Tour de France: Unchained

Netflix trailer: https://tinyurl.com/24ch5693

This is INSANE!

You may not care about bicycle racing, but you'll be riveted by this series.

Netflix has established a formula. It started with "Drive to Survive," its series on Formula 1. The first season the big kahunas don't want to participate, so you get the viewpoint from the underdogs, who get a lot of screen time. And then the series comes out, blows the sport up, and everybody wants in. Will "Tour de France: Unchained" blow up bicycle racing?

Well, it's already huge in Europe.

This was shot last year, 2022. And you see the riders and management wearing masks, even outdoors. It's like they're not privy to the insanity of the anti-vax, anti-mask movement in the U.S. Just before this was shot, I was entering a hotel wearing my mask, an upscale hotel, and a self-satisfied patron exited through the front door and insulted me, one for whom the vaccine didn't work. And unlike too many, I know numerous people who died from covid, and numerous people who've never completely recovered, their taste has not come back, for years.

Yes, Europe. You watch this show and you want to go.

So I've about given up on Formula 1. Because it's about the car, not the driver. I wish everybody would drive the same damn machine, then it would be interesting. But Red Bull's sled is head and shoulders above the rest. They could win every race of the year. How interesting is that?

But bike racing is like basketball. As in equipment is secondary. In basketball all you've got is your sneakers, in bike racing your bike, but in truth most of them are similar. It all comes down to the riders, and the team. Yes, the Tour de France is a team sport.

I feel like I went to a college people don't understand. One wherein sports were secondary. At this elite level there are no athletic scholarships. Then again, the coaches lean on the admissions people for a couple of recruits. And they lay out the dough for anybody who can't afford the ticket price. Sometimes this is athletes. But it's all Division III. Which is kind of like comparing AA to the Major League. Not that there are not good athletes in Division III, but if you're planning to go pro, it's not the place to be.

Unless you ski.

Middlebury is Division I in skiing.

Now if you've followed this, and I doubt you have, certain large universities have doubled-down on their programs, like CU and UVM, so it's hard for the smaller, no scholarship schools to compete. But then there's the dirty little secret, if the skier is really that good they're on the national team, they don't ski for the college. And alpine skiing gets all the glory, you know, where they go downhill, funny how most Americans are now aware of Mikaela Shiffrin, deservedly, but they couldn't name a single nordic skiers. As in cross-country and jumping.

Cross-country is brutal.

And cross-country is connected with bike racing. And when I went to college the best cross-country ski racers went to Europe for the summer, to compete in bike races. And these superstar athletes said one thing... You can't win, because the Europeans are all doped-up.

That was the seventies.

Say it ain't so Joe. Lance Armstrong had many convinced he didn't dope. But he did.

Would you want to do this to your body?

Well, if you're educated, if this is a sport as opposed to a living, no. But these Europeans... They're groomed from a young age, this is all they've got. Hermann Maier was a bricklayer before he won those World Cups. Talk about desire to succeed.

So are today's bike racers clean?

They say so, but I'm not laying down any guarantees.

And if you're familiar with doping... It's not what you think it is, it's not a pill that energizes you during the race. Rather it's drugs that allow you to recover faster, so you can train ever harder. And when you watch these guys ride... If you did the same, you'd need a week to recover. If not more. But these guys get back on the bike the very next day.

Now I always followed the Tour de France from arm's length. I read the daily standings in the newspaper, I knew how the sport worked, but "Tour de France: Unchained" is a whole 'nother level.

First and foremost because of the danger!

I had no idea they crashed this much. You'd see pictures in the news, figured some riders had bad luck, but not the winners. It appears that everybody crashes. And the way the sport works, unless you're injured beyond repair, which is a definite possibility, you pick your bike back up and you still might be in contention.

Or not.

And the peloton... A word that's been popularized by an exercise bicycle... Fans know it's the group of riders, but until you watch this series you have no idea of the closeness and intensity. It's like a giant swarm of bees flying down the highway. One false move...and you've got a crash.

And the crashes can be so serious!

So the teams have names that are hard to understand and remember. This is a sport of sponsorship. And big money. And the people involved only want to win.

