Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Roubaix at 4,000 FPS

Gorgeous slow-motion video captures the essence of the race.
By Joe Lindsey

I said last week that, for me anyway, Paris-Roubaix is one of the races that a cycling fan should watch live sometime in his or her lifetime.

Like any sports event, watching live and on TV offer two dramatically different experiences. On TV, you catch (almost) every attack, and the flow of a race’s storyline is far more comprehensible.

Journalists who cover bike racing sometimes get derided for going to the press room to watch and then rushing to the finish line only for quotes, but the reason so many of them do has far less to do with laziness and far more to do with the above paragraph; in cycling, the press box IS the press room TV.

But watching on TV you’re also at a certain remove. There is no feeling quite like standing on the side of the road for a race like Roubaix.

Lined up with the fans, you watch as mechanics mark strategic spots to stand with spare wheels. You marvel at the sheer chaos of the cobbles – stones laid three centuries ago that have sunk and shifted to form an almost impossible path of jagged edges and ruts.


A euro coin shows the size of some hard cobble edges.

The helicopters’ buzz grows louder, the cloud of dust on the horizon inexorably zigs and zags a path in your direction. From maybe a kilometer away, across the freshly plowed fields of northern France, you spot spare bikes bristling from a team car’s roof rack.

The noise grows to a deafening roar, the cars and motorcycles leading the race sweep through with increasing urgency, horns blaring. Helicopters pounding overhead. Fans screaming in anticipation.

And then, wrapped almost in a cocoon of silent focus, comes the lead rider. His bike bounces, his arms shake like he’s controlling a jackhammer. His face is fixed on a spot in front of his wheel and he appears to neither see nor hear anything around him. There is only him, the bike, and the road.

I’ve never seen anything – not even Jorgen Leth’s remarkable 1976 documentary A Sunday in Hell – that captures that moment and those sensations on celluloid.

This video was shot on a high-speed Weisscam HS-2 that is capable of a ridiculous 4,000 frames-per-second exposure, which essentially offers still-photo clarity and resolution in video form. It’s the closest approximation to being at the race I’ve ever seen. If you’re a fan of racing, of Roubaix, you owe it to yourself to spend 2:36 watching this:



And then you’ll probably book plane tickets for next year’s race. A hat tip to the blog Inner Ring for posting this via a reader’s tip.

Source: http://bicycling.com/blogs/boulderreport/2011/04/12/roubaix-at-4000-fps/

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