le grimpeur

The Giro d’Italia as epic0
Guy WR posted in Classic Stages on June 29th, 2009

This blog has commented previously on the epic, myth-making stories in writing on cycling (see here, for example). In his essay, The Tour de France as Epic, French philosopher Roland Barthes critiqued this style of writing but also added his own level of somewhat over-blown analysis.

“The Tour [de France] is the best example we have ever encountered of a total, hence ambiguous myth; the Tour is at once a myth of expression and a myth of projection, realistic and utopian at the same time… the utopian image of a world which stubbornly seeks reconciliation by the spectacle of a total clarity of relations between man, men, and Nature.”

Quite. (more…)

Hemingway revisted0
Guy WR posted in Climbers on June 20th, 2009

This blog has already written on Ernest Hemingway’s interest in cycling, particularly the Italian riders Ottavio Bottecchia and Bartolomeo Aymo.

“I have started many stories about bicycle racing but have never written one that is as good as the races are both on the indoor and outdoor tracks and on the roads,” he wrote in A Moveable Feast. (more…)