If you don’t know what story cubes are, see the introduction to the story cubes series.
To see the original roll of the story cubes, see yesterday’s post.
In 1903, a time before cell phones for navigation and distraction and before sports were run by empty suits in skyscrapers, a man had an idea: let’s get a bunch of men together to take a bicycle ride around France. Not a mere touristy ride, but A Tour.
They rode on heavy bikes that hardly resemble the sleek racing machines we have today. Tires were unreliable: it wasn’t uncommon to get several flat tires on one stage alone. The roads weren’t paved, the heat bore down as did the winds, but they all pressed on clockwise through France in order to be the one who would be forever locked in the pages of sports history.
Dozens entered this inaugural contest. Some of them were accomplished racers, others amateurs with day jobs who rode for fun. All of them were a bit insane, but none of them were fish because, as we know, fish don’t need bicycles.
So on July 1st they set off, flying like arrows and barely stopping, passing through almost 300 miles of countryside between Paris and Lyon.
Only a few more months and the 113th Tour de France begins! (It’s been 123 years, but they didn’t have Tours during WWI and WWII.) Today’s races hardly resemble the original ones, although they are extremely hard (“hard” meaning the hardest sporting event in the world) in a different way. But those riders in the first one were a different breed: bikes that were heavy and broke easily, roads that were almost entirely unpaved because most roads weren’t paved back then, and due to the lengths of the stages (2 to 3 times longer than today’s stages) they rode at night as well as during the day—and this at a time when there weren’t streetlights everywhere.
The comments section is the perfect place for what you came up with. I’m sure you did better than I did this week!
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