White Guys on Bikes: A Love-Hate Letter to the Tour de France
A cycling enthusiast wrestles with politics, privilege, and the unbearable whiteness of biking fast in France.
I had this self-hating love letter to the Tour de France passed along to me, and found it obnoxiously hypnotic. The lengthy n+1 article is by Charles Petersen, a knowledgable cycling fanatic. Petersen loves the Tour de France, but he has a problem with the cyclists themselves. Or rather, he has multiple problems. The first issue for Petersen, a White man (for shame!), is that the competitors are apparently too White, and getting (gasp!) Whiter.
Is there any other global athletic endeavor whose competitors are only becoming more white and less international? To love cycling of all sports in 2025 requires a hard look at yourself, and perhaps some special pleading. As a white guy of a certain age—with knees too old to keep running, too much pride to join the old folks at the pool, and newfound disposable income to blow on carbon fiber and lycra—I fit the profile.
The second issue is that some of these competitors are politically problematic.
As for the Americans, the current crop is perhaps best known for their Trumpism. The mutton-chopped Coloradan Quinn Simmons likes to celebrate his victories with a six-shooter hand gesture at the finish line; the Red Bull–sponsored time trialist Chloé Dygert opposes trans rights, Colin Kaepernick, and “feminism.”
I would not have known about the race or politics of riders absent this article. I guess I knew that cycling was a stereotypically high status White activity, but if you’d confidently told me that most Tour de France competitors were Asian or Hispanic I, given my lack of engagement with the subject, would have passively bought your bluff. I had absolutely no inkling that there were open Trump supporters in professional cycling. The activity is so lib coded in my mind that this genuinely surprised me. Perhaps American cyclists come with a political escape velocity switch where the great mass is Blue but if they ride fast enough they turn Red. But I’m spitballing.
The only time I ever watched the Tour was at the home of then NBA free agent Kent Bazemore. Bazemore, a high energy guy, is an obsessive cyclist. I had a great time getting his narration on the event. Though I got a lot of information, I had no sense of rider ethnicity, given their attire. In my mind, they were all of the same race: The spandex race. Unlike Petersen, Baze, who’s Black and grew up in a poor Southern rural town, did not obsess over the problematic Whiteness of the competitors. If he was burdened by their backgrounds, he did not betray that sadness. He just, and I know this sounds crazy, enjoyed the event.
Normally I wouldn’t write about such a tiresome perspective on a sport I know nothing about, but the n+1 piece reminds me of yesterday’s post.
People used to be more religious, like Colbert, which served as a funnel for anxieties about being “good.” Now people worry more about transmitting the “right” politics, like Colbert.
Petersen is so burdened by this sense of nouveau moral obligation as to be weighed down by it even when engaging in his hobby. He’s got an acute case of oikophobia, leading him to negatively obsess over the amount of cyclists who share his broad background. It’s all so terrible, for some reason, one he doesn’t articulate.
An interesting wrinkle here is that Petersen is fine with at least one whitey out there.