Cycling Motivation and Nascar

Bill Sheldon — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 23:04:00 GMT

It's been a while since I posted.... I have several items to comment on but I've been on vacation and more focused on setting up some updates related to the blog vs. adding content. So I wanted to quickly comment on the Tour de France (http://www.letour.fr/2007/TDF/LIVE/us/200/index.html). It started Saturday and one of (in my opinion) the advantages of living on the West Coast is that the live broadcast runs from ~5:30 AM till ~8:30 AM daily (http://www.versus.com/tdf/article/view/758/?ss=tv&tf=Body.tpl). The result is I can wake up around 6 tune in the tour and see the results of that days stage before starting my day.

The tour itself is great motivation to get out and ride. Watching these guys do 100+ miles a day for 3 weeks is inspiring. I had a great Mountain Bike ride last week I'll talk about in a later post but there is nothing like a morning or afternoon out on the roadie. This morning's race (stage 2) also brought home how the Tour is like a more environmentally friendly version of Nascar. (note I'm not claiming the tour IS environmentally friendly - as you watch riders toss plastic bottles to the side of the road and consider the chase vehicles etc... )

both involve a "man" piloting a machine (Nascar has women drivers)
both races are on a paved (or other road) surface
both involve corporate sponsors with their name on every available surface
both are more exciting (to the average TV viewer) when there is a pile-up/wreck (http://community.active.com/blogs/MartinDugard/2007/07/09/a-lot-of-tension)
both seemingly individual sports have a team aspect that changes the underlying dynamics
both have issues with particpants 'juicing' there 'engine' - the body (steriods) in cycling, the car and it's combustion engine in Nascar
both have fans that line the course drinking copius amounts of adult beverages

Now obviously there are differences for example the Tour's course takes you through most of France over the course of a month with beautiful scenary and Nascar uses loops and only races on weekends; but in general aside from the fact that the Tour doesn't burn copius amounts of fuel to power it's vehicles the dynamics of the event are somewhat the same. There are of course many more intracacies to the Tour (and bicycle racing in general) than (in my opinion) to Nascar but that's beyond the scope of this musing. Oh and just like in Taledega Nights - if you aren't first, you're last.

Musings

Cycling Motivation and Nascar