#sports tumblr

[pro-cycling-primers]

🚴‍♀️🚴‍♂️ So, you're interested in starting watching cycling in 2025 (I hope), but have no idea where to start? 🚴‍♂️🚴‍♀️

Before the start of the road cycling season this year, I thought I'd post some information for people completely new to the sport. You might have seen some Tumblr posts going crazy about men and women in tight lycra, or watched a bit of the Tour de France on TV once, or maybe this post found you some other way! Let's get to it.

When does it happen?

Cycling doesn't have a set timetable nor are races only at weekends. It's mostly the same each year, but there have been some changes over the hundred-plus years professional cycling has been around.

The WorldTour (highest level of pro cycling, more about that in a later post) season lasts officially from January until October, with the full women's calendar for 2025 looking like this:

And the men's like this:

Don't try to watch all of them. Or do, I'm just a Tumblr blogger hoping more people get interested in this great sport 🤷

Okay then, which races should I watch?

The answers to this are many and varied; every list of 'best races to watch' will have at least one cycling fan clamouring 'But HOW could you ignore [x]!?'

In terms of basic introduction to the sport, I think this would give a solid season-wide grounding:

Five one-day races have mostly arbitrarily been declared The Monuments: Milano-Sanremo, Paris-Roubaix, de Ronde van Vlaanderen, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and Il Lombardia. (A more detailed post about these will be coming later in the season). All but Lombardia have men's and women's versions, with Milano-Sanremo Donne running for the first time in 2025, though Trofeo Alfredo Binda is a more well-established women's race in a similar region at a similar time.

Each has its own quirks, history, and favour different kinds of riders. The big names (except the pure stage racers) will be there.

I'd also recommend one of the early-season one-week stage races, Paris-Nice or Tirreno-Adriatico. They run at the same time, for one week in March, and present the first opportunity for the top stage racers to stretch their legs (another post about different types of riders will come). On the women's side, Itzulia Women or Tour de Suisse.

One of the Grand Tours is in my view, essential: Giro d'Italia, Vuelta a España, or the big one, the Tour de France

If you want, you can disregard this entire section and just watch the Tour. It's the biggest race there is, the most-covered, and teams bring their best riders in their best shape. It's a massive cultural event. If you take nothing from this post other than following a little closer in July, then it has been a success in my book.

How can I watch cycling?

Cycling has a serious lack of easily accessible coverage. Every race organiser has different TV rights arrangements, varying MASSIVELY from country to country, with some having free-to-air coverage of most races on national television but some having no option other than the paid services Discovery+ and Eurosport.

For an international suggestion there is a lovely site: tiz [dash] cycling [dot] io has free (!) livestreams of every race you could feasibly ever want to watch, and a back catalogue covering most of the last decade +

5-15 minute highlight videos from YouTube channels such as Eurosport, FloBikes etc. are also available a few hours after a race finishes! The Tour de France has its own channel with decent highlights and interviews.

See you later in the season!

[dawnofprismatica]

Me normally vs when it's olympic time

[rayyzcosmos]

Kroos, Reus, Bonucci, T. Silva, Chhetri bid goodbyes this season....

who said a sport cannot make you ugly cry?

[che-de-di-co]

"Il bene si fa, ma non si dice. E certe medaglie si appendono all'anima, non alla giacca.

[Gino Bartali]

[mitchellparker]

hey hi hello

ziggy or ferris, any pronouns, autistic, 20, bi (gender & sexual), learning ASL. i’ve been a fan of baseball since i was 8 years old and this special interest refuses to evacuate my brain.

main: @yellowjackets96 / asoiaf sideblog: @helaenarya / writing sideblog: @believemenatalie

ULT BIASES

teams: washington nationals, cleveland guardians

players: ryan zimmerman, max scherzer, jose ramirez, sean doolittle, shane bieber, josiah gray, triston mckenzie, jordan zimmermann, victor robles, juan soto, eli morgan, CJ abrams, lane thomas, daniel hudson, luis garcía jr, steven kwan, keibert ruiz, jake irvin, mackenzie gore, mitchell parker, riley adams, stone garrett, andrés giménez, the naylor bros, gio gonzález, will brennan, emmanuel clase, tanner bibee, kyle finnegan, and probably many others im forgetting :]

OTHERS I ENJOY

teams: arizona diamondbacks, tampa bay rays

players: shohei ohtani, corbin carroll, zac gallen, ketel marte, ryan mcmahon, carlos correa, byron buxton, ozzie albies, mike trout — essentially, anyone with whom i’ve had nice encounters, and/or find silly :D

[saucingitup]

and this is why baseball is the best sport (see also: these baseball sidequests)

[wintvies]

footage of me doing nothing during pe

[justcatposts]

Sport is life

(Source)

[pro-cycling-primers]

🏁 Types of races 🏁

As promised in my general introductory post, this is going to be an overview of the two different types of races that are contested in professional cycling.

One-day races 📅

Exactly what it says on the tin! Start in one town, finish in another, difficult stuff in between and the first rider across the line is the winner. That last bit's obvious but when we have a look at stage races it's not always that simple!

DNF numbers can be relatively high and racing can be very aggressive with no need to save energy for the next day (except for other races that might be happening in the next few days), with different races favouring different kinds of riders. Women's races are usually 150-200km, and men's are typically 180-250km (but can be longer)

A couple of recent ones with good highlights clips that I think are worth watching: men's Milano-San Remo 2022, women's Paris-Roubaix 2023, the Amstel Gold Race both the women's in 2024 and men's in 2019. Also the 2023 World Championships men's road race but WCs and how they work warrants another post.

