STOEP TALK: Cyclists need super vino power to traverse Italy (part 1)
James Clarke - August 10, 2004
Part 1 • 2
 On August 31 six of us - average age 66 - leave South Africa for le Tour de Farce III when we cycle across the Italian subcontinent.
But team member Harvey Tyson has raised a serious doubt. He fears Italian wine does not have a high calorific value and that we are unlikely to get more than 10km per liter out of it.
As L*E*A*D*E*R of this expedition it behooves me to heed his words for Harvey is, by virtue of having lived so long, the team's health adviser.
Last year when Tour de Farce II sped across Southwest France, we managed 25,5km/l drinking des grand vins du Languedoc Roussillon.
The year before when we cycled down the Danube we managed up to 40,7 km/l on Austro/Hungarian beer.
Harvey has experimented with South African wine and can barely make 15km/l.
This intelligence is worrying because our party consists mainly of ancient editors.
(NB: Our average age has dropped from 69 last year to 66 this year because Peter Sullivan (55) is replacing Lawton Christiane (72). This means that we are much younger and more agile and may even stage a final sprint down the Via Veneto on returning to Rome.)
At a recent meeting the wine problem was raised and this led to somebody mentioning performance-enhancing substances.
The older and more conservative members audibly shook their heads at the very mention of this. Harvey pointed out that all wine, considering its natural sugar content, is a performance-enhancing substance.
Then Alan Calenborne (our cameraman whose experience as a lens man goes back as far as 2003) observed, "Water is also a performance-enhancing agent when you come to think about it."
There followed a long silence as we contemplated drinking water.
I mentioned that a FAQ (frequently asked question) from readers was how far do we cycle on an average day?
A keen cyclist, Clive Urquart, e-mailed, saying, "Lance Armstrong averages almost 50km an hour. What about you?"
This triggered a longer silence because 50km is sometimes all we achieve in a day.
But what do we average? We needed our navigator, Rex Gibson, to work this out but, once again, he missed the meeting having got himself lost.
He later phoned from Dinwiddie to ask us to repeat the directions.
Peter wondered if we shouldn't aim to cover longer distances and perhaps pedal down the length of Italy instead of merely across it.
There was no response to this (save a gasp or two) and, as L*E*A*D*E*R, I let the matter drop. (Nevertheless it was nice to hear such youthful enthusiasm.)
A reader suggested we invite Lance Armstrong to join us but Richard Steyn said Armstrong could never keep up with us because part of our mission was to sample local cuisine and, he had noted, not a single cyclist in last month's Tour de France bothered to stop for lunch or even for a glass of wine.
"Did you ever see Armstrong looking around at the scenery?" he asked.
"Did any of them stop to smell the roses?"
There was another long silence broken only by some more audible shaking of heads.
I had to remind the meeting that our primary mission was not to break records or vie for King of the Mountains.
Our mission was to avoid mountains and, inter alia, as they say in Italy, try to bring back the seeds of that country's mysterious spaghetti tree - Pastaritus yumitums.
We are also hoping to pioneer a route, navigable by aged cyclists, from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic via Central Tuscany and Umbria, something which even Marco Polo never achieved.
I read out another FAQ: "Are you all mad?"
This led to an even longer silence and when I woke up everybody had gone home. I then declared the meeting closed.
- Contacts:
Stoep Talk
Fax: 011-465-4564
e-mail: jcl@onwe.co.za
Write to: Box 876 Lonehill, 2062
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