A question, before we begin: Do you all find the PGL installments useful? Are you discovering new things you enjoy? I want to make sure they are actually serving their purpose as part of this newsletter, and I’d love for you to get more involved in sharing your own stories that you think others may have missed and would enjoy. Let me know in the comments, or shoot me an email.
Also, as I was underwater with other obligations last week, I didn’t send a newsletter. So we’re doubling up a bit here, with some cycling fare up top, then the links below. Enjoy.
For the first time in three years, I didn’t race in the local, end-of-season Maryland Fondo up in Frederick this month. There were a number of reasons why not, but the only one that mattered was that I have my newest family member to tend to, and a full day away, racing, with the car, just wasn’t practical.
Which ended up being great timing. While I had classic late-summer weather in both 2021 and 2022, it rained this time around. I’ve had enough races in the rain this year. Two riders even crashed with a car, enduring injuries bad enough that they needed to be hospitalized. That’s always a risk when you race (although it shouldn’t be with cars — it’s unclear to me if this was a poorly marshaled intersection, or part of the non-race sections), but it’s nice not to take those kinds of chances when you don’t have to.
While that meant my racing season ended early this year, American cycling is celebrating the fact that one man powered through a monumental season to an unprecedented finish. Sepp Kuss, the mild-mannered, seemingly universally-liked climbing specialist from Durango, Colorado is widely recognized as perhaps the single most valuable domestique in the sport today. He rides in support of his team leaders, cutting the wind to drag them up mountains and covering rival attacks to springboard them to glory. His team, Jumbo-Visma, has never won any of the three grand tours of cycling without him.
This year, Kuss rode in support of Slovenian Primož Roglič’s win in the Giro D’Italia in May. He guided wiry Dane Jonas Vingegaard to his second consecutive Tour de France victory in July. And still, come September, he was there again in La Vuelta a España, ostensibly supporting…well, one of the two, who were also both on the squad.
Vingegaard is the team’s future; Roglič seems ever more to be its past, but he had also won La Vuelta three times in the previous four years. Come the middle of the three-week tour, a stroke of breakaway fate and jockeying in ensuing stages suddenly thrust Kuss into the leader’s jersey. Make no mistake — he earned it. But still, it seemed to all the world like he wouldn’t keep it, instead delivering one of his teammates to victory.
After a week’s worth of drama, though — much of it within his own team, Kuss stuck in the middle — keep it is exactly what he did. Kuss became the first American to win the general classification (or GC) at a grand tour in a decade, and the first without any real whiff of impropriety in much longer than that. He’s a wonderful ambassador for American cycling, a true good guy who surprised everyone not only with his performance, but by becoming an extremely meme-able character. First, there was this celebration:
Then the internet did its thing, producing this incredible, hilarious, vulgar expression of the long-awaited breakthrough for American cycling at the highest level.
10/10, no notes.
Is Sepp alone the reason Amazon reportedly stepped in with a €15 million sponsorship for the team? Who’s to say?
Alright, onto the links.
Recommended Newsletter
Another way in which I’m mixing it up this month is by not recommending a newsletter, per se, but instead another subscription-based publication. As media’s advertising dollars get increasingly swallowed by big tech, subscription-based sites offer one of the only viable, alternative models to survive. Since we’re already talking cycling, if you’re reading this, you may well be interested in Escape Collective, a site about everything in the cycling world. On top of solid writing and coverage, they do also present a very aesthetically pleasing site, something that stands out for a small publisher. If that’s up your alley, give them a look and check out their various subscriber options.
Other Links
I don’t want to spend any more time than necessary talking about Elon Musk, but this week brought the news that he’s trying to force users to give him not just access to their bank accounts, but to their biometric data. While it’s wild to witness the single biggest vanity money pit in the history of the world as the sand disappears beneath it, we shouldn’t lose sight of the actual, wildly dangerous and outsized influence Musk wields over everything from NASA to, evidently, world military affairs.
We all make mistakes at work. If you’re an office worker, maybe you forget to attach something to an email. If you’re a delivery driver, maybe you leave something on the wrong front step. If you work at NASA, and your calculations are at all wrong, you might, you know, lose the Voyager 2 spacecraft forever. So, that happened. The miscalculation part. This is the story of how the agency was able, from across the galaxy, to save the mission.
For a lot of reasons, I believe Las Vegas will be the canary in the coal mine for the future of American life. The news that the once ubiquitous and perfectly emblematic all-you-can-eat format is all but dead, and being replaced by the buffet-of-choice food hall format, feels like a turning point in the way the many benefits and freedoms of this country are presented to us on our dinner plates.
Like the idea of ebikes, but don’t really feel like actually buying one? Or maybe you just like your existing bike. Well, what if you could electrify it? I don’t really endorse products here, but it’s hard for me to see this and not think it’s the future of electric bikes.
Let’s finish this thing where we started, with some good sports. Dog on the field? Dog on the field.
My Links
My updated MVP and Cy Young Award race predictor model ran at Baseball Prospectus, but honestly, that’s pretty out of date at this point. The final version will come before the awards are announced. In a year that promises a number of extremely tight races, I’m genuinely fascinated to see how well it holds up.
Enjoy the weekend, see you next month.