Old Yarn - The Day I Learned Bicycle Gear Shifting

Introduction

Here is the fifth “old yarn” on albertnet (following in the footsteps of “The Cinelli Jumpsuit,” “Bike Crash on Golden Gate Bridge,” “The Enemy Coach,” and most recently “The Brash Newb”). This is the kind of story that would normally be a “From the Archives” item, except I’ve never before written it down.

Trigger warning: this post is long. It is a rambling tale that doesn’t skimp on any details. And no, it won’t teach you this weird little secret your doctor doesn’t want you to know. It won’t give you the social currency you’d get from talking with colleagues about the last episode of America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Season 2.* So if you’re cool with bike lore of no particular interest to your social network, then read on. But if you’re impatient and/or won’t read anything you can’t summarize in a tweet (I refuse to say “X”), go somewhere else.

(*As much as it sounds like I made up this TV show, I didn’t. It’s the fifth most popular show on Netflix right now. The center cannot hold.)

Learning to shift – late summer 1978

As I mentioned last week, one of the cooler things my dad ever did was to buy my brothers and me 10-speed bikes long before any other kids had them. In fact, these were the first bikes we ever owned. This yarn is about the day—in fact, the very moment—I learned how to shift gears. If that sounds really boring, don’t worry: I’m here to entertain, not to edify. This post describes, among other things, three bike crashes and one near-death experience. (Why isn’t this post mainly about the near-death experience? Because that didn’t change my life. It just put it briefly in jeopardy.) (Full disclosure—if I can be permitted to directly follow a parenthetical with another parenthetical—this post doesn’t feature any really gory crashes. For that, click here or here.)

The peculiar thing about getting this ten-speed for my ninth birthday was that my dad forbade me to touch the gear-shift levers. I asked why my bike even had them if I wasn’t supposed to touch them. “Don’t worry about that,” was all he said in reply. This was pretty typical of my dad. He didn’t really like dialogue. He absolutely loved a good monologue, so long as he was delivering it and on a topic of his choosing (for example, the design of an interferometer he was building), but had little patience for pushback or even pointed questions, which could seem like insubordination. So I just kept my mouth shut and, in the ensuing days and weeks, even months, rode the bike around in first gear all the time. Yes, I was that well-behaved and craven.

I don’t know exactly why my dad prohibited gear shifting, but it’s not hard to guess. His opinion of his four sons wasn’t exactly rosy. It’s probably Geoff and Bryan’s fault. They’re twins and the oldest. Family lore (passed down from our mom) has it that our dad originally had high hopes for his kids, figuring we’d all be the genius offspring he richly deserved, but these hopes were dashed early. When the twins were still babies, he caught them trying—and failing—to throw all their blocks out of their crib. They weren’t clever enough to align the blocks properly to fit through the slats. These dumb babies were just banging the blocks against the slats, perpendicular to them. Disgusted, Dad brought our mom over to witness this atrocious stupidity. Did she wonder if jettisoning the blocks was even the goal of these babies, vs. enjoying the chock-chock-chock sound they were making? Or was she tempted to explain to her husband about realistic infant development milestones? Apparently not. It seems nobody ever corrected my dad, and from that day forward he had to live with the sad “truth” that his kids just weren’t up to snuff. (Other family lore has it that he said to me once, “You’re not very bright, are you.” It’s tempting to dismiss this anecdote except there were five witnesses. Could we all be wrong? Well, actually, yeah, but not necessarily.)

Where bicycles were concerned, our dad was particularly pessimistic about our capabilities. As described here, all three of my brothers and I distinctly recall our dad’s reaction when Max (who’d drawn the short straw) asked if we could register for the Red Zinger Mini Classic bike race. “You boys are too stupid to race bicycles,” he declared. “You’d get yourselves killed.”

So why did he even buy us cool ten-speeds, if he had such a low opinion of our cycling prospects? I put this question to my brother Max. His reply was along the lines of, “Typical one-speed kid’s bikes disgusted Dad. No son of his would ride anything so vulgar. We had to be on proper ten-speeds whether we deserved them or not.”

Now, I realize I should be careful not to drag my brothers too far into my own story as regards the gear-shifting prohibition. I don’t specifically recall them being included in this, so I asked Bryan about it. “I think we were allowed to shift,” he said. “We probably ruined that for you with our own screw-ups.” He proceeded to recall how he tried to fix one of the brakes on his bike. He loosened the cable-fixing bolt, perhaps for diagnostic purposes, and pulled the cable out. Back then the cable would feed through a very narrow cylindrical aperture before being bolted down. Since this is the same dumb kid who as a baby couldn’t even throw a block out of his crib, you won’t be surprised to learn what happened next: he couldn’t get the cable back in. In fact, when he tried, the individual steel strands broke free from one another, fraying hopelessly. Bryan broke down in despair, convinced that he’d entirely wrecked his bike. Not only would he not have it to ride anymore, but he’d be in big trouble with Dad.

If getting in trouble for bike problems strikes you as preposterous, you obviously never met our dad. He was so devoted to his career, any extra parenting demands that pulled him away from his work during an evening or weekend was like a crisis. Nothing, it seemed, peeved him more than extra child-rearing tasks. We would actually be in trouble for getting a flat tire on our bikes. This was construed as an act of moral turpitude, like we were trying to throw our dad’s world into a tailspin by running over something sharp. It’s like nothing was an accident … every mishap was an act of treachery. All this being said, there was a positive side to our dad’s oppressive reign, which is that we learned how to fix our bikes ourselves, so that our “crimes” could be kept secret.

But of course, this frayed cable incident occurred long before Bryan developed any proficiency as a mechanic. At the time he bemoaned his plight to our babysitter, H—, who took pity on the boy and intervened, calling our dad at work to soften the blow. The upshot was that Dad didn’t get angry with Bryan (or at least kept it to himself), but he also didn’t get around to fixing the bike for what felt to Bryan like a year. Needless to say, until the bike was fixed, Bryan was forbidden to ride it. Our bikes always had to have two working brakes.

I told this story to my younger daughter, who incredulously asked, “Why wasn’t Uncle Bryan allowed to ride with just one brake? One is plenty!” Now, before you decide that her attitude marks me as an incompetent parent, let me just say I keep a pretty close eye on the family fleet and proactively make any repairs necessary. The only time my daughter has ridden with only one brake is when she was off at college and burned through a set of brake pads on her Breezer while I wasn’t looking. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true because she sometimes borrows my mid-‘60s Triumph 3-speed, whose coaster brake occasionally fails for reasons I cannot fathom (much less fix). But that’s pretty rare. In general I am a stickler for bicycles having two working brakes.

(Here is a drawing, by my daughter, of her Breezer. It’s not pertinent to the story, but when your kid pays such a loving tribute to her bicycle, you kind of want to share it.)

