Best cycling films?



sinicaite

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Mar 10, 2020
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Hi to all. It is very sad to see, but the world gets quarantined more and more because of the corona virus. Fortunately, where I live, I can still go for a bike ride, but all races and bigger events in general are being cancelled. It is not unlikely that I won’t be able to go for a bike ride soon too because of the virus restrictions.

That lead me thinking that I should stock up with cycling films. I thought about the best cycling films I have ever seen. One recent documentary that I really loved was “Wonderful Losers: A Different World” by Arunas Matelis, which had Svein Tuft and Chris Anker Sorensen (and others) as its heroes. I thought it was quite artsy, but really inspiring. It felt it showed the true beauty of cycling. I bought it on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/wonderful-losers-a-different-world/id1491074255

What are your favourite cycling films? Can we gather a list for quarantine days, just in case? ))
 
WHOA your horses young man. The virus is not in the air, it's in contact with people or things people have touched, you are perfectly fine to ride your bike. Also the virus has killed a much larger percentage of people over the age of 80 that contacted it, the other much smaller group is people who got it and died had compromised immune systems. Don't get paranoid, the news is full of schit on this as well as politics.

Best cycling films, hmm, well the most referred to one is American Flyers, but it was cheesily done I thought, who rides fast while wearing a cowboy hat that doesn't blow off?

Breaking Away, again like most cycling films, a bit cheesy, although I use to race in the late 70's to the late 80's and yes I rode a American bike frame with Japanese components and there was quite a bit of snobbery going on because I wasn't riding an Italian bike with Italian components, thank god that bit of nonsense is no longer around, now they snob racers who race on cheaper bikes, so now it's all about the money you spend.

Sunday in Hell, I didn't really care for the biography format of it, and the film quality was poor.

Quicksilver was another cheesy done film, but interesting, but the stupid little bike stunts done on messenger bikes they rode were altered from the messenger bikes they actually rode like missing brake cables, and Kevin Bacon was as cheesy as ever.

The Flying Scotsman is probably my favorite movie even though I'm not into track racing but it does show the struggles this man had to endure to beat the politics of the cycling world with a new design in a bicycle, and those politics are very real even to this day.

Premium Rush is another favorite movie of mine, intense messenger film scenes makes the movie an action thriller.

My last favorite movie is Icarus, while this a documentary it does shed a lot of light on the doping scene in cycling which I was exposed to when I raced and I wasn't even close to being a pro! At only a cat 3 level there were teams that our team knew of that were doping, this sort of puts the pressure on another team to dope because we all wanted to go up the rankings to Pro. I since I was in that circle my girlfriend I had early on had a cousin who was a world ranked tennis player wanted me to seriously consider doping it I was going to go pro, and she had the doctor's name to go see! I never took her up on that advice and I never made it past Cat 3, had I taken her up on it maybe I could have gone to Cat 4 or even pro but I didn't want to do that to my body without knowing what the long term health danger there may have been. Supposedly no one on my team doped, not sure if that's true, but performance levels would seem to suggest that no one did. Very interesting film.

That's it of the films that I could stand to watch, there are others which I've seen a few of them but hated them, so I didn't bring them up.