Locked down in the Whole

In this post I want to explore a bit the notion of wholeness and what meaning to give to the Whole. A friend introduced me to the works of the late physicist David Bohm. Bohm was one of the most eminent theoretical physicists of the 20th century. He was driven by a profound curiosity to understand the inner workings of the universe. The two main existing theories - general relativity and quantum mechanics - were fundamentally incompatible. This was deeply dissatisfying to Bohm. He therefore proposed a way along which the two could be unified by starting from what they had in common: both theories conceived of the universe as one indivisible whole. He suggested that the universe is in a constant movement of unfolding from and enfolding into the whole and the whole is enfolded in everything. This is hard to understand, but one can maybe accept the possibility of it by considering the rather magical and instantaneous interaction of the gravitational fields of objects far apart. An implication would be that things, even the smallest particles, are just practical abstractions, because they are always wound up in the whole and part of a continuous movement of unfolding (becoming manifest) and enfolding. Indeed, can we draw an exact boundary between you and me? Where was the me that I am today yesterday? Without referring to Bohm, Bruno Latour describes this very vividly in his latest book "Où suis-je ? Leçons du confinement à l'usage des Terrestres." Who am I without everything I depend on and that which depends on me? A physical theory of everything should be able to explain everything, including consciousness and thought. In such a theory, there can be no difference between the material and the spiritual. It must be one, and thus thought is a physical process, too. In different words, Latour suggests the same thing when he says that the opposite of body is not mind or spirit, but death. "We are all begotten and mortal bodies which owe their habitable environment to other begotten and mortal bodies of all sizes and lineages." Both Bohm and Latour ground us in the physical, which, according to Latour, modernity has tried to deny. Latour, though, is not concerned with a physical theory of everything, but with the wholeness of the living world, Gaïa, which he calls "the critical zone", a layer on the surface of planet Earth in which all life as we know it is confined. A layer that extends a few kilometers up and down from the surface of the planet in which life evolved and which evolved by life and that is one interconnected, dynamic whole. And an anomaly in the universe.

So, wholeness, what is it? I still don't really know, but I think that in the above (and the extended works of Bohm and Latour) we can recognize three kinds of it. Wholeness of the universe, wholeness of humanity and human consciousness, and wholeness of Gaïa, the living world.

1  Wholeness of the universe, what it is made of and which permeates everything that manifests within it. What gives rise to the laws of physics as we currently know them? What is it that contains the whole and from which the universe unfolds? This is about the scientific quest for a unifying theory of the cosmos. It is highly uncertain whether, if there were such a thing, we, from within it, can ever access that very source code of existence. It is an endeavor of imagination and experiment to better describe the universe.

2  Wholeness of humanity and human consciousness. This wholeness may require a leap of faith and can be more difficult to appreciate but it should follow from the previous if one accepts the possibility of a theory of everything. This is a kind of wholeness that David Bohm explored with Krishnamurti in many conversations. One can maybe go along with the idea that consciousness is not individual if one realizes that it is affected by memory and thus the influences undergone over one's lifetime. These include culture, social norms and so on, and interactions with physical environments, environments that are shared and produced by thoughts of people in the past. So, although we cannot say that one's consciousness equals human consciousness, we can say that it is largely shared with other people and that all those individual consciousnesses form one continuum. And we can see that one's consciousness is contingent and could be different and more like that of another person if one had been exposed to different experiences. This implies that collective consciousness exceeds individual consciousness. And if wider consciousness is capable of more intelligence, we can see the diversity in experiences and inclusion as a source of enhanced intelligence. And why, then, should we put a boundary around the human species? This is notion of wholeness that aspires to be descriptive but tends toward the normative and may be perceived as dogmatic (possibly because it comes into conflict with incumbent dogma).