You don't usually get this peek into professional sports. The coaches, the managers, they don't really care about you. You're a cog in their machine. And if you fail or get hurt they excise you and don't think twice. They say you're a family member until you aren't. These managers are singularly focused on winning...

This ain't amateur sports. You might as well be a computer. But you're flesh and blood, and that comes with all kinds of complications the team brass wish were not present.

So, in order to win the race, at the end, after all the stages...

You must play for the team. You must sacrifice so one single rider can make it to the top.

Homey don't play that in the U.S., where at the professional level in sports, it's about individual glory. You might be able to win a stage, but you've got to hold back and help your team. It kills you on the inside. But you're not well-rounded enough to win the overall race, so this is your role.

And there's even rope-a-dope.

And the riding itself... It's long and hard. You've got to see these guys race over the cobblestones, never mind in the rain. As for the climbs... Man, these guys are riding straight up the Alps. You can't even fathom it. And everybody says it's a brutal sport of survival, it's not about fun so much as pushing your body beyond its limits. Believe me, you'll watch and you won't believe you could do it.

And unlike football players, or even the gym-rat baseball players of today, these riders are whippet-thin. They're not bulked-up, the extra weight is a detriment. It's all about those muscles baby.

Incredible.

In truth, the Formula 1 drivers are athletes. But they're not in the league of the bike racers. Maybe ultra-marathon runners come close, but they don't race every day for weeks.

And if you're a fan you can get up close and personal. The routes are long, pick your spot, you can see everything.

But even weirder, there's no cop holding you back. A rider is climbing the mountain and people are surrounding him on the road.

Meanwhile, the team manager is riding in a car behind, imploring you via your earpiece, ready to deliver a new bike if yours breaks.

And it's these little moments that are incomprehensible to Americans, because we're so rules-based. Pushing the rider to get momentum after a crash? That's legal. You can hand them goodies, gel-paks and water and ice. And sometimes they even hold on to the sill of the car.

In most sports it's all about the start. Frequently the contest is won or lost at the very beginning. But not in bike-racing, there's a mass of riders and if you're in the middle or back you're not doomed. As a matter of fact, everybody rides together in the peloton until...they don't.

Of course there are time-trials too, where you ride alone against the clock. But even in those you're going so damn fast that you might crash.

It's a weird country we're living in in America. Education is anathema. How much money you've got determines your standing in all verticals. You're seen as more intelligent, more insightful the more money you've got.

But it's the European Union that's fighting the big corporations. Call it socialism, call it whatever you want, but there's a better safety net and a more advanced competition ethos. Not that it's perfect over there, but it's far from the backwater you're told. Hell, it used to be a desire of all college students to go to Europe, whether it be for a semester abroad or to ride the rails in the summer. Now it's all USA! USA! Nationalism on parade. Too often blind nationalism. Head stuck in the ground, refusing to learn from others. You don't have to be them, but that doesn't mean you can't learn from them.

And we popped the extra five bucks for 4k, and it's worth it. Subtle, but worth it. And you can burn through all the episodes, they weren't dripped out week by week, unlike "Happy Valley," where I can't remember what happened from one week to another. And in truth, we're only halfway through, but I'll still get some bozo telling me what happens in the end. I've already forgotten last year's winner, because it's more about the contest than the winner in sports these days.

It's so basic, so human, it's a microcosm of society.

Utterly fascinating.

Riveting.

And you'll be yelling and screaming like it's live.

And even though it all happened a year ago, that's what makes the show so great, like a great book or movie it's timeless. The lessons remain the same.

This show is leagues beyond the sports programming on every other network. Makes you wish Netflix aired them all. It doesn't, but when it does, it gooses the enterprise. And bike-racing is worth watching. The problem with ski racing is it's one at a time. But when they're all out there on the road together, in the peloton, WHEW!

P.S. Yes, a lot of it is in French, you need to read subtitles. But didn't you know that's hip? That the younger generation watches everything with the subtitles on?

"Why Do All These 20-Somethings Have Closed Captions Turned On? - As automatic captioning on TikTok and creative audio descriptions on Netflix go mainstream, so does accessibility": https://tinyurl.com/4e8t4r5k


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