[Podcast] The March Cycling Wrap
Welcome to the inaugural Cyclry monthly wrap up of pro cycling life. While it’s a month that will go down in history for a lot of reasons, there’s not a great deal of bike racing to talk about… So we’ve really picked a great time to launch this.
We’re experimenting with a podcast format for this feature. Let us know if you hate it. Also let us know what platforms you’d like to see it on…
Without any further ado, it’s time for a feature that always been a great hit in the car on the way to bike races: the Cyclry News Network.
Cyclry News Network
Welcome to the Cyclry News Network. I’m your host, Jessica.
In this month’s news, we had exactly one bike race: the Paris-Nice. It was a muted affair. A huge number of riders and teams dropped out before the race even began, so many that we were only half-joking when we hinted that we might still get a ride, and then it kind of just trundled on with the specter of cancelation looming over it. After boasting that it took a World War to cancel the Tour de France, the ASO ended it a stage early, and we’re not sure anybody even remembers who won.
Paris-Nice is the traditional season opener that sets the tone for how cycling racing will play out over the year. As a portent of impending global collapse, it certainly did that. See you next year, when people are allowed to ride bikes again.
There are reports of professional riders across Europe being spat at and even physically assaulted while trying to train outside. While that doesn’t sound particularly unusual for those of us used to cycling in Britain, it’s a remarkable state of affairs for the sport in general. There’s even television footage of an Italian rider wading into the sea to avoid the repercussions of cycling outdoors during the lockdown. That’s definitely more unusual for the Brits, who’d probably rather take their chances with the Covid than come into contact with Britain’s brown water.
France, Spain, and Italy banned cycling altogether. Britain attempted to kill their entire population in pursuit of herd immunity before deciding to actually lock down the entire country, a mood swing so rapid that it would’ve even seemed unrealistic in the terrible M. Night Shyamalan movie Split. And in US news, Tejay van Gaarderen came home early from Paris-Nice to avoid being stranded in France when the US banned travel to and from Europe, which turned out to be a very wise decision.
Thanks John Simm. This has been the Cyclry News Network.
Gear corner
Indoor cycling is booming. That’s probably not a surprise as more and more regions go on lockdown. Trainers are rarer than rocking horse shit, and Zwift are making out so well from the pandemic that we shouldn’t rule out a future Chilcott inquiry into their roles in it. They blew through the 20,000 concurrent users milestone like it was nothing, and that number is only going to rise throughout April.
Oh yeah, and rivals RGT and Rouvy went free. Both are perfectly fine alternatives that are worth a look if you don’t want to ride with your friends on Zwift, or if you just don’t want to pay the subscription fee.
A company local to the Cyclry offices, Virzoom, have also expanded their free line recently. Their platform is based on virtual reality, so you’ll need an Oculus device, and their focuses are on taking you to real life locations and also on fun minigames you can play using your bike.
The most depressing story of the month was the news that Le Col and Wahoo have launched a collaborative indoor clothing line. No… No, I’m looking at my notes and it says that I can’t make light of so many people dying. Designer clothing for your turbo training session is NOT as bad as people drowning in their own lungs. Not quite.
And we reviewed the See Sense Icon 2. It’s a really great little light that reacts to the conditions around you to improve your safety. That includes flashing faster at roundabouts and getting brighter when there are oncoming headlights. The best thing is that it doesn’t require you to do anything – it’s AI based and handles everything. Just remember to charge it.
Racing on Zwift and Rouvy
The sport has, not so quietly, moved to virtual arenas. This has mostly been in the form of casual rides, with some of the sport’s biggest teams like Mitchelton-Scott and Israel Start Up Nation organizing events designed to raise money for charity. And also presumably give some attention to the sponsors so that they don’t pull out. And maybe to give their riders something to do, but when has a pro team ever cared about their riders?
There’s aslo been some racing. The Tour of Flanders launched a virtual race on Rouvy featuring 13 of the best riders in the world, probably. This is a partnership that’s definitely worked for Rouvy. We didn’t know you could race on it. We’ve been kind to RGT in the past, but all of these platforms are kind of the off-brand Coca Cola of virtual cycling platforms. We’ll get emails from the contrarians who love to ride in their completely empty off-brand virtual worlds because the five-second average power reporting is 1.5% more accurate, but come on.
One of the reasons that the push to turn Zwift and its copycats into an esport is falling so flat is that external variables make factors like power output unreliable, which in turn delegitimizes the results.
The entire premise of sport as an endeavor is based around a single requirement: a level playing field. Without trying to radicalize anybody, we’ve long discussed that that sporting competition is entirely predicated on creating equality of opportunity in order to express natural inequalities between individuals… and you can read how those inequalities are not just individual, but centered on identifiers like gender and race.
If we can’t trust the playing field, we can’t trust the result. And if we can’t trust the result, then it’s basically just one of those namby pamby Phil and Friends charity rides that your distant relatives do every year. Zwift started getting riders together in one location and riding with the same equipment to mitigate this, but come on, if we’re already getting everybody together we might as well just make them race in the real world.
One more reason this sucks is that it strips the sport of romance and turns it into a game of power:weight ratios. Real life cycling racing is doing its best to do that too, but it’s never been quite as explicit as in Zwift. And at least the real life power:weight robots fall off their bikes sometimes.
Finally, it’s just not fun to spectate. It absolutely could be. There’s a huge amount of live data available that viewers can see as they please, and you don’t have camera motorbikes or helicopters to worry about so you can show literally anything that happens. But instead the viewer gets no control. There are no replays. One Zwift race we watched on Facebook even managed to miss the finish.
Give us control through an in-app interface that lets us see what we want, what data we want, and live replays at our command. Actually, forget the in-app interface: make it a web player than lets you control the view as if you’re in-app.
I’m available to consult on this last item. It’s basically what I did for six years. Come on Rouvy, I’m sorry for everything I said two minutes ago.
Music: Mystery Mammal – Tip Toe; Glass Boy – News at 11