I love these old bike race videos. IN a sense, it seemed more pure than todays races, with so much on telemetrics, diets, data, aero, etc. These older races seemed just about the rider and tactics.
Great at 20mins watching Peter van Petegem being pulled up the climbs in the draft of the camera motorcycle 2 metres ahead. 😂 The faster you go, the faster the motorcycle has to go... so you can go faster still. Drafting cameramen finally stopped around 2015.
I keep wishing that they'd give music credits somewhere along the bottom of the screen. Very good music to accompany a bike race. It was already the late 90's so I shouldn't be that surprised by that Kyuss/desert sound, but somebody seemed ahead of their time... All thumbs up!
Watch now-classic races like this. Then compare to the races of today, where the helmet radio rules all. See any difference? By removing so much of the unknown from each racer's ongoing race knowledge, great risks for great rewards, unpredictability and opportunities for courage and panache, are reduced. Radios should be banned from bicycle road racing, except for safety and emergency use.
As described by the words of the late, great Paul Sherwen: @ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-hGNj5Z82aBE.html; such a situation could not happen today. The classic "chess match on wheels" is diminished as the racing 'fog of war' gives way to mechanistic "efficiency".
Thanks but remove the background monotonous indecisive musak humm would be appreciated. Yeah ... I couldn't take it anymore; stopped watching it 'cause of the annoying hummm
Cyclists have been doping for over a century, the likes of Merckx were on it virtually all the time, got busted four times in an era of hardly any testing, three of those were in big races including grand tours and Fleche Wallone.