'Velo is an anagram of love' Louis Nucera
My first experience with the sport of cycling occurred in 1983 in Snowmass, Colorado (just outside Aspen). I was eight years old on a family vacation, and I was forever marked.
The Coors Classic at the time was essentially the 'Tour of Colorado', a weeklong professional level race that eventually drew some of cycling's elite and launched (directly or indirectly) the careers of every modern American cyclist. None of this mattered to me at the time.
What did matter was the race. Not knowing cycling, really understanding bikes, I saw hundreds if not thousands of fans watching riders race up a grade difficult to walk up. A year later, my family returned to watch the race move from Snowmass to a criterium in downtown Aspen, but I was no less enthralled.
To this day, I don't know how these races sparked an interest in cycling, nor do I know why. I do know that since that race, with a few years hiatus, cycling has played a role in my life. Be it riding to swim practice pretending I was racing the likes of Phinney and Grewal, to following sporadic newspaper reports as bike mechanic, to taping and watching the classics and each days stages in the Giro, Vuelta, and Tour, cycling played a role.
Because of (or perhaps, in spite of) this, I spend much of April and July trying my best to explain the sport and its eternal appeal to the initiated. This blog represents my humble attempt to explain cycling, bikes, and the tour to those friends and loved ones who have consistently asked for an explanation.
One question I anticipate is, 'where does the title come from?". My hope is that by explaining the title, I can to some extent explain why I ride. The easy answer is this: in 1967, Tom Simpson, a World Champion, son of a coal miner and the first of the great english speaking cyclists, died during the Tour de France on the epic climb of Mt. Ventoux. Simpson, in a state of full exhaustion (driven by a lethal cocktail of drugs, alcohol, dehydration, and probably worst of all, career pressure) collapsed on his bike. Despite Ventoux's brutal and unforgiving nature, Simpson got back on his bike following his first collapse. In reality, his last words were likely "I want to go on, on, get me up, get me straight" (W. Fotheringham, 2002), often his last works are remembered as "put me back on my bike". Its my hope that by the end of the 2010 Tour, I can help the readers of this blog understand why so many cyclists would have said either, or both.
