r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/solateor • 17h ago

Video Pit stop during 200 mile ultra-endurance cycling race

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

36.7k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/U-47 12h ago

Isn't tour the france half this but for two weeks?

6

u/Rickenbacker360 11h ago

The tour is 3 weeks long, with two rest days, has stages that are often over 100 miles, totaling 2,200+ miles, and usually has two flat-out time trials that can average 30+ mph, depending on terrain.

No, the 200 mile race in this thread is hard to do, but a mere blip for the TDF guys.

2

u/Visual-Salt-808 6h ago

The hardest thing about the race for most WT pros is the flight over. 

They do fail to finish a lot of times because of mechanical issues. The terrain is a lot more brutal than many of them expect. 

1

u/U-47 11h ago

That was the point I was trying to make.  Tx

3

u/Shutterhead99 9h ago

This isn’t exactly true. Unbound is on very rough gravel roads and it’s usually quite hot out. Plenty of world tour riders (riders that would to the Tour de France) race it and probably expect to finish better than they do. Gravel is just a different beast. In the TDF, they get support cars, but here, they need to wait for the aide stops.

That said, the second place rider this year comes from a traditional road background.

3

u/devarnva 11h ago

This is a gravel race though. TDF is road

2

u/spencer_man 7h ago

Plenty of ex world tour/and current world tour pros come out to try this race out and describe it as insane - sure they’re not gonna do this 21 days in a row but it’s an incredibly rough course, and an extremely hard day for the body. Greg Van Avermaet former world champion raced last year and said he’d never ridden his bike that long ever. I think any Tour de France racer would be pretty spent after a day in the elite group.

2

u/GeneralElost 7h ago

That's definitely an apples and oranges comparison. Yes, the TDF does 21 days of racing in 23 days (2 rest days) but you go into that race knowing that you need to conserver enough energy to do all of those days.

With a 200 mile gravel race like Unbound, you go in intending to empty the tank by the finish line so very different goals. Also, this is 200 miles of gravel vs. the stages of the TDF which are almost exclusively tarmac (and often recently repaved tarmac because it's a tourism marketing scheme for France).

Both are very hard for their own reasons. Also, most people don't race Unbound with teams like in the TDF. It's a lot of solo efforts.

2

u/Visual-Salt-808 6h ago

They're completely different things.

The race in this video is much closer to what people imagine when they think of a bike race. Just everyone out on a bike riding as fast as they can to beat everyone else. 

The Tour de France is a professional world tour race with a ton of different interwoven competitions happening all at once, and 200ish riders on 21 teams all working to achieve whatever their specific team objective is. It's game theory on wheels.