Wed. C&C, ed. 593 (2019/08/28):
https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/63035499Time for a 12-shot photo essay.
For personal reasons, I have been very interested in bicycle riding in the past week, which brought back fond memories of a photo job a few years ago. So I decided to extract a small essay from the results of that job for today's thread.
Why I have chosen a French title will be obvious in the images.
If you want a translation, that might be "A Herculean Challenge".
In September 2013 I was the official photographer for the first Belgian edition of "Tour for Life", a very serious bicycle challenge for enthusiasts, consisting of a more than week-long extended ride from Italy (Bardonecchio in the Italian Alps) to De Muur of Geraardsbergen (from Tour de Flandres fame) in Belgium.
It was an ambitious and challenging cycling adventure (with stages of +170km and many climbs), along roads of bicycling legend, including Cols of Lautaret, L'Alpe d'Huez, Croix de Fer, Madeleine, French Jura and Lorraine countryside,Grand Ballon, steep hills in the Ardennes and roads of the Tour of Flanders.
The whole effort was a sponsoring event for hobbyist cycling teams (or just groups of friends of any gender) that want to promote and financially support the humanitarian work of "Artsen Zonder Grenzen" (Médecins Sans Frontières - Doctors Without Borders).
Tour for Life 2013 really did not have any luck with the weather: cold and rain followed us the whole week, with only occasionally some short periods of sun.
If you want to see a very extended report of the whole week, you can look at it here:
Tour for Life, Sept 2013 For this C&C thread, I have selected and slightly rearranged (a-chronologically) a sequence of 12 shots from the second real stage of the event, the "Etape Reine", which took the riders over the Col de Croix de Fer, the Col de la Madeleine AND the Col du Glandon, with arrival near the Lake of Geneva.
(Thank God they did not have to finish on top of L'Alpe D'Huez - that was for the next day...)
This Queen Stage would have been challenging in ANY conditions, but was made almost impossible due to extremely bad weather. Unseasonal cold, rain and mist haunted the riders all through the day.
After the descent of one of the cols, most rider groups were completely miserable and exhausted.
And that is the point where my essay starts, aiming to show how the misery did not prevent the heroes from enjoying a calm unscheduled stop in a roadside café (bar-tabac-newspapers) near an abandoned train station, in order to warm up a bit with hot chocolate (and brandy) and to try to get the cycling clothes just a little bit less soaked ... before soldiering on.
With that introduction, I will let the images speak for themselves.
Get your feet on the pedals because here we go.