3  Wholeness of the biosphere, Gaïa, the only known habitable place in the universe made habitable by its inhabitants. The dynamic product of itself, powered by heat from within and without, and to which its inhabitants are confined. In a series of books (Facing Gaïa, Down to Earth, and Where Am I?), Bruno Latour offers an convincing and demystified interpretation of the Gaïa hypothesis of James Lovelock. There are two interesting implications. The first is that to travel outside of it, we are forced to take habitable conditions with us. We can have no direct sensory experiences (except for sight) of what is outside of the habitable layer on Earth. For example, Neil Armstrong could not touch the surface of the Moon with his bare hands. His hands had to stay inside his suit within which habitable conditions were created. Similarly, we cannot venture freely into the crater of an active volcano. Second, we cannot divide Gaïa into parts without reducing its integrity. Links between parts - between species, say, or regions - cannot be fully broken. Methane emitted by a cow in the Amazon affects heat stress in India. Hence, we are locked in twofold - we are locked down in that thin layer of habitability on planet Earth but also in the interdependence between our actions and that habitability. Rather than limiting, this is a liberating realization, according to Latour, because it frees us from our destructive fancy with the unlimited, such as unlimited growth and escapism. Within our confinement, we can finally talk about creation and innovation again. This kind of wholeness is about the wholeness of a complex, purposeless system and seems the most immediately practical of the three. It starts descriptive but is by no means neutral in its implications.

But isn't making a distinction between the three kinds of wholeness contradictory? Each of them is a reaction to coherence-breaking fragmentation, the creation of arbitrary division and boundaries we then identify ourselves with. Indeed, David Bohm saw fragmentation as the source of conflict and of the many crises humanity got itself into. I guess all three notions want us to change our mental model of who we are, that we liberate ourselves from the cages of identity that we created and that we see ourselves as participating in and partaking of processes of sustenance and becoming.

Something like that.

Tour de France 2019: surreality of business-as-usual in the new climate regime.

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If you followed the Tour de France this year, you were in for a surreal experience. Not because it was one of the most open and exciting battles for the yellow jersey of the past decades. But because of the extreme weather conditions that burst onto the stage but were considered mere bit players.

This year’s edition reminded us that the Tour can be a great bike race. For once, the race wasn’t paralyzed by a star-studded Sky train (now Ineos). Instead, stellar performances by French riders Julian Alaphilippe and Thibaut Pinot showed the world that France not only provides breathtaking backdrops to a globalized sport, but that it has great bike riders, too, who came darn close to bringing the yellow jersey ‘home.’ Another Frenchman, Romain Bardet, took the polka dot jersey for best climber. And so this year’s edition may go down as the one that gave the Tour back to the people of France. It will be forgotten that it was also the one that showed that a new climate regime is taking it away from them.

The first two weeks of the Tour were perfect. Clement conditions, exciting stages from day 1, a Frenchman,Julian Alaphilippe, in yellow, and another French darling, Thibaut Pinot, winning on top of the Tourmalet.

The Tour’s final week, however, started off in an intense heat wave. On the day of stage 16, a flat stage with start and finish in Nîmes, Meteo France had placed 80 départements under “code orange” for heat wave (for Nîmes, it was “code yellow”). Cities in the West set new all-time temperature records (41.2℃ in Bordeaux).

The stage was won by Australien Caleb Ewan. Afterward, he said that he had “felt so bad today during the day. I think the heat really got to me.” But he won anyway.

Interviewed before the stage, rival sprinter Dylan Groenwegen boasted that it was a matter of mindset. “Just pedal, stop whining,” he said. The Tour de France organization basically mirrored that position, dismissing a call to action over the heat by green jersey wearer Peter Sagan. After the stage, Groenewegen’s teammate and GC contender Steven Kruijswijk took a different stance: “Today it was code yellow or code orange everywhere,” Kruijswijk said, “but apparently that is not the case in the Tour de France. (...) You can see that measures are taken everywhere in extreme heat, but we just keep going.”

And going they kept. The next day, the highest alert - “code red” - was issued for 20 départements in the North; in the South, the Tour peloton attacked 200 blazingly hot kilometers from Pont du Gard to Gap. Heading into the Alps, some altitude kept things manageable. Riders adapted by taking in enormous amounts of liquids and wearing ice-vests before and after the stage, but the heat took away the peloton's apetite for racing.