Now, being committed to truth in these pages, I must disclose something: my dad’s strict rules notwithstanding, I myself became quite reckless about the two-brake rule, a mere three or four years after having so obediently followed the no-shifting protocol. Perhaps something about an over-strict parent encourages a wholesale abandonment of that parent’s policies. I was around twelve when I bought a 3-speed bike, a basic Sears model, used. Yes, Sears made bicycles. Don’t believe the Google AI Summary on this. In fact, here is a photo of a Sears bike that is the spitting image of the one I had.

Just as in the photo above, my Sears had two handbrakes (and I don’t know what this says about its age as compared to my Triumph). The rear brake stopped working (probably a broken cable) and I don’t think I even considered fixing it. By this point I knew how, but it just didn’t seem important when I still had a perfectly good front brake. (I also didn’t bother replacing the broken gear cable connecting the Speed Switch shifter to the Sturmey-Archer internal 3-speed hub, so this bike was always in third gear, which was the highest. For this reason its nickname was the Third Speed. Why do I mention the brand of hub? Well, so I could include some eye candy here.)

Uh, where was I? Oh, yeah, so, I didn’t bother to fix that rear brake. Nor did I consider riding more carefully. Quite the opposite, in fact. Exhibit A: my bike ride to Mr. Tomato’s Pizza to meet some friends. Mr. Tomato’s was at the bottom of the gently down-sloping parking lot of the Basemar shopping center. It had a huge picture window, and from a distance I recognized my friends sitting right in front of it. I decided to give them a good scare, and started sprinting toward them as fast as I could. My plan was to slam on the brakes (er, brake) just in time to keep from crashing through the window. Two things failed to occur to me. One was the possibility of a pedestrian walking along the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. There was an overhang above this sidewalk, supported at intervals by big pillars that could easily obscure a shopper from view. The other thing I didn’t consider was the possibility of my one brake suddenly failing. This is what actually happened. Just as I hammered the brake, the cable snapped. There was absolutely no way to stop and I was less than ten feet from that giant window, carrying great speed.

It seemed as though all was lost, but just before impact I spied one of the pillars, which fortunately had a round cross-section and a smooth finish. I wrapped that pillar in a bear hug to at least keep myself from crashing through the window. Amazingly, as my momentum spun me and my bike around the pillar, the bike ended up pointed along the sidewalk at the moment it escaped my legs. It went shooting off forward, straight down that sidewalk, still at great speed.

So wonderful is the design of a bicycle, it can travel a great distance with no rider, as my brothers and I had learned to our delight earlier that summer. Not wanting to damage our ten-speeds, we’d conjured up a beach cruiser whose sole purpose was rider-less travel. (Its Ashtabula one-piece crankset assembly had fallen out so we couldn’t pedal it around anyway.) That bike was called Ghost Rider, or Ghostie for short, and we spent many an afternoon getting it up to speed, one guy riding it and several others pushing, and when we couldn’t get it going any faster, the rider would jump off the back and send the bike flying down the street. It could go for several hundred feet before either tipping over or drifting into a parked car. Well, in front of Mr. Tomato’s my 3-speed surely set a new record, since its speed was at least double that of a kid running. It was amazing to behold it flying down the sidewalk along the storefronts. Fortunately it was a slow business day for that mall, with no foot traffic. Equally astonishing was that I was completely unscathed other than perhaps slight damage to my hands and arms, similar to rope burn. My friends regarded me through the window with complete bewilderment, slack-jawed and disbelieving. I guess the point of this story is that my dad’s lack of faith in my intelligence wasn’t entirely unwarranted.

Of course my dad never know about my near-death experience at Mr. Tomato’s, or indeed of most of the crashes my brothers and I had. But the very first days of owning our bicycles were not promising. The problem was, we suddenly had this new hardware but lacked the know-how to use it. As weird as this may seem, our dad made zero effort to teach us how to ride, and in fact I am deeply puzzled as to how he even expected us to learn before being presented with these sophisticated ten-speeds. Did he just think people are born knowing how to ride a bike?

Which brings me to how my brother Max and I did learn, or at least were given one lesson apiece, on how to ride. No parents were involved, of course. Max went first. It had come to pass that Geoff and Bryan realized Max lacked this important skill, and talked their friend R— into loaning out his bike for the lesson. It was a typical kid’s bike in that it was a one-speed with high-rise handlebars and a banana seat. (We had a whole saying around this, that we would chant in mockery of these inferior bikes: “High-rise handlebar with a roll bar, banana seat, small wheel in front, big wheel in back, cool-dual frame, rusty old chain, with a slick, streamers from the grips and flower pedals.” I fact-checked this with Bryan and he remembered like half of it, and I added a couple details, and Max knew the rest. “Cool-dual frame” probably pertained to the two extra top-tubes of the Schwinn Sting-Ray, a popular model in those days. A “slick,” as Max eloquently put it, is “a rear tire with no tread for monster skids.” “Flower pedals” refers to “dust caps on the pedals that looked like daisies.”)

Actually, R—’s bike was somewhat unique in that it was an official licensed Boy Scout bike. But that’s neither here nor there. The more important detail is the single instruction that Geoff and Bryan gave to Max as they put him on the bike at the top of Howard Place, a long downhill: “Whatever you do, don’t turn!” Max and I remember it like it was yesterday. So ridiculous. I mean, what was the guy supposed to do? They didn’t tell him how to brake. They just figured that his future would work itself out somehow, after he’d built up all that speed! They set him off, gave him a good push. Now, I just did some research with Google Maps, and this street ran about 450 feet at an average grade of 5.5%. With help from ChatGPT (because I’m lazy, not because I needed it) I just calculated that by the time Max crossed Ithaca Drive (which Howard Place T’s into), he had to have been going at least 20 mph. He dutifully followed the instruction not to turn, so it’s a good thing there was no traffic on Ithaca to run him over. Instead he crashed over a curb, with so much velocity the bike kept going, and then hit a low fence that stopped him so he tipped over into the grass, remarkably unhurt. He leapt to his feet, delighted, and cried, “I can ride a bike, I can ride a bike!”

Alas, that was Max’s only lesson before receiving his ten-speed, months later, on his birthday. I guess he just assumed his skill was still there. He jumped on the bike and managed to pedal it not only to the end of our street, Hillsdale Way, but to negotiate the right-hand turn onto Howard Place (the same street I mentioned earlier), which is a cul-de-sac. He rode to the top, managed to turn the bike around, and then came barreling back down. In trying to make the left-hand turn back on to Hillsdale, with my dad and my brothers and me watching, he clipped a pedal and crashed. He got up, winced at his road rash, and checked over the bike. A big divot of foam rubber had been ripped out of the brand-new saddle. Regarding this, he thought to himself (as he related to me yesterday), “Well, I guess now this bike is really mine.”

