Post-Truth World

A few of you have checked in this week, trying to get the scoop on how Il Pantani shook out at the front.  I can only report that the scoop is still empty, and it's Sunday, a week later.  

There was rumor for a while that Logan Jones-Wilkins won it in a sprint.  Thomas Bouber even had shady, cell phone video to support this rumor - that video showing Logan first, then B-Slow, then Jeremiah in 3rd.  The evidence looked puzzlingly slow, but I don't know much about sprinting after doing Pantani in 2:45 anyway, so I just figured they were smoked and called it Logan's race, won.

Come to find out that Logan only claims third place.  Wadsworth purports to have been 4th, a minute back, and saw nothing.  And Strava might have indicated that Petrylak or Noah rolled in 5th, all of them well under 3 hours.  I hung on for less than 30 seconds of that, so I have no way of knowing what happened on the pointy end of the race.  So I texted B-slow to get the skinny, and so far no reply.  Jeremiah took a shower at my mom's house, then fled to California. So how exactly the finish went, no one seems to know.

Funny thing is, it doesn't matter.  Set aside, for a moment, the fact that racing bikes at a thing like Il Pantani is really just about having fun, and consider first that we're living in a post-truth world, folks, right before it actually falls apart.  Your podium placement at a gravel non-event in some backwoods corner of Greene County means so little now.  Truth is whatever your instagram says it is.  

If it matters to you, Thomas Bouber went home with the Maillot Pistachio, and - if he can get his biceps into it - I think he'll rip the sleeves clean off.  I kept the knitted shorts, because I've raced in them for 4 years running now, and at some point when it comes to bike shorts it's like a common law marriage.  You're bound by habit mostly, but also, you can't get them off.    

Lemme know if you know something I don't know.  Or not.

What a strange time to be alive.  

Up, up, up.