Thursday July 25th, three days before the Tour’s arrival, Paris was frying in 42,6℃. The Tour peloton crossed the high Alps. 2000+ m altitude and the first thunderstorms brought some relief. The next day, the race had to be cut short because a heat-fueled hail storm had dumped its excess energy on the road to Tignes, covering it in hail and mud. The caravan lauded the decision by the race organizers in the face of such “exceptional” circumstances. Force majeure. Is it, in July 2019? The next day, the stage had to be cut in half because similar storms had wreaked havoc on the mountain roads near Cormet de Roselend. In two days, the Tour parcours, a year in the making, changed face drastically.

But at the celebrations in Paris, just one day later, everything seemed...so normal: just another Tour had come to a close. When the Tour de France peloton rolled through the Louvre museum onto the Champs Elysées in the warm evening light - a breathtaking sight - the crushing heat and hail only seemed memories from a distant past, the still-raging Siberian wildfires otherworldly. That’s what’s surreal: the Tour-as-usual.

A day after the Tour, a symbolic video emerged. It contained images from a junior team time trial race in Catalunya. It showed a team and its follow car ride full speed into a flooded street. The water hit the riders and their bikes to the ground and their sports directors jumped out of the car into the water, arms raised in exasperation. As the riders struggle to emerge from the water, a director is heard saying “Stay calm, let’s go! Put on your helmet, you have to finish!” The show had to go on, even after it smacked its face.

If sports are a metaphor for life, that is certainly true for the dominant approach to the climate breakdown we have knowingly rushed into and which can now be seen all around the globe all the time. The approach is to look away, deal with the weather but de facto deny dependence on a hospitable state of the biosphere. Not just cycling. Just think of the next men’s soccer world cup in 2022, which the FIFA managed to assign to Qatar where summer daytime temperatures reach 42℃ on average. It was later forced to move the tournament to November and December, messing up many national leagues.

On the day the Tour peloton braved the heat around Nîmes, Greta Thunberg, the swedish teenager who inspired the school strikes for the climate around the globe, held her speech at France’s General Assembly. Critics say that it is ridiculous to listen to school children - what do they know? But what’s most ridiculous is that she’s right. That, like the Tour de France, most institutions do not act like they believe what is observed twenty-four-seven. Thunberg put it well: “They are more scared of me and by the youth climate protests than by the real problem.” The pitiful ad-hominems coming her way only help prove her point.

A report by World Weather Attribution concluded that although the July heat wave that struck much of Europe was exceptional, it would have been 1.5 to 3℃ less hot without man-made warming. In addition, climate change has already made such a heat wave 10 times more likely, a trend that is sure to continue. Moreover, heat waves tend to followed by thunderstorms, which are getting more violent as warmer air can hold more water. The 2019 Tour encountered both these phenomena while being even lucky to escape the worst heat.

If the Tour - and other sports - wants to keep inspiring, keep us dreaming, and keep doing its nation proud, it cannot shrug off this year’s extreme weather as did Tour director Thierry Gouvenou (“Oh no worries, it’s once every 30 years…”). It needs a vision for the new climate regime, for what a Tour de France in 2050 can look like, how it can remain the perfect distraction in July that it is. To do so as a sport so tied to climate, nature, land, it cannot ignore they’re changing. It needs to get real to let the athletes keep making the show, not the circumstances.

Homo Economicus still very much alive

"Richard Thaler Wins the Nobel in Economics for Killing Homo Economicus," wrote The Atlantic when the winner was announced early this week. Thaler's work is fantastic; Homo Economicus, however, is still very much alive. Homo Economicus has long escaped the unsafe place of economic theory and become an ethical standard, immune to theoretic attacks like that from Thaler. Man may be systematically irrational - the establishment of which is theoretical progress - but for irrational we have learned to read "stupid." Homo economicus should be our aspiration. Having escaped theory, homo economicus keeps legitimizing free markets on which firms can freely exploit the many predictable irrationalities behavioral economics reveals. And so it comes that two supposedly theoretical antagonists - neoclassical and behavioral economics - are in bed together. But when behavioral economic knowledge is mobilized in the public realm, to actually help people make better decisions - which is what Thaler's famous book Nudge, coauthored with Cass Sunstein, is about - it is immediately controversial and gets framed as an infringement of self-determination. Behavioral economics is great, but it did not kill homo economicus. To kill it, we need to stop letting economists determine what is rational and what is not.

