Same as it ever was…
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
 Photo source: LIFE photo archive |
“These punks today, riding bikes, getting paid mad money, they don’t know what it was like when blah blah blah blah…”
I’ve been poking around some on the LIFE photo archives, unsurprisingly perusing their images related to cycling. When you enter the phrase “bicycle racing” into the search engine, 31 photographs are returned. As one would expect, there are some Tour de France photos, some 6-day photos from the ’40s, several Little 500 pics, and then there’s a certain Monsieur Fourcet (as seen above).
The caption to this photograhs reads, “Veteran cyclist Fourcet expessing low opinion of modern racers, saying they no longer have good legs and are much too lazy.”
The location is France.
The month is July.
And the year is 1953.
Jeez, you’ve got to wonder what it takes to impress this guy. It’s quite likely the photo was captured while the 1953 Tour de France was in progress, won by that well-known slacker Louison Bobet, his first of three consecutive Tour victories. Alongside other perennial softies such as Raphaël Géminiani, Gino Bartali, Wim Van Est, Fiorenzo Magni, Hugo Koblet, Charly Gaul and Jean Robic.
And as luck would have it, there’s some stellar prose recently created concerning Louison Bobet: the ever-interesting Dave Moulton penned a Bobet primer and Rouleur #12 has a profile of Bobet’s younger brother, Jean, a rider (and writer) of no modest abilities in his own right. You’ll have to get your hands on the issue (or better yet, his book Tomorrow We Ride) to read his account of Louison laying waste to the field on Mont Ventoux during the 1955 Tour, while he endured his own personal level of hell to finish his first Grand Tour.
Laziness, indeed.
