The Tour de France – with all due respect to this very historic and beautiful race – is prone to moments of absolute batshit insanity. Sometimes that comes from the very funny caravan, or the silly sponsorships, or simply the sights, sounds and smells of rural France. But today there was a particularly exciting moment of in-race battiness: a time when the oddity came from riders and team staff dead set on achieving a goal and manifestly failing.
Our scene opens with the sight of Uno-X Mobility’s Johannes Kulset – 20 years old, the youngest rider in the race – standing by the roadside. Kulset – the baby brother of a dynasty of four cycling Kulset sons who have all ridden for the team (one of whom has since retired and is now a DS) and the son of Vegar Kulset (CEO of the team sponsor) – comes from a rich lineage and is deserving of a spot in the team lineup, but on this particular day – ah, on this particular day – he had a bit of a tumble. Speaking to Escape Collective at the bus afterwards, blood running down his right leg into his sock, he explained that he’d clipped someone’s outstretched arm, hit the deck at a corner and skinned his knee.
This is the point that the TV coverage catches up. We see Kulset standing by the roadside, trying to get his chain back on. It is, to use the technical terminology, a little bit fucked: the cranks spin, the wheel does not, we have a fatal problem with this first bicycle. While he stands there on the roadside, his much bigger colleague Søren Wærenskjold whooshes past and very narrowly – like, we’re talking centimetres here – dodges him. “Søren came in at a super fast speed and I heard like, ‘Woooooah!’ Luckily, he’s a super bike handler,” Kulset tells me post-stage. “Nice job, Søren,” I say to the nearby Søren. Søren says thank you. I don’t think he understands what we’ve been talking about, but oh well.
Flash back to the race: Kulset gets back on his bike. This is good. His chain immediately falls off, causing him to crash again. This is not. Finally he gets his chain back on, gets a hearty push from a team mechanic and then the team doctor, and he’s on his way again. There he sits behind the Uno-X car. He is extremely close to the bumper. There is a certain sense of rising dread after these fraught few moments, but it is not yet clear the creative ways that things will continue to go just a little bit wrong for Uno-X.
A roundabout approaches. Kulset remains glued to the bumper. The Uno-X car takes a hard left around the rounadabout. Crucially, the route does not. From the other side of the roundabout comes another Uno-X team car. The Kulset car sails toward it, narrowly missing it by a sphincter-puckering few fractions of a second. “I just saw the other car went the other way. And I was like, ‘What is going on there?’ I was thinking, ‘That’s a stupid guy. He’s going the wrong direction’… if the roundabout was smaller than they could have had a front collision, but luckily, it was a big roundabout so it went well,” Kulset recounts.
After a bit of spirited chasing and some more time on the bumper of other cars, Kulset made his way back to the peloton, arriving at the same time as the main peloton (albeit with a 30-second time penalty for all that drafting). Kulset lives to fight another day, to the envy of his big brothers. “I’m finding it insanely hard,” he admits of the Tour overall. “I watched the Tour since I was three or four years old and I’ve known it’s big, but the fact that it’s this big is just crazy. It’s a dream come true to be here and learn and just get the experience at this age.” Are your brothers jealous? “Yeah, for sure,” he says with a smile. “I can say that, but they are also very happy for me. It’s been kind of a project for our family, to just enjoy each other. The fact that one of us got here is just kind of a win for everybody,” Kulset finishes.
There’s a lot to love in that sentiment: that combined sense of happiness in the achievement of somebody else, in every kilometre of someone’s effort and enterprise. Even when – maybe especially when – it involves two Uno-X riders and then two Uno-X cars almost colliding in the space of two crazy minutes.
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