From the Library: 1989 Tour de France (dvd)

"... Is it any wonder I'm not crazy?
Is it any wonder I'm sane at all...

Too much time on my hands
(It's t-t-t-ticking away)
Too much time on my hands
(And I don't know what to do with myself)
Too much time on my hands..."

You know, I have never really put much stock into those lyrics. I have spent my lifetime (thus far) pursuing the maximization of "free" time. Too much time - no such thing; it is just a matter of how you allocate that time to useful ends. Useful, being a subjective word, can mean relaxing, recharging, reliving. That stuff has value, and you'll never convince me otherwise. 

The 1989 Tour de France, for myself, is the benchmark by which all other Tours de France are measured. 1989 was the year I started racing, the year I became an aficionado of the sport. That does not mean that I was unaware of bicycle racing before that time, or that there had been other great Tours, but they were somehow distant, unobtainable, something other people did. When I realized that I too could do it (though at a much lower level) a connection was created; I was, suddenly, a real part of the sport.

Anyway, the 1989 Tour de France was, and remains, among the great Tour battles of all time. The back and forth between Greg Lemond and Laurent Fignon is epic. The final stage, in which Lemond made up a fifty second deficit, to claim victory by the narrowest of margins is likely to remain in the history books as such. If only reigning champion, Pedro Delgado had not lost so much time in the opening Prologue... well, that is just as moot now as it was then, but it sure led to much speculation. The shadow of Miguel Indurain was beginning to grow large, and would change the way riders approached the Tour for decades to come.

Too much time? Naw, nothing wrong with popping one of those old dvd's into the machine, putting your feet up, grabbing a coffee, or something cold, and just reliving the past for a couple hours.