It's grand tour season. The Giro d'Italia is entering its second week and I have watched every minute of the coverage shown on American TV. I sat transfixed as I watched the cyclists hurtling down the hillsides of Switzerland in the rain on Thursday, knowing how easy it is to wipe out on even the most innocent looking bend in the road.
I watched every minute of coverage of the Tour de France last year and I intend to do so again this year. And the Vuelta de Espana in September if it is shown here.
All in the name of research. A character in a novel I have been playing with for the past year or so is a serious amateur cyclist. Last summer he broke his collar bone in an accident very similar to that suffered by Lance Armstrong earlier this year. I decided I needed to know more about cycling, so I started watching the Tour. During the day, I researched how the scoring works, the history of professional cycling, etc., and then watched the race at night. I became fascinated with the unwritten rules and the terminology: "domestiques" are riders who are not expected to win a stage but instead maintain a particular position within the peloton all day in order to allow the star rider on the team to sprint to the front in the last few kilometers; "natural breaks" are when the entire field of riders stops in order to urinate at the side of the road, often while still on their bicycles; an "uncategorized climb" is a moutain that is so steep it deserves a description beyond Category 1 (20 kilometers with an average 6% grade).
My objective is to have my character sling lingo in a believable way and to try to develop some insight into why otherwise ordinary people spend their vacations standing on the sides of roads in Europe while a hundred men flash by in just a few seconds. And then I'll try to figure out why I am spending dozens of hours watching it on TV.
No comments:
Post a Comment