I don’t get how the tour of France is such an event. It’s boring, has rampart cheating, and all the athletes look sickly. No one looks to be enjoying themselves.
As a German, I might be used to a lot more rough-and-tumble language, but OP's statement sounds much like the sort of thing I'd hear at a social gathering. You know, a personal opinion? That, in a dialogue, one could bond (or not) over? Which might lead to a social bond (or not?)
Aussie here, so also probably used to slightly rougher langauge than the Yanks.
I think the problem with these "I don't like x" posts online is that they attract miserable, jealous and bitter people and go downhill fast.
Very different to a comment between two people in a pub environment, where the most likely outcome is some jokes about the riders' (lack of) balls or a jovial discussion about whether or not wearing lycra makes you a wanker.
one thing someone explained to me, is that there is actually strategy!
how? well you can manage your cyclist team's resources (leg muscles, stamina, etc) throughout each stage to try and win. Or for example, knowing when to draft and when to cycle fast.
As it is impossible to "just" cycle as fast as you can.
Look up Velon 'on bike highlights' on you tube (especially stages 1 2 and 3 of 2021) also the deTour podcast on you tube.
The tactics can be amazing, though this year, the freak performance of one rider will raise the issue of chemicals - but this has been already been addressed by several commentators - see Dan Lloyd on gcn racing on YouTube.
What is going on behind podacar- multiple, multiple, overlapping stories: still news to me after several years are the tacit deals done between teams.
As for looking sickly: riding 21 days at 5000+ calories intake per day at often over 50kmh doesn't strike me as sickly.
How do you look racing, on a bike? It's tough!!
Sitting at my desk for half my day job seems worse.
And, as for it being 'such an event'....? It took me a while to geddit, but the lantern rouge channel explains many tactics.
I, actually, used to race bikes. Just mountain bikes and on obstacle courses. I had to stop when my herniated disc became to unbearable to regularly ride. To me, there are many other biking sports that are more interesting. Yeah the riders before look fine, after they look minutes to death.
If you already think road cycling is boring then no one will convince you otherwise but...
Road cycling is a beautiful thing if you understand some of what's going on in a multi-stage race.
Cycling is a team sport because you can save between 16% to 50% of the energy required for movement by drafting other riders.
Other forms of bike racing lack that aspect, they're effectively individual day efforts.
It gives a huge number of tactical permutations and competitions within competitions going on all the time. The multiple stories unfold and resolve over the 3 weeks of the race.
Take yesterday's mountain stage. Ignore the main GC (Yellow jersey) competition. Ignore the race to actually win the stage. Instead just look at the battle for the Green jersey (aka the points or sprinters' competition).
Cavendish is in the lead right now but he's not a climber. To win the jersey he still needs to complete the race and not be eliminated by arbitrary daily time window.
Other teams like Team BikeExchange are maybe less strong in flat stage sprints but they can do other things to attack his position. Like compete for intermediate sprint points during the day.
The race organisers can grow or shrink the rolling time window. That's usually done to keep the bulk of non-climbers, the "autobus", in the race. BikeExchange could have their riders work hard on the front of the autobus to move it faster.
Then Cavendish would have to not only keep up with the climbers contesting the stage and the climbers contesting the overall GC but also the autobus itself. If he trails that and is outside the elimination window then he'll be out and the next place rider in the Green jersey completion becomes the leader.
That's just one thing we're watching for. There's loads of other stories going on like the battle between breakaway riders and the Peloton on the flatter days. They could be all be from different teams but on a day where they don't have to work for their team leader. Will they work together to escape the faster main group knowing that one in the breakaway will be stronger than the others?
There's so much more going on each day if look into it and that's why we love it.
Then I think someone else in the thread has mentioned the Velon highlights[2].
There's actually a set of Tour de France video games which are surprisingly OK. You could search for videos of people playing those as they often explain they're tactics.
They're not a complex as a real Grand Tour race but still quite good fun.
I actually find that rest day highlights shows are also really good for rounding up everything that's been going on too.
Of course there's 100s of books on the subject too.
> Their mission: to make sure the cameras capture no rude words, no insults, and no political slogans.
That is a very interesting problem. Most events with high attendance happen in controller environments.
> The words “SOS réfugiés” – a call for action on the Mediterranean migrant crisis – are turned into an enigmatic 888.
That is an interesting strategy. Even that I can also see it backfiring by creating "messages" that can be read by niche cultures as significant.
I guess that the future of this job is to have it done digitally by deleting messages in real time thru some AI filter. That would be very practical, but it is also a scary future were changing reality becomes a commodity.
Can they, though? People deliberately paint stuff on the course of the tour de france because they want the publicity. The venue isn't the way the venue would be anyway, people are already altering it for their propaganda purposes.
Partially related and about the 888 thing, former Sevilla footballer Frédéric Kanouté [1] told the club's manager that he would refuse to play for the club anymore as long as the "888" logo was still on the team's shirts as a sponsor. Kanouté happens to be a Muslim and 888 is a betting company.
Deep learning/AI isn’t the solution to everything. It’s probably a lot cheaper and more reliable to pay a couple of guys to turn knobs into butterflies for 3 weeks than mess about trying to get a computers to do it effectively.
Once you have a trained neural network you can apply on several TV programs, you can even share with the community... Don't know, it sounds like an interesting problem.
The counterpainter crew is an established part of the build-up ritual. Chances are a large percentage of what they censor wasn't made to get on TV but to see them perform. It's a beloved ritual as much as it is a broadcasting technology problem.
