#106 Mystery of the One Ball

Among the many mysteries I find mysterious in this world—like why is phonetics spelled with a “ph”—is the whole Tour de France thing. I admit that I don’t watch it fanatically. Though I know intellectually that it takes huge feats of stamina and strategy it still pretty much looks like a bunch of clowns in funny costumes riding around town before the circus. I mean really, with those misshapen helmets and that tight spandex clothing in bizarre colors I wonder why I never hear a honky horn when they go fast around a turn.
And fast they do go. The problem is, none of us has any idea how fast, as the cameras are always filming them relative to the pellaton, which is moving just about as fast. As any physics teacher will tell you, in order to perceive speed you have to compare the speeding item to a fixed object. Not only that, half the camera shots are taken from these crazy yahoo camera jockeys perched on the back of motorcycles, which swing in and out of the poor bicyclists with such wild abandon that I’m surprised we don’t see more crashes of man and machine. And how hard it must be, struggling up one of the mountain stages, when the air is thin enough already and you’re pouring every last ounce of your energy into moving your bike up this steep climb, and you’re sucking air big time because you need every drop of precious oxygen you can get to fuel your screaming muscles and gasping lungs, and some idiot camera guy on a motorcycle comes by and hovers right in front of you belching exhaust into your face. All the more kudos to Lance Armstrong for continually hacking it out at the front of the pack. I’m surprised he doesn’t get carbon monoxide induced lung cancer to add to everything else.
I’m never sure how they score the Tour de France. Lance was always ahead by quite a bit but he never seemed to win any stages. At least the ones I watched. I was listening to a news story the other day and they were saying how after a number of stages he was ahead by 38 seconds. Now that’s a tight lead. How hard is it on your psyche when after six hundred miles you’re only ahead by 38 seconds? “Um gee, I was hoping for 39 at this stage. I sure am glad I shaved my legs.”
I tease local athletes who go to the trouble of shaving their legs and smoothing off their wind profile with the latest synthetic bike clothing. That stuff’s so thin you might as well be wearing a transparent Speedo for all the modesty you’re left with. Really, at local level competition a few extra leg hairs are probably not going to be the defining difference between victory and defeat. But with Lance and the boys, absolutely. Every little ounce counts. So it begs the question, if in fact the weight of your accumulated leg hair can make that nanosecond of difference in the photo finish, then what about other body parts. Leg hairs, earlobes, nostril hairs, eyebrows, appendixes?
Oh nuts. Who knows? I only know if they start shaving off their eyebrows, they’ll really start to look like clowns...
America, ya gotta love it.