Did I do any better? Alas, no. My lesson was a year or so later. Perhaps having been spooked a bit by Max’s disastrous first effort, Geoff and Bryan didn’t start me down Howard Place. Instead, they put me on my friend P—’s bike, another lowly one-speed, at the top of a steep driveway facing Hillsdale. They gave me a big push and I flew down the driveway, absolutely frozen in terror, went straight across the street, and crashed into the curb on the other side. I hadn’t built up nearly as much speed as Max had, so the curb stopped the front wheel cold and I flipped over the bars. I didn’t quite clear the sidewalk and landed roughly on it, but was no more hurt than on any other day, what with all the various skirmishes kids faced during that era of free-reign bullying. But I can’t say I’d learned any biking technique at all.

So when, about six months and zero follow-up lessons later, I got the Fuji Junior, I really didn’t know how to ride. But there was no way I could just stand there and look at the bike, with my dad seeming so expectant (apparently notwithstanding Max’s fiery wreck on his bike’s maiden voyage). So I just winged it, riding down the sidewalk, pedaling furiously because the one thing my brothers had managed to get across was that speed was the key to balance. I made it about two houses down before veering off course, heading straight for a mailbox. I managed not to run into it, but raked my back across it rather painfully. Somehow I kept the bike upright, and I guess by that point I had the hang of it. But this first ride on the Fuji Junior couldn’t have impressed my dad, and may have reminded him of Max’s similar misadventure, and this is perhaps why my dad decided to declare my bike’s shifters off-limits. Maybe he felt I had my hands full just learning how to steer the bike. Fortunately, I did figure out the brakes.

Well, once my fear abated, I fell madly in love with the bike. As I’ve mentioned before in these pages (in the notes to my “Corn Cob” poem), my Fuji had Suntour shifters and derailleurs, which I noticed when with great delectation I examined every last feature of the bike. Suntour seemed like a really cool word. I didn’t grasp at the time that it was brand of component; I thought Suntour was a sub-brand of the bike, as though Fuji was the make and Junior was the model and Suntour was the sub-model, like they do with cars now (e.g., Subaru Outback Expert Sport-Trac, L.L. Bean Edition). I remember riding up and down the block joyously singing “Sun-TOO-or BYE-sick-UL!”

One day when the bike was still new, I rode all morning, from my house up to the end of Howard Place and back down, then all the way down Hillsdale and back up, then back up Howard and back, over and over again, whistling the whole while because I was so happy. I happened to notice Mr. S—, who lived on the corner of Hillsdale and Howard, looking at me funny. He was out working in his yard and every time I went by he glared at me. What was his problem? I just shrugged it off. Well, later that day, another neighbor, Mr. D—, confronted me, asking if I’d vandalized Mr. S—’s house and yard. I was like “WHAT?!” It happens that Mr. S— had described at length to Mr. D— how I’d vandalized his place, and then rubbed it in by riding by again and again, whistling merrily to showcase my Schadenfreude as I watched him clean it up. I was mortified at this totally false accusation, and declared my innocence to Mr. D—. He advised that I’d simply have to go over there and knock on Mr. S—’s door and explain that I wasn’t the vandal. This I did, despite being a very shy kid, and I was so upset I was crying throughout my denial speech. My river of tears, it seemed, was mistaken for remorse and contrition by Mr. S—, who clearly didn’t believe my story of riding by again and again just because I liked to ride. At least my blubbery speech mollified him sufficiently that he didn’t see fit to involve my parents. This was a big break, because my parents never seemed to believe in my innocence, either. My mom once made me go apologize to yet another neighbor for being part of a cruel pack of kids that relentlessly teased her dog, even though I told my mom over and over that I wasn’t involved. Can you imagine how soul-crushing it is to apologize for an act of animal cruelty you are entirely innocent of?

Okay, time to move on. It was the toward the end of the summer when, on a day I now see as momentous, Max taught me how to shift my bike’s gears. We’d pedaled up Table Mesa Drive and were about to descend Vassar Drive, which is a 5.5% grade. Max, surely tired of waiting for me as I coasted down such hills (first gear being way too low to be of use), pointed at my stem-mounted shifters and told me, “Grab those two levers and push them all the way forward.”

Now, you probably think we’ve finally reached the crux of this story, after so very many diversions, and will now get to the really important, life-changing bit, and that’s almost true, but first I need to pause yet again to explain about these shifters. If you’re old enough to have used old-school stem- or down-tube-mounted shift levers, and remember how they worked, you may have raised an eyebrow just now when reading about Max’s instruction to push both levers forward. On almost any ten-speed-type bike, pushing the right lever forward would put the chain on the smallest cog in back (making for a higher gear, exactly as intended), but pushing the left lever forward would put the chain on the smaller chainring up front (making for a lower gear, at odds with the rest of the shift). You’d also wonder why, since I always rode in my bike’s lowest gear, both levers would have been down at the moment Max issued his instruction. On almost any bike, this would have meant my chain was on the big chainring, corresponding to the higher gear range. The only way you might have thought, “Oh yeah, of course, this makes sense” is if you’re the kind of bizarrely knowledgeable bike maven who would recall that the Suntour derailleur line-up of 1978 included the Spirt model, which worked backwards from most other derailleurs. As it happened, Max’s instructions were perfectly accurate for putting my bike in its highest gear.

And this begs the question: if my front derailleur (and thus left shifter) were essentially backwards from most others, how is it that Max’s instructions were correct? Wouldn’t he have assumed my bike worked the same as his? When I started this post, that question wouldn’t stop nagging at me. Now, if you’re wondering if I’m just remembering it wrong, think again … after all, this was a life-changing moment, forever seared into my memory. The highly specific action gave me, even before the gear shift actually took effect, a very powerful feeling. I knew that these gears were the key to somehow going faster, though I didn’t have any idea how (because when you think about it, the behavior of a bike’s gearing only makes sense after the fact, when you know empirically how gearing works; before that, the notion of differently sized cogs and chainrings affecting a bike’s speed is highly, highly abstract). The idea that I was somehow about to unleash great speed was tantalizing, and to achieve this by taking one hand, applying it to two levers, and pushing them both all the way forward in one go … it’s like pushing the throttle control forward on a fighter plane, or, better yet, remember the opening scene in “Risky Business,” when Tom Cruise’s character pushes all the levers on his dad’s stereo’s graphic equalizer all the way up, so he can totally rock out? It was just like that.

Determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, I had to find out if it was possible the front derailleurs on my brothers’ bikes, meaning Simplex derailleurs (these being Motobécane Nomades), might have also been backwards. This could have been a convention, after all, because this arrangement just makes sense. You have one consistent rule—pushing lever forward = higher gear—instead of the conflicting rule of pulling the left lever down = higher gear while pushing the right lever forward = higher gear. This conflicting behavior stymies cycling newcomers. On my wife’s road bike, I actually put “H” and “L” stickers on the down tube near the shifters to show which way to move them. It’s one of the more confusing things about pre-pushbutton shifting.

