Friday Group Ride #157

I’m not sure how many times I’ve watched the end of 1992′s Milan-San Remo. Sean Kelly chasing down Moreno Argentin in the closing kilometers, in the rain, is the stuff of legend, and the advent of massively multi-player online networking, i.e. the internet, has increased our access to these sorts of motivational moving pictures in a way that previous decades only promised in half-baked sci-fi films.

The internet is a magical place, where each of us can be a star/hero/goat for +/- 15 minutes if the prevailing winds are right, and we’ve done something sufficiently attention grabbing. Cheap, helmet-mounted cameras are the great equalizer, a technology of the people that takes super-rad video production out of the hands of the professionals and straps it to your head. So what if 99% of this proletarian cinema is vomit-inducingly hard to watch?

My own interest in the  larger video genre we might call “action sports” has me regularly disdaining the offerings of network television for the attention deficit stoking media of the high speed interweb. I have watched strangers shred gnarly singletrack, climb boulders in South Africa, France and Australia, and descend the world’s great descents on bikes just like the ones I ride.

As an aside, how did anyone make an action sports video before dubstep came along?

This week’s Group Ride wants to know what YOUR 3 minute ride video looks like. Imagine a friend of yours is recording your exploits, or perhaps that you are motivated (and narcissistic) enough to do the job yourself. Where would you be? What would you be riding? And, what music would accompany your heroic efforts?

Image: Sean Kelly at the 1991 Nissan Classic -  John Pierce, Photosport International