Well, a 32-inch-wheeled bike won the Unbound XL:
However, this doesn’t mean anything, because Unbound XL–and all “ultra-endurance” or whatever-you-want-to-call-them races–are stupid.
Firstly, let’s take a look at what the Unbound XL actually is:
That’s a pretentious way of saying you are paying a publicly traded company $270 to ride a bicycle a dumb distance while receiving absolutely nothing in return. Riding all night and foraging for sustenance in rural gas stations is not a sport; it’s cosplaying as a war refugee. This is a brilliant business model, though. In fact, I’m proud to announce the most prestigious ultra-endurance gravel race of all, the Tan Tenovo Super Mega Oversized Triple XXXXL Ultra 12,000:
Here’s how it works. You pay me…oh, I dunno, let’s call it $500. That’s not even twice what you pay to ride Unbound XL, for a race almost 35 times as long! In return, I’ll come up with a start time and place conveniently located close to my home so I have to do as little as possible. You’ll then ride across the entire continental United States and back twice, and the winner gets half of whatever I net in entry fees, which even if only one idiot registers is a huge payout compared to the Unbound XL, which pays…NOTHING.
[OK, I used AI again. No wonder the stock market is going through the roof!]
As for this year’s edition of the Unbound XL, as per the story I initially linked to, and am linking to again, the winner was on a 32-inch wheeled bike. Here’s what he had to say about it:
“I think this bike is just amazing. The wheels rolled so smoothly over everything,” Gemperle said.
Oh, really? LET’S GO BACK TO THE HEADLINE OF THE FREAKING ARTICLE, SHALL WE?
If the bike rolled over everything then HOW COME YOU HAD TO WALK FOR THIRTEEN FREAKING MILES, huh?
And sure, no bike is going to fare well over 350 miles on unpaved roads in severe thunderstorms…which is exactly why these ultra-endurance “races” are so stupid. Really, they’re not races at all, they don’t qualify as sport, and even calling them cycling is a stretch since the bike is mostly incidental–especially when it’s just another thing you have to schlep as it was in this case.
Consider an actual bike race–or really any type of sporting event. Ultimately the winner may possess one particular attribute in abundance, and of course luck is always a factor, but overall the contest is one in which the participants cannot rely on one thing alone to secure victory. There’s natural talent, but there’s also preparation. There’s brute strength, but there’s also finesse. There’s luck, but there’s also skill. There’s strategy, but there’s also being able to improvise in the moment. There’s following the rules, but also knowing how to work those rules to your advantage. And so forth. Therein lies the beauty.
But when you take the duration of the event and stretch it so ridiculously far that all that stuff burns off and the outcome is basically determined by how stubborn the competitors are, it ceases to be a sport. Instead, it’s just a stunt, or a cannoli eating contest on wheels:
See, a sporting contest needs to be long enough to test the competitors’ abilities, but not so long that ultimately none of that matters, hardly any of them even finish at all, and the ones who do finish are separated by gaps that are measured in TV show episode lengths. So how long is too long? Well, it varies from activity to activity, but there is a ceiling on it, because here on planet Earth we have this thing called a “day:”
To grossly oversimplify things, a “day” is the period when there’s light outside and we’re doing stuff, as opposed to when there’s not light and we’re sleeping. Or, if you want to get a little more scientific, it takes the Earth 24 hours to turn around once, and we spend roughly half that time doing stuff and half that time resting from doing stuff, usually on a diurnal schedule. Obviously the amount of actual daylight we actually experience varies quite a bit depending on the time of year, where we are on the earth, and so forth, but fundamentally this is the cycle in which all of human endeavor is rooted.
The point is, any sporting event that’s longer than the “doing stuff” period of a day is stupid. Please note this does not include events like the Tour de France, the World Cup, the World Series, or whatever else, because everyone still goes to bed. This is because spectating is an integral part of sports; like art, sport is meaningless if there’s nobody to see it and share in the emotional journey. Sure, you may not have time to watch an entire Tour stage, but if you’re a retiree, or a European, or someone else who doesn’t actually have to work, you could still choose to do so and have a life. Unbound XL on the other hand takes like 20+ hours, and there’s no spectating, just a dot on a map so if you happen to wake up in the middle of the night you can make sure your friend or loved one who’s dumb enough to be doing the “race” hasn’t died–or if they have at least you’ll know where to find the body:
A physical endeavor that is challenging is a sport, but a physical endeavor that is a calamity is called “news.” If some guy crashes his Hyundai off a ravine and survives for three weeks by eating grubs until he’s finally found, we’ll certainly read it afterwards, and we may even be inspired; however, planning the crash beforehand and watching a dot of the guy on a screen in a browser window you peek at occasionally to see if he’s still alive would simply be perverse–yet “endurance cyclists” would have you believe this is a sporting endeavor. I mean these are people who wind up in Russian prison on purpose:
And while the Unbound XL may pitch itself as an “unparalleled challenge,” endurance cycling is really just an extremely competitive form of refusing to actually compete. See, only one person a year gets to win the Tour de France, and they have to truly excel at cycling in order to do it, but anyone can set a FKT (“Fastest Known Time”), which is literally someone picking a random course and saying, “I’m the best at riding it…well, as far as I know, anyway.” To put this in perspective, consider the following passage:
Cheese Danish. The fuzzy window challenges the uncompromising nature of the pudding. Eerily, the cat muddles through. Yet the bleary-eyed mailman has yet to clean the aquarium
Now imagine a whole book of that. It would be completely random, and yet nobody in the history of letters has arranged those words in precisely that order ever before…as far as I know. Does that make it a great work of literature, or a total load of crap?
By the way, if you said “total load of crap,” the joke’s on you, since that’s actually a passage from “Finnegan’s Wake” by James Joyce.
Just kidding:
It’s total crap.
And so is endurance cycling, the ultimate expression of which is tying your head to a freaking stick:
Just think how much farther he’d be able to go if he also tied a cannoli to that stick.