That is a Getty Images picture of Tadej Pogacar, who won the Tour de France this year. Again. I hope they don’t make me take it down, since I’m not making any money from it, but let’s see.

Anyway, I haven’t been posting the last few weeks. There’s nothing special going on, or not going on. Just haven’t gotten around to it.

One reason is that I spent three weeks very actively watching the Tour this year. I splashed out for Sky TV… $54.99 for a month is outrageous, but still a lot cheaper than a trip to France. Nobody will ever replace Paul Sherwen, Phil Liggett and Bob Roll as the greatest TdF commentators of all time. But Anthony McCrossan and Nicolas Roche are very very good.

The coverage airs overnight in NZ, and I don’t have a DVR any more, since we only stream TV any more for the most part. Luckily, Sky offers an Instant Replay feature that lets me watch the shows on my own time… as long as I get there within 48 hours. That worked fine (except for a couple of the extra long mountain stages where I had to settle for the abbreviated Last 2 Hours coverage). I wake up pretty early these days, so for three weeks I was sitting in my favorite chair in the pre-dawn quiet, whooshing around France without turning even a single pedal-stroke. I mostly watched on the iPad, because the fast forward works better than on the TV.

It’s hard to say whether or not this was a good race. The epic battle wasn’t for first place… that was decided pretty early. Even Pogacar himself seemed annoyed that nobody could stand up to him. But there was a lot of drama down the ranks, and full credit to the media for ferreting out some of the other stories… I was willingly and thoroughly entranced by some new kid fighting for 7th place, or a big muscly guy making an improbable move on a mountain stage, or whatever storyline they fed me. This is a real reality show… 180 of the best in the world, thrown together by a pitiless and sometimes arbitrary selection process, facing a ridiculously hard challenge, with career-defining stakes on the table every day.

So, now it’s back to the real world for me… and maybe getting my daily step count back up without three hours of morning TV.