I couldn’t reach my brothers right away so I consulted ChatGPT. It assured me that, in fact, Simplex derailleurs were also backwards (vs. more modern shifters), just like the Suntour Spirt. GPT confidently declared, “The circa 1975 Simplex shift lever was pushed forward (toward the front wheel) to move the chain to the big ring. As a result, the lever would end up in a vertical or forward-leaning position when in the big ring.” Had it stopped there, I might have been fooled by a classic AI hallucination. But GPT went on to say, “This action corresponded to pushing the shift lever forward (since the shift lever pulls cable as it rotates forward).” Of course this is wrong. The shift lever pulls cable when you pull it down. So I asked it to furnish photos and diagrams. It provided a photo of a mid-‘80s Shimano Dura-Ace front derailleur (useless); a drawing of a Simplex rear derailleur (also useless); a photo looking from the left at a ‘90s-era triple crankset (ditto); and a photo of a bottom bracket with chainwheels in the background (noticing any trend here, i.e., useless?). Then it described these visual aids in exhaustive, needless, and useless detail.

I pointed out its error, challenging the notion that pushing a shift lever forward would ever tension the cable, whereupon GPT completely backpedaled (pun intended, couldn’t resist) and recanted everything it had said earlier, saying, “You nailed it!” and providing a totally new answer to my original question: “No, Simplex front derailleurs (like the Prestige models used on Motobécanes in the mid-1970s) were not reverse-spring designs like the SunTour Spirt.”

But wait, I’m not done. Disgusted by ChatGPT’s blithe ineptitude, I asked it to furnish a diagram and a photo to illustrate its revised explanation of Simplex’s shifting. Look what it came up with:

Can you believe that? For all its detailed description (running over 1,600 words in all), ChatGPT apparently had no concept of the cable actuation. Look at the arrow pointing from the “Cable” label … it has no head, goes nowhere! No cable is shown! And look at the arrow showing the motion of the lever: it’s 90 degrees off of the actual motion. And since when is the lever mounted directly to the derailleur? Where would the cable even be?

Actually, in fairness, I know of at least one front derailleur that was actuated by a handle instead of a cable. It was on an ancient Schwinn Collegiate that I bought from a police auction. The rear derailleur had a normal shifter and cable setup, but that front derailleur had a handle. At least it did, for a while, until my pant leg caught it one day during hard pedaling and ripped it clean off the bike. But this wasn’t a Simplex derailleur; I’m pretty sure it was a Huret (though it was labeled “Schwinn Approved” in keeping with the fiction that this was an all-American bike). That derailleur looked something like this:

Getting back to ChatGPT, its drawing wasn’t even the worst of its crimes. Look at this fake photo it generated of what it imagined that Simplex front shifting system looked like:

I thought for a second this was an actual photo of some bizarre ill-fated real-life setup, but look at the ersatz brand stamped into the shift lever, in a nonexistent alphabet. The entire rendering is just grotesque. In fact, for me, and I suppose anyone else who has great familiarity with bicycle components, this mock photo is deep into uncanny valley territory, to the extent it’s almost nauseating. Also note how the derailleur cage doesn’t clear the chainring teeth. Artificial intelligence my ass!

Suffice to say, Simplex derailleurs of that era weren’t backwards and nothing can explain Max’s spot-on instructions. When I asked him he simply admitted, “I don’t have an answer for you. Geoff and Bryan probably made the observation so it must have been common knowledge. I know I didn’t discover that on my own.” Bryan theorized that Max had taken my bike out for a few joy rides and discovered it that way; Max could neither confirm nor deny this. The perfect accuracy of his instruction shall have to remain a mystery.

But oh, when I pushed those levers forward, and that bike went from first to tenth gear … it was breathtaking. I mashed the pedals with everything I had, working hard to get on top of that 52x14 top gear, until I was just flying down Vassar. I’d had no idea just how effective pedaling in “the big meat” (as a bike’s highest gear is known by racers) could be. It’s like if you had what you thought was a Fred Flintstone car, propelled by your feet paddling the ground, and then one day you discovered that this car had an engine. What a game-changer. It was like I went from patsy to made man in the span of a minute.

Not only did this sudden knowledge change my cycling, but it forever changed how I regarded my dad’s authority. Not only would I use all my gears from that day forward, but I’d have this secret I’d be keeping from him. It was impossible for me to revert to the lowly, gutless, quaking obeyer of rules; I was like, fuck that guy! He kept this gearing magic from me! He kept me down! I felt like Toecutter in Mad Max: “The bronze, they keep you from being proud.”

As it turned out, I never did get in trouble for defying my dad. An absentminded fellow, he evidently forgot he’d ever issued that prohibition. Or who knows, maybe on some level he wanted me to take some initiative. But most likely he’d intended to one day teach me all about shifting, but just forgot. Maybe he’d have thought a little harder about this if he’d had any inkling that his silly rule, coupled with Max’s intervention, would turn me into a lifelong rebel…

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume II

Introduction

It’s another slow news day. So, taking a cue from Can’t and Won’t, a collection of very short stories, essays, letters, and recounted dreams from Lydia Davis (click here for details), I’m assembling and posting some excerpts from some old letters to my brothers. (My first set of these is here.) These bits and bobs should be better than actual diary excerpts because at least I wrote them with an audience in mind, so I had incentive to make them good. I’ve provided, for each snippet below, the locale I was writing from.

April 24, 1989 – UC Santa Barbara

I went to see this movie, required for my English class, in one of the lecture halls on campus tonight. I planned to hit Gold’s Gym afterward since it was closed at 6:00 this morning when we rode down there (they said due to “water damage,” whatever that means). Anyhow, the movie’s supposed to be at 7:30, but the bozos can’t figure out how to lower the screen. They spend twenty minutes on that. Then, they can’t figure out how to turn off the lights—another ten minutes down the drain. Then, for twenty more minutes they can’t get any sound for the movie. Meanwhile I’m sitting next to this funny looking guy and this stupid girl with him who’s staring at the ceiling and laughing at everything and reminding me of one of one of the groupies I’d have if I were a rock star. Out of the blue, the guy turns to me and says, “You want gum?” Is it okay to accept gum from strangers? It’s Extra gum so I take the risk. It’s really rubbery, really slippery, good for blowing bubbles. Finally, after forty-five minutes they get the movie going. Halfway through, I blow a bubble a bit too aggressively and the gum goes flying out of my mouth, and you know what? I never found it! I was really slouching, with my feet up on the seat in front of me, so I was sure it landed on my clothes, but it was nowhere to be found. Not on the floor, my clothes, anywhere. Gone. Vanished. Anyhow, the movie was great but needless to say I didn’t have time to lift weights afterward.

I’ve got some new music. First of all, and don’t scream, I’ve been turned on to rap music by Captain John Pelstar. So I’m getting into Kool Moe Dee, Public Enemy, and Ice-T. You can hate me if you want, but once you start listening to this shit it’ll probably grow on you too.

Jesus, what the hell am I doing? I’ve gotta read Huis Clos (aka No Exit) by Sartre, in the original French; memorize about 4.5 billion vocab words for same; and write a 6-8 page paper on a 400-page book! I’ve got a final exam on Friday, on Saturday, on Monday, on Wednesday, and the following Friday! Holy shit!

