisticated for estimating power pretty closely, unless you’re really riding in extreme conditions:
The power produced while riding is made up of several components:
Power produced to overcome the rolling resistance of forward motion.
Power produced to overcome wind resistance.
Power produced to overcome the pull of gravity (in the case of climbing hills).
Power produced to accelerate from one speed to another.
The total power produced, P(total), is the sum of all four power components.
It looks like the biggest source of error would be the environmentals, particularly wind resistance and elevation change (if the GPS elevation data is poor). My ride today shows an average 103 watts for the 1 hour 20 minute ride. Since it’s almost totally flat and their was only a little wind today, it should be pretty accurate. Seems to me that wind-induced error would sort of cancel itself out on circuitous routes like this one — for every segment of headwind, you get another with tailwinds.
I also found this bike calculator that takes various inputs and adjusts the resulting speed and watts accordingly.
Endurance cyclist Mark Beaumont is best known for his “around the world in 80 days” ride starting in Paris and crossing 3 continents in 78 days, putting him in the Guinness Book for the accomplishment.
A few years back he did this ride from Cairo to Cape Town across Africa — 41 days, 6,762 miles, 190K feet of climbing, 160 miles per day. To me it’s as stunning in itself as the around the world ride. Some of the shots in this video of him traversing the Sahara through Sudan and the mountains of Ethiopia are incredible.
This week I tried out commuting on the bike, like I posted about earlier this week. It’s a comfortable, nice ride with a dedicated bike lane the whole way from my house, a block away from the Island Loop through Shore Acres and Snell Isle. I haven’t done any rides to the office from the new place yet; it’s a decent morning workout of about 6 miles when connecting up to the North Bay Trail route downtown.
There were some crazy summer thunderstorms all week long. I had originally intended to work in a Tuesday / Thursday plan for bike commutes each week, but Mother Nature screwed that up Thursday. Some weather came through during the day today, but I dodged it for the ride home.
A commute plan like this would add a solid 25+ miles of cycling weekly to my health routine. I want to at least try to keep this up through the summer before Elyse starts back at school.
Lance Armstrong’s been doing THEMOVE podcast on the Tour for 3 years now, the first being the 2017 Tour when I spent so much time watching both the Tour itself and the podcast (then known as STAGES). On the show they do a stage-by-stage breakdown each day, with segments on the best rider of the stage, recap the days major changes, analyze the sprint finishes and mountain attacks, and make predictions on future team tactics. It’s a fun show, but also gives insight from two guys who rode in the Tour many times (Lance and his former teammate and 17-time Tour rider George Hincapie) on how the team dynamics work and a lot of the off-the-road experiences go for a group of guys competing in such a brutal endurance event.
This year Lance’s former team director from the US Postal days, Johan Bruyneel, has been doing a separate set of episodes from a team manager’s perspective. It’s cool to hear the differences in point of view between rider and director and what they look for.
Roots of Progress has an interesting deep dive on why it took so long for a (relatively) simple invention of the bicycle, even in a time when the principles of a bicycle’s components were well understood for a long time. There’s an interesting inventory of potential hypotheses about why it took until the late 1800s.
Early iterations of human-powered transport looked like inventors trying to replicate the carriage, with devices that looked like “horseless carriages”, someone providing power, another person steering. The first breakthrough toward something that looked like a modern bicycle (at least in form factor) was from German inventor Karl von Drais, modeling his design on the horse rather than the carraige:
The key insight was to stop trying to build a mechanical carriage, and instead build something more like a mechanical horse. This step was taken by the aforementioned Karl von Drais in the early 1800s. Drais was an aristocrat; he held a position as forest master in Baden that is said to have given him free time to tinker. His first attempts, beginning in 1813, were four-wheeled carriages like their predecessors, and like them failed to gain the support of authorities.
It seems cultural and economic factors make the most sense as explanations, versus technological or environmental ones:
In light of this, I think the deepest explanation is in general economic and cultural factors. Regarding economic factors, it seems that there needs to be a certain level of surplus to support the culture-wide research and development effort that creates inventions.
Like most breakthroughs viewed with the advantage of hindsight (and in this case 150 years of it), the invention seems so obvious we struggle to imagine why the people of the 18th or 19th centuries wouldn’t have worked on the problem. Combine the non-obviousness with a lack of cultural motivation and an unfriendly economic environment, and it’s not surprising it took so long.
Last weekend I got the bike back up and running again. It’s been out of commission in the garage since the move a few months ago. Just had to clean it up a bit and put some air in the tires and it’s good to go. I’ve got a budding plan to start commuting down to the office, thinking I’ll start with a target of doing that two times per week to start. It’s about a 6 mile ride each way, which wouldn’t take much longer than driving, but in the summer heat here it’s plenty to require a shower when I get there. With the unpredictable weather here in the summer, committing myself to more than a couple commutes per week will just mean I’ll come up short on the goal.
My bike is only a single speed (a Takara Kabuto with no bells and whistles. It’s been reliable over the 7 or so years I’ve had it — no problems at all but tire replacement. I’m exploring getting a more serious road bike at some point, but I’ve told myself that’s not allowed until I can build up a good pattern of regular usage on the one I’ve got.
I went out for a loop ride yesterday and it felt good. My regular running has got my cardio up to make a decent pace ride pretty easy.
The Tour de France is on right now, reaching the first rest day after a wild first 10 stages of racing. Julian Alaphilippe (a Frenchman) is in the yellow jersey, who’s one of the great opportunists in the field, with a win at Milan-San Remo earlier this year.
The Tour is one of my favorite sporting events of the year. I’ve gotten familiar enough with the UCI Tour over the last 5 or 6 years that I enjoy all of the flavors of races — the big grand tours, the classics, and the world championship events.
But one of the main reasons it’s a special event for me is the sentimental nature of what’s gone on in my life in past years during the Tour: Elyse was born during the 2015 race, and I had my diagnosis and surgery during the 2017 event. One was a very positive experience, sitting home each day on leave holding the baby and watching the stages, and the second of course not so positive, but watching each day gave me something to hold my attention and follow to keep my mind occupied during that rough patch on the road to recovery.
In the past two years the Tour brings those times back to me. It is “just” a sporting event, but it’s a sentimental one, for me.
Yesterday’s stage 10 into Albi was suspected to be a relaxed flat day leading into the rest day, but it was anything but. Crosswinds, some complacent GC riders in the back of the peloton, and some well-timed attacks in the last 25km created a split in the field and a chaotic blitz for the line. The climb of La Planche des Belles Filles on stage 6 and De Gendt’s breakaway win on stage 8 were also incredible to watch. A great way to kickoff week 1 with a competitive race in the GC standings.
The mountain stages of the Tour de France are some of my favorite events in sports. This edition of Places features a tribute to this year’s 18th stage, and one of my favorite climbs of the Alps: the Col du Galibier, a 2,600m HC beast with an epic descent on the other side.
This year’s stage route includes the Galibier and another HC fixture in Col d’Izoard, also last seen in the 2017 edition when Warren Barguil had a memorable mountaintop finish there.
The UCI World Tour season kicks off this week with the Tour Down Under.
I started following pro cycling closely about 5 years ago, but since it’s fairly hard to get access to on broadcasts, I only get to watch a handful of events each year. With the NBC Cycling Pass you get some big events, like the Tour de France and Vuelta a España, plus some other fun ones in the spring like Paris-Roubaix, Paris-Nice, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
With some top cyclist team moves in the off season, there are a few big things to watch. I’ll try and catch what I can of the Tour Down Under and get a preview. Never was able to watch that one before.
