We glide into Bodø over craggy peaks flecked with snow, rings of salmon nets haloed by bubbles in the sea. There’s a hazy quality to the light, and it’ll get hazier over the day – we’re above the Arctic Circle, so the sun doesn’t really set, just slides towards the horizon and swings back around again. The little plane touches down, tyres kicking up a puff of grey. A walk across the tarmac. A walk through the terminal to the baggage claim. A walk from there into the city, wheels on the suitcase going chug-a-chug-a-chug as I walk past a football stadium and supermarkets and homes. The centre is a few blocks long, that’s about it, blurring into two-storey wooden houses a few hundred metres out. That’s Bodø.
The mountains have a sense of inspiring scale to them but everything else feels very small, especially so soon after the Tour de France while the men’s Olympics Road Race is happening at the same time. I wonder if that bigness and smallness all at once is what draws people here, to the edges of the Arctic, where life is conducted either mostly in the dark or the light and very little in between. I wonder, if I was here, whether I’d be able to avoid my temperament tracking the same paths, before concluding that it’s probably for the best that I push such thoughts away.
People seem pretty stoked that the Arctic Race of Norway is here, though. On the waterfront, marquees are set up with activities for kids: at the firetruck one, kids perform mock-CPR on fake torsos of fake kids while a big bear mascot called Bjørnis wanders around. A robot dog stiffly walks circles outside the tent of the Norwegian state energy company Equinor – what they’re trying to convey with it is a bit of an unknown, as it mostly feels like shock and awe rather than surprise and delight. A kid looks on, kinda confused, and we’re deep into pre-bike-race-uncanny-valley so I really can’t blame her.
In a more human realm, Thor Hushovd and Dag Otto Lauritzen are up on a little stage talking about how Alexander Kristoff is in fine form (turns out they’re right). Lauritzen is just as cheerful and perma-tanned as he was on our flight out of Bergen, and says that even after all these Tours de France and other races he’s been to there’s something uniquely special about being here, at a bike race in Norway. He would say that, wouldn’t he. Even so, I believe him.
There’s similarities to be found, even at this race that isn’t all that important in the grand scheme things: a sort of in-between-ness to the day before the race starts. Today is all about making sure that the sponsors are seen and heard, that the promotional photos are taken, that the dignitaries are getting what they need to get to justify the investment in hosting the event. Locals and tourists bask in glorious sunshine, drinking mugs of filter coffee and pints of expensive lager. I’m starving so I grab a burger and a pilsner at a brewery, and 410 kroner (US$37) later, watch a revolving cast of old chain-smokers sitting outside. Half the dudes look like late-era Peter Gabriel. At the other extreme of physical vitality, Lars Craps and a Flanders Baloise teammate walk down the street in Birkenstocks, full kit and helmets on, stick people from another place and time.
My phone buzzes. Jonny’s flight’s been cancelled and the team presentation is beginning in an hour. I duck back to the hotel, lie down on the bed for 30 minutes that threaten to turn into The Big Sleep as I watch a mini-documentary about Norway’s 1,500 metre runners on NRK, and get up just in time. I’m glad I make it to the park that the presentation is in: the cursed robot dog is clomping its way over as I arrive and there’s a sequence of little friends of pro cycling there, most of them intently watching the Olympics road race on their little phone screens right up until the minute they get called up on stage.
Mathieu Burgaudeau’s shaved his goatee off and when I express my astonishment he does a stylish swoop of his chin with his fingers to visually demonstrate just how fresh and clean he’s feeling. Magnus Cort talks to me about his moustache, Alexander Kristoff nods a hello, and Chris Froome is there, taller than you’d expect, quiet and patient with the streams of people that come up and ask for his time. Someone asks him to sign a jersey and he fishes around in his big business satchel for his own germ-free Sharpie. What a pro.
Our favourite ASO staff member, Christophe, has organised a van for us to the top of a hill overlooking Bodø. In four days it’ll be the climax of the entire race, a bit over a kilometre of crisply tarmacked switchbacks at almost 10% terminating at the carpark of a big and fancy wooden hotel called the Wood Hotel. A lift to the eighth floor for press conferences; a jaw dropping view of the mountainous island of Landegode off one side of the terrace and Avatar-esque ridgelines in hues of purple and pink off the other.
A smaller selection of riders is here: tolerant Chris Froome again, Alexander Kristoff and Andreas Leknessund representing the home team, 2023 runner-up Cristian Scaroni (Astana Qazaqstan), and Kevin Vermaerke (DSM Firmenich Post-NL) who finished third and was best young rider here last time. You can tell the scenery’s pretty good when the riders are taking pictures of their own, the jaded remove from travelling the world to beautiful places obliterated by pointy mountains and cotton wisps of cloud tinged golden.
There are more interviews and more speeches because of course there are; Kristoff comes over and asks “is that it now?” at a point that isn’t ‘it’ and then, after he’s regaled me with tales of his post-Tour holiday, we listen to the manager of this objectively beautiful wooden hotel tell us that it’s all made out of wood. “That’s not wood,” a sotto voce Kristoff accurately observes to me, pointing at a metal door frame. “Nor that,” I say, pointing at the glass barrier around the terrace. Riders pose with jerseys and a big golden trophy and everything is beautiful and serene and staged and strange.
We get taken down a floor to another jaw-dropping lookout where there are more views of more mountains to look at. Seven floors up we walk onto a (not wood) grate and see the ground far beneath our feet.
Suspended in the air, we are here but not here. We are, like the riders and the entire infrastructure of this bike race, hovering in a state of flux, here for a race that isn’t yet happening, waiting for reality to take shape again.
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