Stage races 🗓

As if one day wasn't hard enough, much of the cycling calendar is made up of races that range from less than week to nearly a month: the longest are the men's Grand Tours, 21 stages across 23 days (two rest days).

The overall winner of a stage race is the rider with the lowest combined time across all stages, but every stage also has an individual winner. Stages are usually shorter than one-day races, and a rider must finish each stage within a time limit (percentage of the winner's time) in order to start the next.

In the aim of giving a thorough explanation but at the risk of being patronising; I've drawn up a simplified and exaggerated results table for a stage race to illustrate how General Classification works. Skip the bullet-pointed section if you get it.

(Unlike the very real five or six stages of the 4 Jours de Dunkerque, it actually lasts the stated number of days.)

Through some shocking organisational misfiring, only three riders are competing in the TJT. The UCI will likely be fining me several thousand Swiss Francs for this and preventing me from organising any further events, but we press on.

Annemiek Generieke takes a definitive victory in stage 1, her closest competition coming in nearly ten minutes down.

As she has the lowest accumulated time, Generieke starts in the leader's jersey for stage 2 (underlined). Perhaps exhausted by her previous efforts the day before, she finishes in last place with Ciclista beating Blanks by only one minute.

Blanks made up enough time on Generieke to now have the lowest accumulated time - she is leading the GC, so wears the leader's jersey for stage 3.

Ciclista wins her second stage but Blanks rides tactically to ensure she doesn't lose time and thus keeps the leader's jersey.

Brody Blanks wins the inaugaural (and final) Trois Jours de Tumbler with a time of 8 hours 55 minutes!

It's certainly for a GC winner to win a race without winning any stages - see 2017 men's Tour de France - but they'll usually win at least one. Successful GC campaigns require a team to work together to protect their leader and ensure they don't lose time to their rivals. GC riders are often exceptional climbers as the mountains are where the biggest time gaps are created, decent time-trialists, and especially gifted at recovery, staying consistent enough throughout a race to remain competitive.

Not every rider or team in the race is there to win GC: some will be teammates of leaders, others will be there to win as many stages as they can, or target one of the secondary classifications: points, climber's, youth, and team, (plus some other prizes) which I'll go into in a different post.

Thanks for reading, and see you later in the season!

[dawnofprismatica]

idk is there a sports side of tumblr? i wonder if that exists like there's sports twitter. i think sports tumblr would be really fun

[hane22]

Hello, I am Hane from Gaza, Palestine, I speak to you with a sad and heavy 🥺 heart about what happened to me and my family.I was seriously injured in the war on Gaza and did not receive treatment from the moment, I am married and have three children, Abdullah, Salma and Saleh and my wife gave birth to a baby girl named Tulip, but unfortunately she died at birth from the effects of war and famine, since more than a year I have not been able to buy my children's needs such as milk and life necessities. We live in a torn tent and💔😭 winter has come and the bitter cold is hitting my children very cold, because we do not have winter coats and winter clothes, we lost everything we have in our house destroyed in the war, please my friend do not ignore my story, donate and share my campaign I will be grateful to you 🫶

Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #99 ) ✅

[thekaiserroll]

Wrestling with the king

[scarlettphantoms]

Sporty/Athletic Hawks has my heart :D

[incognitopolls]

From anon's observation, the dominant attitude on tumblr is of the "ew sportsball" variety, but they're curious how many people feel strongly about that or just don't care, and if there are many American football fans on here.

–

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[ola-family3]

an agreement has been reached for a ceasefire 🇵🇸💥💥💥💥💥💥💥

finally after a long and exhausting ordeal, which will take effect on Sunday.

However, it is truly heartbreaking that our suffering will continue as we are left with no homes, no hospitals, and no schools. We are physically and emotionally exhausted.

My greatest wish is to be able to travel with my children to Egypt and reunite with my husband, their father, whom they haven’t seen for 17 months. My one-year-and-three-month-old daughter has never even seen her father.

All the donations I received 💰 were spent during the war to provide essential needs for my children, such as tents, food, clean water, blankets, and clothes. Nothing remains to cover the cost of traveling to Egypt and paying the necessary expenses.

Please, I urge you to help me leave Gaza as soon as possible, especially once the border crossing reopens. 📢📢

@tamamita @punkitt-is-here @2spice @paper-mario-wiki @omegaversereloaded @nyancrimew @90-ghost @beserkerjewel @ot3 @prisonhannibal @aimasart @anneemay @dirhwangdaseul @neechees @memingursa @certifiedsexed @afro-elf @11thsense @sawasawako @girlinafairytalelovestory @spacebeard @skipppppy @beetledrink @3000s @fools-and-perverts @dailyquests @evillesbianvillain @wolfertinger666 @taffybuns @valtsv @postanagramgenerator @imjustheretotrytohelp @wikipediagf @kibumkim @resonantchamber @neptunering @autisticmudkip @meglyfer @maester-cressen @tiredandlonelymuse @nyc-looks @sylvianritual @hillfogstudio @jmfenner91 @punkpandame

@sweetsweethate @lavena @a-shade-of-blue @nabulsi @determinate-negation