But wait, there’s one more thing I gotta tell you. I’m spreading a new rumor through the cycling team. The rumor is: we’re being sponsored by Club Tan this season! Unlimited free tanning for everybody on the team! But you didn’t hear it from me! What’s scary is we’re scraping so low now for sponsors that everybody actually believes this. I told Mike B–, who’s on the sponsorship committee, and even he believed it! Now that he knows it’s just a BS rumor, he’s been spreading it around too. By the time the season rolls around, everybody will “know” about it. Shit, I really gotta go.

October 28, 1989 – Isla Vista

So I’m riding with Brett, a really cool guy on the cycling team (aren’t they all) and we’re exiting Highway 101 toward Goleta. The exit is long and uphill, and we’re going really slow because it’s a rest day. We pass this racer type, wearing some fancy Rincon team outfit, and we say hi but she doesn’t even acknowledge our existence. So we keep riding up the hill, and at the top there’s a stop sign where we turn right. I always run it, since there’s never any cars there. In fact, I once ran it right in front of a cop and he didn’t bat an eye. It’s that much of a blow-off. So I’m behind Brett, and oddly enough he actually starts to slow down. So I decide to go around him on the right, and no sooner do I start to pass him than the Rincon girl comes surging up the right side, without warning, almost plowing into me. Stunned, but still unwilling to brake, I decide to go around Brett’s left side instead. As I’m coming around, I look again at the girl, like, “What is she thinkin’?” Then, I hear a noise behind me. I look over my left shoulder and this truck is suddenly bearing down on us. No problem, he has plenty of room, I think. So I look forward again, and to my horror, Brett has slowed down even more and I’m hopelessly hooked on him. I have nowhere to go because of the truck, and my bike seems to have locked into his somehow. My bike gets pulled out from under me, and my butt is falling towards the rear wheel. If my butt were to land on the wheel, it would drag my balls into the brake caliper and drag me along like that, ruining my chances of ever being a father. In the nick of time, I manage to pull my right foot out of the toe-clip and stand up on it, though the bike is still being dragged along, and my left foot is still in its pedal. My left hand is holding onto the top of the handlebar, and I’m sliding on my right foot now, with my right arm swung high like a cowboy on a bucking bronco. To give you a better perspective of how grave the situation is, I should perhaps mention that the right side of the handlebar is dragging on the ground, while my puny left arm is holding the bike up as I watch my brand new Dura-Ace Integrated 8 rear derailleur coming precariously close to hitting the asphalt. I also need to protect my precious Dura-Ace right brake lever so I’m yarding on that handlebar with all my might. I slide like this for some fifteen feet, before Brett’s bike finally lets go of mine and I grind slowly to a stop. Total damage: to body, none. To bike, three inches of torn Benotto tape valued at 95 cents. (I fixed it up with electrical tape; I don’t use that part of the handlebar anyway.) I can’t believe I didn’t go down; indeed, Brett said later he was just waiting for the terrible scraping sound and my blood-curdling scream. So the end result was that disaster was once again narrowly averted, making me more cocky than ever.

October 31, 1990 – Berkeley

The owner of the bike shop has got a really cute kid, like eighteen months old. The wife brings him by daily. He already seems intrigued with the bike parts, and likes to drag a floor pump around the shop with him. He’ll hold the hose up to his face and point the handle towards you, so you pump it and give him a blast of air. This makes him giggle like crazy. Every now and then he’ll wander into the shop area and look up at me and say “Papa?” Today I said, “Can you say Dana?” and he did, the little rascal. Then he took a few swipes at a bottom bracket with a screwdriver, which is about the level of proficiency of most of our mechanics, so I figure he’ll be doing spot repairs within a year and everything else before kindergarten. That’ll be good for the shop, because he’ll be free to work full time unlike us college kids who only do 10 or 12 hours a week.

September 12, 1991 – Berkeley

So I’m biking down Bancroft, a street that borders the campus to the south, and I see this young female student being heckled by a homeless dude in army fatigues. He’s in the street spitting on a car (presumably hers), and she’s across the car on the sidewalk, and in a rage she throws this jar at him. Of course it misses, and hits the ground like a foot from me, sending broken glass flying across my legs. In shocked disbelief I watch as the homeless dude runs around the car at her as if to attack her, but before I can see what happens this car behind me, totally oblivious to the mêlée, starts honking at me and I have to get out of the way. I tell you, this is a weird place.

September 22, 1993 – San Francisco

Planetary Gear is a kinda dumb name for a really cool bike shop. It’s this tiny, cramped place with a giant Simplex clock on the wall, posters of great racers of the past, and old antique bikes everywhere. All kinds of ancient celeste-green Bianchi framesets, these cool Dutch Mary Poppins bikes like Geoff’s probably riding these days, old Gazelles and Allegros and an occasional Basso. It definitely has that old, retro Euro flavor. Not a click shifter or clipless pedal in the place. The owner, Grant, is this youngish looking guy, as Euro as his shop, who coolly dangles a cigarette from his lips and looks at you with a curious, slightly judgmental look, his eyes twinkling boyishly like Mickey Rourke’s, as if he’s deciding whether to laugh at you or take your money or both. He’s an expert at maximizing the flash and panache of a tired old Italian road bike, and selling it for more than it cost when it was new and state-of-the-art. I’ve seen him really rip some people off, but I figure, heck, at least they’re not being ripped off on something lame, like one of those Allsop Softride monstrosities. Besides, he is selling the last vestige of Western Civilization; he should be well compensated for that.

I drop by every so often, but I never actually do any business. For the most part, my bikes are pretty modern. And then when I finally did go in on Saturday to do buy something—I needed a spring for the ancient Mafac cantilever brake on my commuting bike—Grant wasn’t even there. Some other guy was working who didn’t seem too with it. No shirt, no shoes, no service—and I mean the guy, not the shop policy. Anyway, he ignored me for a while, but after I stared at him long enough he finally said, “Yeah.” I asked if they had a Mafac cantilever spring, and I pointed to an old cross bike that, of course, had them. “For this brake right here.”

He smirked. “Yeah, I’ve got that, but I can’t sell it to you.” This seemed to please him and—oddly enough—me as well. “You gotta come in Wednesday or Thursday and talk to Grant about that,” he said.

          “Why,” I said.

          “Well, because … huh. Let me see your bike.”

          “It’s not here. I’ll bring it in Wednesday and show it to Grant.”

          “Yeah. Do that. Cause he’s real picky about where that stuff goes.”

December 11, 1995 – San Francisco

I started my new job today. They took me out to lunch to a really cool place. It was nice, but not exactly posh—very old-fashioned San Francisco-ey. Our booth was solid oak. There was a button on the wall that rang a buzzer to call our waiter. He was an old but spunky fellow with a mouth. Somebody asked if the lemonade was fresh squeezed; he returned with a glass of water and pointed to a bowl of fresh lemon wedges that had been on the table the whole time. “Make it yourself,” he said. Later, when somebody tried to order a chicken dish, he said, “Come back at dinner. We haven’t killed the chicken yet. It would be way underdone.”