Ook wij wensen Shell geloofwaardigheid

Shell-CEO Ben van Beurden kan maar niet begrijpen waarom Shell geen geloofwaardigheid geniet in de discussie over de transitie naar een klimaatneutrale energievoorziening. Dat zei hij onlangs tegen bedrijfsblad Venster. Het Financieele Dagblad (FD) berichtte erover op 8 januari jl.. Piet Briët, Mariska Weijer en ik hebben wel een idee en schreven een brief aan de krant. Een verkorte versie verscheen op 19 januari. Hier het wat langere (en wat bijgewerkte) origineel.

CEO Van Beurden verdedigt het bestaansrecht van Shell in FD (8/1/2016) en verzucht: “Die geloofwaardigheid naar ons als bedrijf terugbrengen, te worden gezien als een waardevol onderdeel van de oplossing en een speler die een cruciale bijdrage kan leveren - dat vind ik het moeilijkste”.

Zo moeilijk hoeft dat niet te zijn. Want zeg eens eerlijk: is Shell niet nog steeds enigszins een nationaal icoon, te vergelijken met het Nederlands elftal? Voor beide geldt dat we zo graag willen dat ze het goed doen, dat we er trots op kunnen zijn. Bij falen is het fluitconcert oorverdovend; bij winst daarentegen, staan we met open armen klaar. Maar Shell lijkt maar niet te willen winnen.

Ja, Shell kent het energiesysteem als de beste. Met zijn kennis en omvang kan Shell veel betekenen voor de transitie naar een klimaatneutrale energievoorziening. Maar elk van de meeste recente energiescenario’s die Shell uitbracht leidt tot meer opwarming dan de 2ºC die de wereld in Parijs heeft afgesproken. De boodschap: Shell gelooft er niet meer in en het is niet zijn verantwoordelijkheid.

Zo wordt het inderdaad moeilijk geloofwaardigheid te herwinnen. Met ingenieursrealisme blijven wijzen op de huidige afhankelijkheid van olie en gas ter legitimatie van exploitatie van elke verdomde uithoek werkt vervreemdend. Zoals DSM-bestuurder Wientjes twitterde vanuit Davos: “het gaat er niet om de toekomst te voorspellen, het gaat erom haar te realiseren.” Shell is iets te groot om “Calimero” te spelen.

De keuze is gemaakt – zie Parijs, Energieakkoord – de toekomst is CO2-vrij, efficiënt en hernieuwbaar. Hernieuwbare energie is schoon, creëert banen, groeit en functioneert als katalysator van buur- en burgerschap. Fossiele energie kent steeds meer problemen, zoals lekkage (Californië), aardbevingen (Oklahoma, Groningen), verwoesting van landschap (teerzanden Canada), ecosystemen (BP olielek), en opwarming ten gevolge van de CO2-uitstoot.

Uiteraard gaat de transitie niet van vandaag op morgen, en natuurlijk zijn we dankbaar voor de welvaart die decennialange innovatie in opsporings- en exploitatietechnieken ons heeft gebracht. En het moet gezegd: Shell vraagt al enige jaren om een hogere CO2-prijs. Evenwel zijn ondertussen de “potjes” voor duurzame energie “van het vuur” gehaald, zoals ex-CEO Jeroen van der Veer pleegde te zeggen, en worden, het mantra prevelend dat “de wereld olie en gas nodig blijft hebben,” de miljarden naar megalomane investeringen in de Pool- en diepzee geschoven. De regen aan debacles in de sector zijn echter een teken aan de wand dat de welvaartswinst voortaan van elders moet komen.

We kijken daarom wat bedroefd toe hoe Shell ondanks een serie gevoelige nederlagen blijft vasthouden aan een verouderd spelsysteem en de marge om een nieuwe weg in te slaan ziet verdampen. We zouden graag weer geloven in Shell (net als in Oranje). Dat begint wat ons betreft met een scenario dat de klimaatverandering voldoende beperkt en een innovatie- en investeringsagenda die laten zien dat het menens is.