That sentence would be perfectly fine in British English. But I've noticed that British english seems to have kept more similarities to French grammar than US english.
For a second I thought this was going to be about the Scissormen[0] (whose name I misremembered), who are meta-fictional villains from Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol run that... well, it would take too long to explain, but luckily someone made a blog post[1][2].
I guess I could try to come up with some tenuous connection between the two, with erasure and censorship, and also with dadaism being, you know... French... but nah.
33 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 91.3 ms ] threadAs a German, I might be used to a lot more rough-and-tumble language, but OP's statement sounds much like the sort of thing I'd hear at a social gathering. You know, a personal opinion? That, in a dialogue, one could bond (or not) over? Which might lead to a social bond (or not?)
I think the problem with these "I don't like x" posts online is that they attract miserable, jealous and bitter people and go downhill fast.
Very different to a comment between two people in a pub environment, where the most likely outcome is some jokes about the riders' (lack of) balls or a jovial discussion about whether or not wearing lycra makes you a wanker.
On an online forum, there is absolutely no limit to parallel conversations. Letting others know a topic is uninteresting is wholly unnecessary.
how? well you can manage your cyclist team's resources (leg muscles, stamina, etc) throughout each stage to try and win. Or for example, knowing when to draft and when to cycle fast.
As it is impossible to "just" cycle as fast as you can.
The tactics can be amazing, though this year, the freak performance of one rider will raise the issue of chemicals - but this has been already been addressed by several commentators - see Dan Lloyd on gcn racing on YouTube. What is going on behind podacar- multiple, multiple, overlapping stories: still news to me after several years are the tacit deals done between teams.
As for looking sickly: riding 21 days at 5000+ calories intake per day at often over 50kmh doesn't strike me as sickly.
How do you look racing, on a bike? It's tough!!
Sitting at my desk for half my day job seems worse.
And, as for it being 'such an event'....? It took me a while to geddit, but the lantern rouge channel explains many tactics.
Would recumbents provide an alternative? I love riding this puppy which leaves my spine all relaxed: https://tromp.github.io/img/M-racer_green.jpg
Road cycling is a beautiful thing if you understand some of what's going on in a multi-stage race.
Cycling is a team sport because you can save between 16% to 50% of the energy required for movement by drafting other riders.
Other forms of bike racing lack that aspect, they're effectively individual day efforts.
It gives a huge number of tactical permutations and competitions within competitions going on all the time. The multiple stories unfold and resolve over the 3 weeks of the race.
Take yesterday's mountain stage. Ignore the main GC (Yellow jersey) competition. Ignore the race to actually win the stage. Instead just look at the battle for the Green jersey (aka the points or sprinters' competition).
Cavendish is in the lead right now but he's not a climber. To win the jersey he still needs to complete the race and not be eliminated by arbitrary daily time window.
Other teams like Team BikeExchange are maybe less strong in flat stage sprints but they can do other things to attack his position. Like compete for intermediate sprint points during the day.
The race organisers can grow or shrink the rolling time window. That's usually done to keep the bulk of non-climbers, the "autobus", in the race. BikeExchange could have their riders work hard on the front of the autobus to move it faster.
Then Cavendish would have to not only keep up with the climbers contesting the stage and the climbers contesting the overall GC but also the autobus itself. If he trails that and is outside the elimination window then he'll be out and the next place rider in the Green jersey completion becomes the leader.
That's just one thing we're watching for. There's loads of other stories going on like the battle between breakaway riders and the Peloton on the flatter days. They could be all be from different teams but on a day where they don't have to work for their team leader. Will they work together to escape the faster main group knowing that one in the breakaway will be stronger than the others?
There's so much more going on each day if look into it and that's why we love it.
Well GCN Racing is probably a good place[1].
Then I think someone else in the thread has mentioned the Velon highlights[2].
There's actually a set of Tour de France video games which are surprisingly OK. You could search for videos of people playing those as they often explain they're tactics.
They're not a complex as a real Grand Tour race but still quite good fun.
I actually find that rest day highlights shows are also really good for rounding up everything that's been going on too.
Of course there's 100s of books on the subject too.
1. https://www.globalcyclingnetwork.com/category/gcn-racing
2. https://www.velon.cc/
That is a very interesting problem. Most events with high attendance happen in controller environments.
> The words “SOS réfugiés” – a call for action on the Mediterranean migrant crisis – are turned into an enigmatic 888.
That is an interesting strategy. Even that I can also see it backfiring by creating "messages" that can be read by niche cultures as significant.
I guess that the future of this job is to have it done digitally by deleting messages in real time thru some AI filter. That would be very practical, but it is also a scary future were changing reality becomes a commodity.
Can they, though? People deliberately paint stuff on the course of the tour de france because they want the publicity. The venue isn't the way the venue would be anyway, people are already altering it for their propaganda purposes.
You can at least talk to them while they "rectify" your drawings. And an AI would not have the same artistic merit :) !
Partially related and about the 888 thing, former Sevilla footballer Frédéric Kanouté [1] told the club's manager that he would refuse to play for the club anymore as long as the "888" logo was still on the team's shirts as a sponsor. Kanouté happens to be a Muslim and 888 is a betting company.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Kanout%C3%A...
I guess I could try to come up with some tenuous connection between the two, with erasure and censorship, and also with dadaism being, you know... French... but nah.
[0] https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Scissormen
[1] https://www.agonybooth.com/the-doom-patrol-19-and-20-crawlin...
[2] https://www.agonybooth.com/the-doom-patrol-21-and-22-crawlin...
https://goo.gl/maps/RgGUdozm73edSYUj7