There is a bike race today. It’s not in France, it’s not in Spain: it is in Britain. It is in My Neck of the Woods.
Sleepy villages are full of bunting, midweek cafes are packed and country lanes are a race track. The police are cheered. School kids, resplendent in their high vis, are out of lessons. Shouting and screaming is encouraged. Spectators are a collective, sharing stories and theories of the events to come. There are no strangers on the day of a bike race.
By both geography and status the Tour of Britain isn’t the Tour de France. But when a bike race comes to Your Neck of the Woods it is treated as such. Those mythical beings you watch on the TV are in front of you. You can shout at them. You see their fear, see the desire, see the hurt. They are real people.
The race goes up the climb that you rode to school. It goes past the house where you did that thing. It laps a cobbled horror that you’ve ridden full tilt, imagining years ago that you were off the front of today’s bunch.
There is a Chinese theory surrounding a sense of place, that somewhere is important because of what happens there; that the place itself contributes to those happenings. Nowhere is that truer than in a bike race.
From the Magna Carta to the world’s tallest building, Lincoln has a lot of history and yet it and the surrounding Shire is a backwater, ignored by governments and forgotten by most. Things are slower here; they happen when they happen. The wind blows hard and the roads are heavy. It is not as flat as its reputation. It is a place for strong riders.
Backwater or not, these roads and this place matters to people. This place matters to me. And today it mattered to bike racers. Tomorrow, the bike racers will be somewhere else that matters to someone. Maybe it will matter to you.