Piet Briët, Amsterdam

Mark Olsthoorn, Grenoble

Mariska Weijer, Utrecht

Between hope and fear

Somehow the stars aligned at the very last moment and so I found myself at the annual Springtij Forum on the isle of Terschelling last weekend. Springtij means springtide in Dutch. Since its first edition in 2010, Springtij has evolved into the most iconic sustainability gathering in The Netherlands. Each year, close to 400 professionals pushing for a sustainable and resilient society come to the island to make new connections and discuss the latest in food and agriculture, nature and biodiversity, circular economy, finance, leadership, and climate and energy. It is at Springtij where one can witness the foundational elements of a better future come together. This year, I was the 'marconist' for the climate and energy track, assisting 'navigator' Jan Paul van Soest in streamlining the sessions. We set out to curate for constructive dialogue among natural opponents, believing that to be our best and only bet for bringing the energy transition up to speed and scale.

At the end of three loaded days, the navigators for each track reported back to the plenary through a spoken column delivered over the final dinner. You can find the columns here (in Dutch). I translated the one in which Jan Paul summarized the takeaways of the sessions on climate and energy. Here goes:

How to capture the harvest of the energy track in 500 words?

In these sessions, hardly a word about hardware: nothing on heat pumps, PV systems, mechanical vapor decompression; not even combined heat and power was mentioned. Everything is possible, technology is not the problem.

It was all about the software: how to deal with the tensions between nightmares and dreams, between rules and freedom, between control and markets, between competition and collaboration. It was about the human deficit to build bridges between such extremes.

We seek a common language to describe the movement that has started in recent years, and which now, at Springtij, leads to new, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit alliances and agreements.

My MarkOnist and I recorded intriguing metaphors, attempts to express in images what cannot be articulated:

• The coach traveling south: the energy transition is inevitable, the direction roughly known, and it would be great if everybody were on board, but no endless discussions about the destination, please. The south, that’s enough for now. In case a few people get held up in Paris later this year: tant pis.
• The trapeze: dare to let go of the old bar, the existing system, trusting that the new bar will arrive in time: innovations, coalitions, actions. 
• A hodgepodge of nightmares and dreams. Society is in utter confusion about its future, a confusion in which the transition bus has to chart its course.
• Gas fired patio heaters, which arouse irritation when burning, but cause us to be cold in the barn when off. So to the sun we turned.
• Finally, the nicest one, inexplicable to those not present, and maybe even to those who were: a crystal coffin for the grandchildren in which a princess waiting to be kissed awake. After a few glasses of wine it may dawn upon you.

These metaphors represent the phase the transition caravan has reached by now: everyone shares the sense of urgency, everyone seeks the south, and is looking for travel buddies, for, according to an African saying, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.

So, if we want to travel beyond Paris, we have to go together.

And to go beyond we want.

Or do we?

For Springtigers*, too, inconvenient truths persist.

We discussed the changing climate, but had to conclude that no more than a handful of people is willing to communicate the message of 3 to 4 ºC warming. After all, that’s something people just won’t get a load of.

I, for one, was among the handful, and so I’ve decided to give up.

Alright, one last time: I cherish all bottom-up initiatives, energy coöperatives, start-ups, brilliant innovations, and so on; Obama and the Pope are doing what they can; but the harsh reality of all things on the table is 3.5 ºC warming by century’s end. As magnificent as they are, dreams do not get a pass on the laws of physics if they are to be realized.

I will repeat this a few more times in the coming months, but that will be it.

And so we were making our way between hope and despair.

That will only succeed if we consider both, and, speaking with Klaas van Egmond, if we make new connections: connections between the self and the other, between the mind and matter.

Thát is what happened in the Springtij energy track: the making of new connections, from which trust can spring.

Then it showed how valuable it is to bring along the next generation to Springtij, in this case my daughter Heleen, here for the fifth time, who wonderfully captured what we’ve realized in one sentence:

“Faith fills the void between hope and fear.”