Our discussion during lunch ranged from the industry and technology itself—which is sufficiently interesting that even non-dorks can participate—to the tale of a fellow employee who, when skydiving for pleasure, had a parachute failure. The failure, the raconteur explained, was of the “Mae West” variety: the cord somehow got flung up over the parachute, causing it to fail to fill all the way. The name derives from its looking like a bra. It is less drastic than another type of failure called the “candle,” which is almost always fatal. This colleague lived, but was in traction for a while.

September 18, 2008 – Albany/Boulder

Sorry to hear about [your daughter] Lydia’s bike crash. You can tell her the following story to cheer her up. On the day of freshman orientation [back in 1984] at Fairview High [in Boulder, Colorado], I somehow found myself in the position of getting a ride there from D—. But not in a car, of course, but on the rack of his bike. So we were flying down Greenbriar Blvd, where it drops down from Shanahan Ridge, and D—’s Dr. Who scarf was flying out behind him, and he let out a couple of whoops, for sheer joy. Suddenly, the weak part of my brain, the insecure part, the part that fixates about good First Impressions and whatnot, kind of took over, and I worried about what people would think, since I was starting at this new school that none of my junior high classmates were attending, so I had to make all new friends. What would my classmates think if they saw me on the back of D—’s bike? They’d probably think I was his bitch.

I decided I just couldn’t stay on there, on the rack of this bike piloted by Dr. Who. So I bailed off the back. The weak, insecure part of my brain is pretty stupid, of course, and neglected to notice that we were really flying. How fast? Well, it was a steep downhill, so we probably doing like 20 mph, and I’m thinking maybe even more. I mean, it was enough speed to start D— whooping, after all.

So, you can guess the rest. I didn’t exactly hit the ground running, but I sure hit the ground. I did one of those stage slides like heavy metal rockers were doing during that era, where I slid on the tops of my shoes and—more importantly—my knees. Just ripped those kneecaps right open, like you’d taken a planer or a rasp to them or something. (I was wearing shorts, unfortunately.)

So after that I was going around freshman orientation gushing blood from both knees. I considered for a moment that the girls might be impressed by my toughness and my stoicism, but of course they were just grossed out, I mean just totally disgusted. I’m amazed I don’t have scars from it. And of course I had to try to answer to D— when he asked, incredulously, “What did you do that for?”

I really didn’t know what to say. I guess I just shrugged. “Didn’t realize how fast we were going, I guess.” It was odd, though ... I felt somehow as though justice had been served. I felt like I deserved the pain and the public scorn, for thinking I was too cool for my friend.

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Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2021 Vuelta a España Stage 14

Introduction

Year after year, the Vuelta a España ends up being way more exciting than the Tour de France, so it’s well worth following. And you’ve come to right place: with my totally unprofessional coverage, you’ll get much more detail about what the racers are thinking, where they are on the doping spectrum, where they get their hair done, etc. I don’t bite my tongue when (right or wrong) I don’t like something a rider is doing (e.g., doping, being inelegant, having a funny name) and so I pretty much tell the whole story. The real story. The as-I-see-it story. Sometimes an off-topic and/or totally made-up story, if I get desperate. So read on for my biased blow-by-blow of Stage 14, a pivotal day in the mountains finishing atop the Category 1 Pico Villuercas. During lulls in the action I’ll fill you in on what’s happened in this Vuelta over the last couple weeks.

Vuelta a España Stage 14 – Don Benito to Pico Villuercas

As I join the action—well, I guess I’m not technically joining in, I’m six thousand miles away sitting in a chair—but as I begin watching, the riders are starting the Puerto Berzocana, the first big climb of the day. There is a breakaway with a lead of about ten minutes. The best climbers in this group are Romain Bardet (Team DSM), Arnaud Démare (Groupama FDJ), and Jan Tratnik (Bahrain Victorious). Démare’s teammate Kevin Geniets is the one in the French champion jersey here.

“Wait,” you’re saying, “Démare isn’t a climber, he’s a sprinter!” Well, if that’s your position, how do you explain that he has the Strava KOM for the famous Cipressa climb in the Milan-San Remo classic? And don’t give me any explanation about him hanging on the side of his team car even though two riders reported this. Démare is a pure climber, even if that trip up the Cipressa is the only fast riding he’s ever done uphill.

(Note: if you’ve just looked up the Strava KOM for the Cipressa, you won’t find Demare’s record anymore. He took that ride down … something about setting a record on a crucial climb during a major race while putting out close to zero watts wouldn’t have looked good.)

Bardet takes the sprint to the summit to scoop up maximum KOM points. He’s now just one point away from the jersey.

After a short descent, the riders tackle the Alto Collado de Ballesteros, which (I am not making this up) translates “High Hill of Crossbowmen.” It’s a fricking monster climb … check out the profile.

Gosh, Démare is kind of hanging on the back there. I don’t understand why he’s not drilling it on the front. In case you’re wondering, he’s having a shitty Vuelta … hasn’t won a single stage.

Speaking of having a shitty Vuelta, Team Ineos-Granadiers hasn’t done squat, their top rider, Egan Bernal, being all the way down in seventh overall, almost five minutes back. They do have one rider in this break, Tom Pidcock, who is currently sucking wind near the back.

Where have you heard that name, Pidcock, before? Wasn’t that the kid in gym class everyone called Pudcock? No, he’s the winner of the Olympic mountain bike race this year.

Wow, in a crazy instance of simultaneity, at the very moment Pidcock is dropped from the breakaway, his Ineos teammate Richard Carapaz, who won the Olympic road race this year, is dropped from the peloton!

For some reason the cameraman wasn’t around to see it, but Bardet easily took the KOM sprint atop this climb. In fact, he pretty much dropped everybody to get it. He’s now the virtual KOM, and will take the jersey off Damiano Caruso (Bahrain Victorious) if this break stays away. Here is Caruso riding comfortably on the front of the GC group.

Caruso is a consummate professional when it comes to doping. His Bahrain Victorious team doesn’t have the top talent of, say, Ineos when it comes to the riders they’ve signed, but TBV’s doping program is second to none as this article laments. Caruso won his first professional race rather recently, that being Stage 20 of this year’s Giro, in which he went on to finish a spectacular (and very suspicious) second overall. Caruso has been doping since he was an amateur which apparently bothers TBV a lot less than it bothers me. Needless to say I’m hoping this breakaway succeeds so that Bardet can take away that KOM jersey.

Now the lead group is over the summit, having shed a ton of riders.

On the long descent, three riders have attacked the breakaway: Matthew Holmes (Lotta Soudal), Daniel Navarro (Burgos-BH), and Nicolas Prodhomme (AG2R Citroën Team).

