{"id":20921,"date":"2024-06-17T16:31:15","date_gmt":"2024-06-18T00:31:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=20921"},"modified":"2024-06-17T16:31:15","modified_gmt":"2024-06-18T00:31:15","slug":"tour-de-france-unchained-season-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2024\/06\/17\/tour-de-france-unchained-season-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Tour de France-Unchained-Season 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Netflix trailer: https:\/\/t.ly\/kiSF8<\/p>\n<p>This is better than &#8220;Drive to Survive,&#8221; which I stopped watching after Red Bull stole the championship from Lewis Hamilton, after Verstappen started winning all the races, and I stopped watching the races too. Sure, there is human drama, but the problem is the machines. If you&#8217;re in a lousy car, there&#8217;s no way you can win. Whereas with the Tour de France&#8230;it&#8217;s not about the bicycle, it&#8217;s about you.<\/p>\n<p>And the team, of course, especially if you&#8217;re going for the GC, which is the overall title. There is strategy, but sometimes riders throw the strategy out the window and just ride for themselves, which the owners\/coaches hate, unless said rider wins.<\/p>\n<p>I wrote about this series last year, this year is even better.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s inherently flawed because you don&#8217;t get a feel for the overall landscape, you&#8217;re never told how many teams\/riders are involved, how much money is involved, and that is frustrating, but it does not detract from your overall enjoyment of the series.<\/p>\n<p>You see bike riding is dangerous. You can be going as fast as a motorcycle, and when you crash, which happens all the time, you&#8217;re not wearing leather but a thin jersey&#8230; Talk about road rash!<\/p>\n<p>But it really comes down to personalities. I hate, hate, HATE Jasper Phillipsen, who doesn&#8217;t ride fair, he squeezes his competition into the barriers.<\/p>\n<p>And I&#8217;m not a huge fan of Jonas Vingegaard either, he&#8217;s quiet and skilled, but he&#8217;s involved in the biggest controversy of the season. If you win by too much, if it&#8217;s inhuman, did you&#8230;DOPE? Yes, that underlies cycling to this day.<\/p>\n<p>Everybody takes it so seriously. You&#8217;d think the rest of life, politics, global warming, doesn&#8217;t even exist. Which makes the series a great respite from everyday life. Big girls may not cry, but big men do, especially with joy, when seemingly impossible goals are achieved.<\/p>\n<p>Do you root for the winner or the underdog? Is winning everything, or is how you win important?<\/p>\n<p>There are twenty one stages and each is different. And the landscape is jaw-dropping.<\/p>\n<p>There are other bicycle races, but this is the big kahuna. As for the athletes, it&#8217;s a herculean feat, to be able to ride these distances, climb these mountains, day after day after day.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t watch much sports on TV anymore. Can I say it&#8217;s a time-waster? Especially baseball, which used to be my favorite big league sport. I guess the essence is gone, and sure it comes down to the speed of the game, i.e. it&#8217;s slow, but changing all the pitchers, swinging for the fences&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>And now I&#8217;m going to hear from all the baseball lovers. All I&#8217;ll say is I don&#8217;t know where you find the time.<\/p>\n<p>As for the NFL&#8230; John Madden said you play one game and your body will never be the same. I don&#8217;t quite know why everybody&#8217;s addicted, even the wimps who never played in high school or even on the sandlot. You may think you&#8217;re an expert, but the true experts will tell you you don&#8217;t really know what is going on on the field.<\/p>\n<p>And then there&#8217;s soccer\/football, the world&#8217;s game. Some say there&#8217;s not enough scoring, but I don&#8217;t watch that either.<\/p>\n<p>I guess I can say that watching sports on television is no longer a priority, with so many other options available. There are things I&#8217;d rather do than spend hours watching sports. That&#8217;s what the internet age has wrought, and that&#8217;s what people can&#8217;t get over. Why don&#8217;t you listen to my record? Because it&#8217;s a very low priority. If I heard you were the greatest thing since sliced bread, I might check you out, assuming I heard it from people I trust.<\/p>\n<p>But I hope you trust my television recommendations.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t care if you&#8217;ve never gotten on a bike. I don&#8217;t care if you don&#8217;t understand how bike racing works. Neither will detract from your enjoyment of this series.<\/p>\n<p>Bob Costas famously said that sports are a metaphor for life. And you see it all in this series. Which makes you feel human. You&#8217;re involved. You don&#8217;t feel the sport is at a distance, but it&#8217;s right there. They&#8217;re not talking down to you, they&#8217;re just trying to win.<\/p>\n<p>And not everybody can. And you can be a great rider and have a difficult personality&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>CHECK THIS OUT!<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Netflix trailer: https:\/\/t.ly\/kiSF8 This is better than &#8220;Drive to Survive,&#8221; which I stopped watching after Red Bull stole the championship from Lewis Hamilton, after Verstappen started winning all the races, and I stopped watching the races too. Sure, there is human drama, but the problem is the machines. If you&#8217;re in a lousy car, there&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-television"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-5rr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20921"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20922,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20921\/revisions\/20922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}