5-4-Fri: Cyclysm Sundays

The Tour de Lance is clearly a gateway drug to cycling fandom. For the past several years, I have moved beyond obsessive watching of the Tour de France and have been enjoying the complete marriage of TiVo (yea!) and Versus--which began life as the less testosterony "Outdoor Life Network." Many weekends now, I find myself on the couch ("I am on the couch; what are YOU on?") watching some obscure-to-Americans cycling "Classic," like the Tour de Moins Vite sur Lourd. On a series called, "Cyclysm Sundays," Versus offers single-viewing coverage of a One-Day-Classics bike race, from the season-starting Milan-Sanremo to the recent Tour of Flanders. Their coverage gives you summaries of the day's previous action and then brings you into real-time racing to the finish line over the course of about 2.5 hours. Here are 5 incroyable things about these Classics:

1. Stijn Devolder. This Belgian rider just won the Ronde van Vlaanderen (Tour of Flanders) in a bold breakaway that was awe-inspiring. As American George Hincapie said, "Stijn was on another planet."

2. Bob Roll. The man strangles every single foreign word that comes his way, talks with his hands on TV, and is the Magic Johnson of cycling--in the sense that he is clearly the dude still most enjoying the sport after his retirement; not in the sense that he dominated his sport even for a second.

3. Traffic Furniture. The Europeans seem obsessed with putting concrete obstacles in the roadways for the sole purpose of trashing their competitive cyclists, who smash themselves and their machines apart on these low-lying but deadly traffic islands.

4. Crazed Fans. I have seen a lot of things that scare me on television--Republican operatives claiming to be impartial Fox news broadcasters, the Snuggie, anything with "Idol" or "Dancing" in the title--but let me tell you that I am utterly flabbergasted by cycling fans who look intent on colliding with their heroes during races. The fans regularly dash out onto the course, obscure the sight-line into hairpin turns, wave on and off the road like so much human surf and run like maniacs next to the bikers on hills steep enough to make a footrace with the leaders possible.

5. Distance & Speed. These dudes are inhuman. Classics require that the peloton cover as much as 185 miles in a single day and still have the juice to sprint for the finish. The insane combination of distance and speed no doubt accounts for the woeful epidemic of doping in the sport but it also creates a sense of awe in the viewer.

PS - I am going to head off for a bike ride myself now (for as much as 25 miles at speeds of up to 23 MPH!) oh, and "Hey Ladies" by The Beastie Boys is cyclastic; now on iTunes.