D’oh! Holmes punctures.

You know what’s an even bigger bummer? They’re showing pointless aerial footage of a bunch of rooftops instead of the wheel (or bike) change. I wanted to see if a team car was close enough to support him, but don’t know anything. They’re showing the remaining duo on the attack, and then the rest of the breakaway now, without any sign of Holmes.

Ah, here he is, latching on the back of the main breakaway group as Démare takes the intermediate sprint (uncontested, I might add). What a stunning achievement for Démare. These are the first points he’s won since Stage 4, a week ago Tuesday.

Oh, shit! A rider is fetching something from the team car and totally stacks!

It’s Jay Vine (Alpecin-Fenix) and now he’s sitting in the road and looks like he’s in a lot of pain. Poor guy. At least the motorbike getting the footage didn’t run him over.

The breakaway is pretty far from starting the final climb, so I’ll take a moment to fill you in on what’s happened in this Vuelta over the last couple weeks. In the first stage, a 7.1 km time trial, defending champion Primoz Roglic (Team Jumbo-Visma) crushed everybody, showing the same stellar form that won him the Olympic TT recently. He lost the red leader’s jersey the next day when a breakaway stayed away.

Back to the action, Holmes has managed to jump across the 35-second gap to the leading duo, followed shortly by Sep Vanmarcke (Israel Start-Up Nation).

Getting back to the recap, Fabio Jakobsen (Deceuninck-Quick Step) won two flat stages, Magnus Cort (EF-Education –Nippo) won two lumpy stages (one in a solo breakaway, the other in a field sprint, showcasing his varied talents), and Caruso had a very not-normal solo victory on Stage 9. Roglic, having bested his GC rivals in Stage 6, was in the red jersey heading into Stage 10, but a big breakaway went waaaay up the road, with GC challenger Guillame Martin (Cofidis) in it. Roglic, apparently not feeling he had enough help chasing—or perhaps just showing off—attacked the peloton and had a gap of 20 seconds at the final summit, heading into the long descent. He descended like a madman—the commentators expressed surprise at his recklessness—and then sure enough he locked up his rear wheel heading into a curve and totally stacked. I have to hand it to him, he got his chain back on in like one second, leapt back on his bike, and got right back into the lead group. After the race he said, essentially, “I meant to do that,” channeling his inner Pee Wee Herman.

OMG! Navarro overcooks a curve and stacks, taking Vanmarcke with him!

Back to the recap, in Stage 10 Roglic lost the red jersey to Odd Christian Eiking (Intermarché-Wanty-Gobert Matériaux) who has held it ever since. By the way, “Odd” is not my commentary, that’s actually the guy’s first name. Sounds like a Dickens character, doesn’t he?

Now, I was thinking Roglic’s needless risk taking was totally unprofessional, since he’s crashed so much this year (and in fact lost the Paris-Nice on the last day by crashing twice). But he bounced back quite persuasively on Stage 11, crushing Enrich Mas (Movistar Team) in the mountaintop sprint finish to win his second stage. Roglic now sits third, 1:56 behind Eiking and 0:58 behind Martin. Mas sits fourth, 2:31 behind Eiking, and Miguel Angel “Superman” Lopez (Movistar Team) rounds out the top five, about a minute behind Mas.

Returning to the action, Prodhomme is now solo after that crash, and has a bit over a minute on the rest of the breakaway heading into the final climb.

Back in the chase group, Navarro (#61) is back in there and looks okay.

The chase has split, but may come back together in a bit. Bardet is the favorite here, being a name-brand climber, but he’s in the second chase group. There are three in the first chase group: Navarro, Ryan Gibbons (UAE Team Emirates), and Andrey Zeits (Team BikeExchange).

Man, Prodhomme is riding well but looks to be really suffering.

You know who else is suffering? Your humble blogger. I got my shingles vaccination yesterday and gosh my arm is sore. It’s hard to properly pity these riders when I’m feeling so sorry for myself.

As Prodhomme’s lead dwindles, Zeits attacks the other two and gets a gap!

Back in the peloton, Jumbo-Visma sets the tempo as they’ve been doing all day, pretending Roglic has the red jersey simply because a man named Odd cannot possibly hold on to it for long.

And now, up in the first chase group, Bardet attacks!

OMG! Vine has made it back to the chase group after that horrific crash! Look at how tattered his uniform is, his remaining bib number dangling!

Amazing! If Vine were a soccer player he’d still be rolling on his back, clutching his shin and moaning in pain like a little bitch, to try to get a penalty kick! But instead he’s gotten all bandaged up, grabbed a fresh bike, and chased back on! What a stud!

And now Vine is attacking this chase group! He’s got a two-liter thirst-buster of adrenaline and is tearing this shit up!

Pidcock, who must have re-caught the break and then attacked it, sits up (way over to the right of the road) and lets them catch him.

Zeits is about 22 seconds behind Prodhomme. They’re not showing Bardet anymore so I assume he’s been caught by the main chase group.

The GC group has now reached the bottom of the climb. Their 14-minute gap behind the breakaway is great news for us spectators … it makes the action last longer!

Prodhomme’s lead is going out a bit but I don’t think he’ll get this stage. He’s still got 8.5 km to go and the chase group seems to be loafing as everyone watches Bardet. Bardet is having a terrible Vuelta, sitting way down in 38th over 49 minutes back, so of course he’d love to win this stage to salvage his pride.

Geniets sneaks up the right side and launches a massive attack! The footage sucks and shows this distant aerial footage that is useless! Now they’re showing Prodhomme again, for no reason whatsoever! We can’t see the action because the coverage is so piss-poor! I’m livid!

Now Bardet attacks again!

Up at the front, Zeits is about to catch Prodhomme!

But before he does, Bardet latches on! He easily overhauls these two and immediately attacks!

Bardet’s gap yawns out to 11 seconds almost instantly, as Vine and Jesus Herrada (Cofidis) join Zeits and Prodhomme.

Now Vine starts to saw off the rest of the chase group. Bardet’s gap, with 4 km to go, is about 30 seconds.

Trek-Segafredo leads the peloton, for no apparent reason. Their top rider sits 12th on GC, and obviously there’s no hope for a stage win today.

The GC group is still huge, so they’re obviously loafing. Maybe Trek-Segafredo is setting tempo simply because they can … just being visible is their greatest distinction in this Vuelta so far.

Vine has dropped the rest of his chase group. Now Herrada bridges across to him and takes a pull.

This race is giving me chills! Wait, that’s not right. The shingles vaccine has given me chills. My teeth are literally chattering here. I hope you’re happy with my sacrifice … I could be in bed right now.

Back in the GC group, Cofidis busts a move to set up Martin.

So, on the face of it of course Martin needs to shed Roglic. But even if he doesn’t, he could probably get rid of Eiking  today and take the red jersey.

Now Cofidis’ move is paying off, they’ve got a solid gap on the GC group!

At the front of the race, Bardet is flying!

