HOW TO GET HERE
Jönköping has an airport, but you might be better going to Gothenburg and then proceeding to Jönköping from there, by bus or by train. that given moment. Abloc has also been contracted to build public trail systems. Find out more at abloc.se
terminal, which had been occupied by terrorists. So captivated was I by the rendering of this imaginary world that I kept asking the teenage counterinsurgent to go back to the bookshop in the terminal so I could see which books they had in stock. I was secretly hoping to spot one of mine. He duly obliged, even though every time he went back he was shot in the back by a sniper in the burger bar.
That’s where me and the digital universe left off, and I hadn’t been back since. Until, that is, this benighted pandemic and the erasure of all road racing forced me to tune into the live stream of an eRace a week or two ago. Even as I logged on and stared at the screen, I was aware that this was the behaviour of an addict seeking out a synthetic substitute; methadone to a Grand Tour’s pure heroin.
The version of virtual racing that I saw, very ably commentated upon by Alex Dowsett and my colleague Declan Quigley, bore as much resemblance to the product it aped as the CallofDuty bookshop did to a branch of Waterstones. Perhaps it would have been made more exciting if one by one the riders had been picked off by a sniper hidden in the virtual bushes by the virtual side of the virtual road.
The producers of the spectacle tried from time to time to remind the viewer of the very real efforts being produced by the actual athletes. But each time they cut to a shot of Rohan Dennis with a towel around his neck, it just served to remind us ever more readily of the painful paucity of the experience.
Dowsett was able to dispense some interesting wisdom. Young Remco Evenepoel, an unstoppable force in the real world, struggles to impose himself to the same degree in eRacing because the advantage he holds in aerodynamics due to his position on the bike is negated in a world without airflow. I thought that was quite interesting. But it was the very last thing I thought was quite interesting. So I picked up a book. TheIdiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky seemed a better way to pass another day of lockdown than watching people do their exercise.
And that gets to the nub of the matter. Fitness is boring. I mean, it’s great for the people who are fit. But it’s not the point of watching cycling. This is why ‘live power data’ in bike race coverage is of such limited value: once we’ve all agreed that they’re really fit, there’s not a great deal more to say.
I would not for a second decry the value of these things as training platforms. But this experiment in streaming virtual races to an enthralled public has proved beyond doubt that, as Belinda Carlisle so philosophically framed it, ‘Heaven is a place on Earth’. And Watopia is nowhere, really.
“I once rode a stationary bicycle and beat Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp in a Rollapalluza challenge...”