Jan Paul van Soest,  ‘Navigator’ Energy

in collaboration with Mark Olsthoorn, ‘MarkOnist’

* Refers to participants at the Springtij Forum

Aiguebelette

Aiguebelette, ag-buh-let, the name of the lake is as elegant and delicate as the sport of rowing, the world championships of which were held on its waters last week. At only an hour's drive from Grenoble, my wife and I went to watch the finals on their last day.
I remember the lake as dark and cold from a bike ride along its shores on a damp, grey morning in autumn, so I didn't expected much of the place. The difference couldn't have been starker. When we came around the bend and caught our first glimpse of the lake, it expanded before us as a brightly sparkling carpet of a thousand shades of blue. On one side, steep cliffs of the Chartreuse mountains towered over it, on the other, rolling hills with patches of trees, meadows and chalets.
On google maps, we had picked our designated viewing site, on the lake's eastern shore where the shoreline came closest to the race track that was laid out in eight dead straight parallel lanes spanning two kilometers between the little village of Aiguebelette-le-Lac and the lake's northern tip.
A grass strip at the end of a line of parked cars, between the road and the steep bank leading down to the water 10-15 m, we judged just wide enough to park ours. A few places down, another parked car was making an odd angle with the horizon, one wheel dangling in the air. As we walked over to lend a hand, we saw one guy hanging in the upper most door opening like a wind surfer, trying to level the vehicle with his weight. Men had gathered under its nose to push it back onto the road. It worked, the car was saved, and we could turn our attention to the world class sports that were going on on the lake.
We came well prepared, with binoculars, hot water, instant coffee, tea and all. So we walked along the road a bit to find a spot to savour our preparedness with a good view of the starting area. There were plenty excellent spots, but they were all on private properties, which covered pretty much all the narrow land between the road and the lake. Proprietors don't like rowing, because we saw none. Just gates, and hospitable signs commanding us to stay out. In between: tall, leafy trees blocking the view. And so we ended up in the village, on the narrow stretch of shoreline where access wasn't for-customers-only. It was a peaceful place, nice view on the lake, families picnicking, little castle on the hill across. So we took out the thermos. Rowing, though, took place on the part of the lake that was out of sight. We almost forgot about it.
When we woke from our snooze, we quickly headed back up the road toward the narrow break in those view-blocking trees close to the starting line. We shouted in support of the Dutch women's eight. They finished last. A little later, we shouted for the Dutch men's eight. They passed us in last position, and, watching the finish through our binoculars, we were convinced they failed, too. But they actually came in third, we discovered! Well done, lads. To be watched in replay at home.
In the men's single final, a strange fellow in lane six confused us lakeshore spectators. "It's a French guy, he's got the bleu-blanc-rouge on his blades," one guy said. "But he wears a red top, unlike the other French," said another. The fellow turned out to be a Cuban, a possibility too unlikely to bet on for us high on the banks. Although he came in last, his was the coolest of composures of the six finalists; he rowed like it was just the lovely Sunday afternoon at the lake that it was. At ag-buh-let.
In the Cuban's wake, the course was dismantled and the floating bill boards towed to shore, to be redeployed wherever the circus' next landing site. And Rio next year. A world away from Aiguebelette, where no trace is left, and certainly no concrete ones, if a local action group of lakeshore residents got its way, except for the promised economic impulse for local shop holders.

