Into the... >
"Kilometer 75-78. The fields are a dry yellow and light green. Endless fences lean crookedly across the landscape. To keep something out of the wind? The road is narrow and rolling. Uphill or down, you can't sort it out, it drives you crazy. We shift, we stand on the pedals when we get too lazy to shift again. The sky up ahead is black. No one is watching us. More than two hours to go.
One by one they slide past me, on their way to work up front, and then back through the lee to the rear. A sentence for my racing logbook formulates itself: 'Pace line worked together passably well.' That's laying it on thick. The pulls are irregular and the steering's bad; they're better at this back in Holland.
I think they're all still going strong, but of course that's because I don't know what to look for. Ab Geldermans tells about how, when he was Jan Janssen's team director in the Tour de France, he was able to signal to Jan, during climbs for instance, that one of his rivals was scraping bottom.
Jan would pick up the pace a little and have one less rival. Road racing imitates life, the way it would be without the corruptive influence of civilisation. When you see an enemy lying on the ground, what's your first reaction? To help him to his feet. In road racing, you kick him to death."