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The World’s Greatest Sport Is All but Ignored in the United States
It’s a beautiful but cruel sport not for the faint of heart.
My work productivity goes way down in July. It’s not because of summer, not directly. It’s because of the greatest spectacle in sport — the Tour de France.
My first sports love was and still is baseball, but I am increasingly obsessed with cycling. People love to race, to see who can move the fastest, and that includes the humble bicycle. Organized competitive sports emerged in the late 1800s, and cycling was one alongside football (the real one, not the American one) and baseball. Milano-Torino claims to be the oldest professional cycling race, first run in 1876. Cycling events have been a part of every Olympic Games since their inception in 1896.
Professional cycling is governed by The Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), founded in 1900 and currently headquartered in Aigle, Switzerland. The UCI holds competitions in multiple cycling disciplines, including road, track, mountain, and cyclo-cross. I’m going to write about the most popular discipline, and the one I know best — road cycling.
Road Race Cycling — The Basics
Because the sport of cycling is so foreign to most people, I have to share some general…
