The life of the professional cyclist is, at a certain level, one ruled by routine. The athlete – in this case Tadej Pogačar – wakes in unfamiliar sheets in an average hotel, rolls over to face his roommate in the neighbouring single bed, probably makes some boring small talk, and embarks on the business of the day: stuffing his face with carbs and protein as a prelude to riding his bike very far, very fast, and winning another bike race. Routine, see?
So, hypothetically, what happens when a pro cyclist encounters something unexpected, maybe even outside their realm of understanding? It makes an impression, obviously: there are things in the world that even a man as well-travelled and wealthy as Tadej Pogačar has simply never seen before. This sort of thing can move the needle. Maybe to the point that at the Tour de Romandie, he’ll want to share it with a colleague.
In the absence of definitive confirmation, we can only assume that this is what took place on Sunday. By the end of the day, Tadej Pogačar would stomp to his fourth stage win of the week – his eighth win in 11 race days so far this year. At this point, it’s basically muscle memory. But at the start of the day, Pogačar encountered something unique: he found a big carrot.
Carrots are a mainstay of vegetable aisles worldwide, so I won’t insult your intelligence by explaining what they are, but suffice to say, there was something different about this particular carrot that captured Pogačar’s attention. The photographic record of his interaction with said carrot is brief but notable – just two pictures of 190 in the Cor Vos archives. The other 188 of those photos are, for our purposes here today, total duds on the carrot front. But these two perfect photos: well, let’s just say that they have some intrigue about them.
The metadata is brief: we know who it is (Finn Fisher-Black and Tadej Pogačar) and where it is (Lucens, Switzerland), but the photographer does not expand on the layers of meaning behind the object. It is a little vignette that only expands when you consider the interplay of the two photos with one another. In one photo, the passage of the carrot could go either way: a big carrot for Tadej Pogačar, courtesy of Finn Fisher-Black. The other photo reveals that, actually, this orange gift is travelling in the other direction. The file names suggest that there are 34 additional frames that we are lacking, so maybe it was all happening in slow motion.
Either way: Pogačar is happy. Fisher-Black is also happy. They both understand something about this carrot that we, the audience, do not.
But we can engage in some speculative world-building, imagining the circumstances leading up to this interaction. An established fact to the exchange: Fisher-Black was a teammate of Pogačar’s for the last four seasons before jumping across to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe from this year onwards. The obvious rapport between the two might, with a superficial assessment, indicate that Pogačar and Fisher-Black might have some history vis a vis root vegetables, but Fisher-Black’s obvious delight assigns a deeper meaning to this particular carrot.
What we can assume is that the size of the carrot is, in itself, noteworthy – for this is no ordinary carrot but a real girthy fella. See Fisher-Black there, looking down at his hand wrapped around a large orange root. There are phallic overtones, certainly, but these are professional athletes, eloquent of leg and mouth. A carrot being a bit dick-like is probably not enough to provoke such widespread mirth. Or maybe it is. I don’t know. It’s a pretty big dick of a carrot.
But if we are to delve a little deeper in the search for meaning – which we are – we can introduce some other possibilities. Three plausible options present themselves.
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