And as Bardet approaches the finish line, a giant of saliva drops down from his lower lip! It’s totally disgusting!

But he sucks the viscous gob of drool right back into his mouth, like playing a movie backwards, and thus rescues his stage win! All is well, he has all the saliva he needs now.

And now Bardet approaches the line … nobody can catch him now! But what’s this? It’s another giant blob of mucous sliding down his lip! Disgusting x2!

This spitball won’t go back in! He’s sucking as hard as he can but it still creeps down his lip! His sponsors will be furious! He reaches up now with his hand to wipe it off.

It’s a PR disaster! He’ll be known as the Saliva Soldier! No more endorsements for him! What is to be done? Ah, but Bardet is a wily one. He turns his manual spit-wipe into a blown kiss. Well played, Bardet!

But the saliva just keeps coming! He must now go at it with the back of his glove, as the front is already completely saturated!

He finally finishes sorting out his spit-gobs and gets to do his victory salute, but dammit, there’s that spit-yoyo yet again! It can’t be stopped!

Bardet is over the moon, but the spit has now spread and completely coats his lower lip. You can even see a new gob of it starting to drip off his front teeth. Disgusting.

And now the film of drool is dragged downward by gravity and starts to pool up again into a round blob. It even looks like a bubble is forming somehow, like there are gases suspended within the spherical membrane.

This is truly one of the most bizarre spectacles ever seen in sport. I really feel for the guy.

Obviously I’ve never had that kind of athletic success, but I can relate to grossing people out via a gross mouth. When I was in junior high my orthodontia required an “appliance” called a Frankel which involved both my upper and lower teeth; I had to hold it in place by clenching my teeth against it. My mouth, stupidly thinking this Frankel was something to eat, produced infinite amounts of drool, which ran down my chin constantly and made my lips chapped. I should have just hidden in a cave until my orthodontia was complete, but—like Bardet—I gamely did my best to live with it. One day I finally struck up a conversation with Natalie Greenstein, on whom I had a huge crush, and things seemed to be going well other than she could barely understand what I was saying, due to the Frankel. She was smiling, though (it would be years before I came to understand she was almost laughing at me), and I reasoned that the only thing standing between me and perhaps asking her out was the Frankel. I had to get rid of it! So I deftly snaked the plastic carrying case out of my pocket and popped open the lid one-handed, and then kind of let the Frankel drop from my mouth. I caught it very gracefully in the case, but a saliva tether must have formed—nothing else could explain the look of utter horror on Natalie’s face. Needless to say, I never again summoned the courage to talk to her. I was utterly mortified. How odd, then, that Bardet just looks completely delighted right now. It’s not like he’s oblivious to these giant loogies that keep making their way out of his mouth—he’s done an admirable job of damage control—but it’s as though he doesn’t realize they’re all anybody can think about, other than the fans at the side of the road whom we should hope are generally nearsighted. I think after Bardet sees the coverage of the finish he’ll want to put this day behind him.

Herrada sprints in for second, Vine taking third just behind him.

This really was an amazing comeback from Vine. He looked so awful sitting in the road after that crash, and then like twenty minutes later he’s suddenly back in the breakaway and riding well. Look, he’s even smiling now! I guess he wanted to make amends … his team is going to be pretty angry about his tattered jersey. It was brand new!

Back in the GC group, Giulio Ciccone (Trek-Segafredo) makes a ho-hum attack. Perhaps he could move into the top ten if this works out. Which I doubt.

And now Lopez attacks!

He instantly neutralizes Ciccone, who looks back at the peloton as if to say, “Help!”

Lopez quickly opens up a huge gap!

Jumbo-Visma drives the pace on the front. This is great for Mas who gets to just sit on and perhaps plan an attack of his own.

Sepp Kuss takes a monster pull for Roglic. ‘Merica!

Eiking looks pretty bad at the back of the GC group, but I think that’s Martin just ahead of him, not looking so hot either.

By the time Superman hits the line, Roglic has somehow pulled back most of the time, busting up the GC group in the process.

A bit behind, Eiking is dropped but not by much and gives it his all to minimize the damage. His red jersey should be secure for at least another day.

Martin crosses the line a handful of seconds before Eiking, and not much later than Roglic. He lost an opportunity to take the GC lead today, but based on how vulnerable he looked, I reckon he’ll be satisfied with the outcome.

Now they’re interviewing Bardet.

INTERVIEWER: You must be feeling a total mixed bag of emotions. What’s it like to be Romain Bardet right now?

BARDET: Well, not really a mixed bag, I mean, I’m totally happy and want to thank my team for—

INTERVIEWER [interrupts]: Well of course you’d be happy about the race, but that other thing … they’re starting to call it SalivaGate.

BARDET: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

INTERVIEWER: Nice try. I’ll bet you’re glad to be wearing that COVID mask now.

BARDET: Wait—are you telling me—are you saying you guys could see my little drool problem?

INTERVIEWER: What do you mean little? Dude, you could see it from space!

BARDET: Merde! I can’t believe that! I’ve had such a shitty Vuelta … can’t I get a break?

INTERVIEWER: You were clearly struggling to manage all that slippery, viscous mucous. Walk us through that ordeal.

BARDET: Well I’d had all this extra drool all day, and it was disgusting, it tasted like bong water, and my teeth felt all furry. My tongue is tired from trying to squeegee clean my teeth. Hell, my tongue hurts more than my legs!

INTERVIEWER: Did you consider just clamping your mouth shut?

BARDET: Please. It was like a 19% grade. Hey, I gotta go. My soigneur is over there waving a toothbrush at me and I can’t wait to use it!

Here’s the stage result. Not shown: Démare, who finished over ten minutes down. Just sayin’.

And here’s how the GC looks now. Not much change, for a stage that was ballyhooed as being potentially pivotal. Eiking lost a whopping four seconds to Martin, and Roglic took back 16 seconds from Martin.

Bardet mounts the podium to celebrate his stage win. This is the first time in Grand Tour history that not a single female model is present on the stage. I’m sure the promoters tried their best, but no woman would go near a guy with that much spittle, mask or no mask.

This is also the first time a rider has ever been instructed to not spray the champagne. COVID couldn’t interrupt that ritual, but Bardet’s saliva issue now has. Look how carefully he sets the magnum down inside the recycling receptacle: it’s completely full. Look, dude, spare yourself the effort … nobody is going to want to drink that.

Now Eiking mounts the podium for the red jersey presentation. Just look at his hair. It’s magnificent. You can’t tell from the still shot, but it’s actually waving in the wind, like amber waves of grain. I’m sure all the fans back in Norway have a huge crush on him. Bardet must be green with envy at this point.

Well, that’s about it for today. Check back on Thursday because I plan to cover Stage 18, the final mountain stage and probably the hardest, with a Cat 2 climb, two Cat 1s, and a finish atop the beyond-category Altu d’El Gamoniteiro. I’m drooling just thinking about it! And I’m sure Bardet is too!

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