Mende 1995

July 14, 2015

It is exactly twenty years ago today, that I first visited the Tour de France. On 'quatorze juillet,' the French national holiday. It was only the second day of a three week cycling tour through the Languedoc and Provence region with my friend Pieter, which we had carefully planned for months, leaning over maps to find the most beautiful roads. The day before, the Oad Cycletours coach had dropped us off with our bikes on the outskirts of the town of Millau. The sudden brightness of the southern sun after the long ride through the night from Amsterdam was a shock to the eyes. Happy, though, we were to finally get off the smelly bus and head off into the spectacular Gorges du Tarn for the first leg of our journey, from Millau to Saint-Énimie. We had pitched our tent by the river Tarn and woke up to a splendid morning, freshened by the nightly thunderstorms. This day, we would leave tent and panniers and go watch the Tour de France stage, near the finish in Mende.
We left camp early enough not to risk being late at our carefully selected spot, right atop the final climb of the day, a steep ramp leading up from the town of Mende to the plateau above, which harbored the regional airport where the finish line was drawn across the very center of the runway. It was exactly the same finale as of the 14th stage of this year's Tour. Via the Causse de Sauveterre and a painfully steep back entrance to the plateau, Pieter and I arrived at our designated spot three and a half hours before the passage of the peloton. No time to get bored, though. A crowd of spectators had already built. With our fellow fans, we tried to spot celebrities behind the tainted windows of the official cars that passed ahead of the race and listened in on race coverage coming from noisy shortwave radio receivers or RV television sets. Finally, the sound of a helicopter announcing the first of the riders. It swelled. Honking cars and motorbikes crested the hill. Spectators leaned over the barrier in anticipation. We positioned ourselves a little higher on the grassy bank next to the road, camera at hand. The energy built up in the air and sent adrenaline through my veins. We saw Laurent Jalabert and his green jersey pass in front. The French fans were going wild. Jalabert had been on the attack all day and was going to secure the stage win for the French on their national holiday. Few things seem more important. A couple minutes later, the main bunch with the GC contenders at the front. Pantani first, followed by Indurain, Riis, Zülle and Rominger, with dutch favorite Erik Breukink a few seconds behind.
I would say this victory, in a hilly stage wearing the sprinter's jersey, marked the tansformation of Jalabert from sprinter to allround champion. He would go on to win the polka dot jersey for king of the mountains twice, in 2001 and 2002. We now know it was the heyday of EPO use in the peloton. Jalabert's main directeurs sportifs, Manolo Saiz and Bjarne Riis, have been revealed as leading actors in the dark drug saga. Jaja himself is now a Tour de France commentator for French television. He has never come clean about his past, never confessed to doping, never claimed the opposite. He was among those tested positive for EPO in 2004 in an experimental test of 1998 samples, results of which were revealed only in 2013, four days prior to that year's Tour. Jalabert maintained he never tested positive during his career and dismissed the results as improper evidence. French TV cosmetically suspended Jaja only to have him return in 2014. Even today, he shows no inclination to admit or testify. His silence is unfortunate and undermines his credibility as a commentator. A great cyclist like Jaja could do a lot of good to the sport by opening up about the past, explaining what happened, whether he doped or not. The French cycling fans may be quick to link the impressive performances of Chris Froome and his team to doping, but seem to care little about the likes of Jalabert, champion in EPO-fuelled races, commenting on today's performances. So I don't think a confession or testimony will hurt him. And it tells me that fans care less about doping than about their chauvinist urges being satisfied.
The revelations about the ubiquity of EPO, blood doping, et cetera, hasn't tempered my interest in the sport one bit. On the one hand, there's always hope that cycling can clean up its act, that the love of the sport beats the pressure to win at all cost. The argument that spectators demand a constant breaking of records is ridiculous. The excitement is not in average speeds and absolute climbing times. Statistics show that the peloton has slowed down in recent years, and the crowds along the roads are no less. However, calls for cultural change - from doping by default to fair play - go together with surveillance and repression taking on ridiculous forms. Trust enforced with tools of distrust. A 1984-world in the making. On the other hand, the stream of revelations over the past years about the organized use of doping read like a detective novel. Both developments I find interesting to follow. We see a judicial system being bricolaged together as we go along. However, I can do very well without unfounded accusations and speculations about exceptional performances being drug-fueled. I would agree with Michael Rasmussen that the "did you dope?" question is a gratuitous one to ask an active rider, because, free after Upton Sinclair, how could a rider confess to doping, when his job depends upon him not confessing? I don't have the solution; as long as winning counts, there's an incentive to cheat. But I hope that parents will be able to let their little kids pursue their childhood dreams of one day wearing that yellow jersey on the Champs Élysées with peace of mind, and may that thought motivate cyclists and others involved to ban drugs from the sport.
Back at our camp site by the river Tarn, Pieter and I cooked our ravioli. We loaded up on carbo hydrates for next day's stage as the Bastille day fireworks lit the sky above the village. Miguel Indurain would go on to win his last of five Tours as we rode for weeks through a lavender scented Van Gogh painting along remnants of Roman times, fueled by crispy baguettes, blueberry jam and an ever shining sun.


Saint-Etienne - Mende, Tour de France 1995