Summer and a Bicycle Race

Posted by James.

Yesterday, I was walking to work and halfway up the Wilmersdorfer pedestrian mall towards Schillerstrasse I suddenly realized: "It feels like summer!" In California, we never get that sharp transition from cold/wet to warm/dry that I felt yesterday. Last winter in Silicon Valley, we hardly had any frost at night, and the days were almost always in the low to mid 60s F and sometimes in the 70s and even 80s. Of course, the weather here could turn cool and rainy again at any time, and I've been in Berlin on a business trip in the late summer when the weather was so hot I could hardly sleep. The small hotel I was in didn't have air conditioning, as most buildings - including the building my office is in - don't. Germany really doesn't need it, as we really don't in coastal California. But, for now, the weather feels quite pleasant.

The other event that made me think of summer was the bicycle race we saw over the weekend. On Fri., I was walking to work and when I reached Bismarkstrasse, the traffic was incredible. It was backed up from Ernst Reuter Platz almost to Leibnizstrasse, and more bicyclists than normal were commuting to work. When one of my colleagues arrived, he told me that Strasse des 17 Junis was blocked off for a bicycle race. Since Strasse des 17 Junis is one of the streets leading out of Ernst Reuter Platz, the enormous traffic jam around Ernst Reuter Platz was explained. Nobody on their way from the suburbs toward the district of Mitte and the Brandenburg Gate could take their usual route, so they all ended up going down Marchstrasse, where the building my office is in is located. Marchstrasse has two lanes, compared with Strasse des 17 Junis, which has four, so the whole day the street was one big parking lot. Traffic noise coming in my window was pretty intense, including the famously impatient German drivers pounding on their horns when the traffic didn't move fast enough for their liking.

As it turns out, the Velothon, as the race is called, is the second largest in Europe. Probably Tour de France is the largest, but since Berlin is so flat, the course is probably much easier than the grueling Tour de France course.* It attracts something like 13,000 participants and 250,000 spectators. The race starts and ends on the Strasse des 17 Junis. The course runs around Berlin hitting some of the important tourist sites (Brandenburg Gate,  Reichstag building, Siegerssauele, etc.) as well as some of the more little known sites such as the Havelchausee. There are three classes: a 60 kilometer race for beginners, a 120 kilometer race for more sporty types, and a 120 kilometer professional race. You can read more about it here.

Renate and I stopped by the ending of what I think was the professional race in the late afternoon on Sunday. The entire street was blocked off from Ernst Reuter Platz to the Charlottenburg Gate and bridge over the Landwehr Canal on the east end. The event was one big commercial celebration of bicycling as you can see in this picture:

The entire street was packed with  stands selling stuff that you could use for bicycling: Lycra outfits, water bottles, even whole bikes. Every stand had a flag in front. Very few stands were selling food and drinks, and even the food on offer was in most cases energy bars and the like, a big contrast to the usual German outdoor festival, where beer and pretzels make overdosing on carbs a definite danger.

One side of the lane was blocked off by portable fences, the place where the race was to finish. Shortly after we arrived, a convoy of police motorcycles and a "Streifenwagen" (German slang for a police car, means "Striped Car" because police cars here have large stripes horizontally on their sides) came tooling down the lane. The guy inside was making an announcement on a loudspeaker. I didn't catch what he was saying, but I figured it was something like: "Attention! The bicyclists will show up soon! Stay out of the lane!"

We took a place at the fence, and, sure enough, the bicyclists started to arrive. First were a couple of individual cyclists, probably the winners. They were followed by some cars carrying bicycles on roof racks. The sides of the cars were emblazoned with the names of  teams and the logos of their sponsors. We figured the bikes were substitutes in case someone on the team encountered mechanical difficulty. Then came the mass of cyclists:

Normally you think of bicycling as quiet in comparison to a gasoline powered car, but this mass of cyclists was accompanied by a whooshing and clanking noise that you wouldn't believe. And they were by so fast that I hardly had time to pull out my cellphone and take a picture.

The cyclists were there and gone so quickly, its hard to imagine bicycle racing as providing a satisfying in-person spectator experience. On the other hand, as we were walking down the bicycle mall, we saw a booth where live video from the race was being shown. I can imagine that with the ability to merge shots from different sites along the course, video is probably a better way to experience a bicycle race. And somehow, given Berliner's dedication to bicycling, it seem appropriate that the second largest bicycle race in Europe is in Berlin.

*Maybe John Kerry would have had more luck if he came to Berlin and tried a section of the Velothon rather than the Tour de France.

Image from youtube.com