This last Wednesday the French club hosted its second activity for the year...its first (perhaps annual) Le Tour de France. It was a big success. How did you like it? What?? You weren't there?? Well, let me fill you in on all the action.
French Club adviser Bob Hudson got things started by showing some love to the blog! Boo yah! There we were, in plain sight, right on the big screen. He explained the event which would have three parts:
1. A brief presentation on the Tour de France given by Dr. Corry Cropper, a cycling enthusiast and chair of the French department.
2. A jersey and bike design contest.
3. A scavenger/treasure hunt a la Amazing Race around BYU campus representing the Tour de France.
Now, without further ado, I give you Dr. Cropper:
He began with a brief introduction of himself and the background of the Tour de France. Now it was essential that we take notes because the questions that would be asked throught the treasure hunt would be based on his lecture. I found it to be very informative and interesting. I realized that in all reality I never really understood how the Tour de France worked. Now before I share with you the highlights of what I learned, I thought the most entertaining moment of the whole event was when Dr. Cropper hit his third slide and the image wouldn't load. Then, fearing the worst, he quickly flipped through all the slides and realized that none of the pictures loaded properly. With a frustrated look, he turned to the students gathered in the lecture hall and said "Any ideas?"
It turned out that the presentation was prepared on a Mac and wouldn't work on a PC. Well, it was proposed that Drs. Hudson and Hurlbut, two excellent French professors I might add, ran off, one to get his Mac laptop and
the other one to get some adapter cables. While they were away, Dr. Cropper showed us gruesome Youtube videos of some pretty gnarly crashes along the Tour. It was pretty impressive to watch. They ride in an incredibly tight cluster and once somebody goes down, it literally dominoes and is at once poetic and brutal.
Well, we finally got the powerpoint working, and this is what you missed.
DID YOU KNOW?
--The Tour de France is composed of teams. A team works for one team leader, who is never out in front. Alberto Contador, the winner of last year's Tour de France is on the same team as Lance Armstrong, who took third. Certain controversy exists as to which of the two is team leader. The team mates create a little wind stream for the team leader to ride in. It's a lot like birds who are flying in formation. There are about 17 teams competing in the Tour de France each year.
--Riders in the Tour ride 100-120 miles a day. They burn 6000 calories while they are on the bike each day. Within a period of three weeks, they ride all but two days. There are also two time trials per grand tour and they are 20 miles long.
--Certain mountains are well known just because of the Tour de France, in 1910 riders first went into the mountains because the roads were good enough. This year, in commemoration of the century that has passed since the Tour first took to the mountains, they will feature prominently in the route. If you didn't know, the trajectory for the Tour de France changes every year and usually goes through somewhere that isn't in France, be it Belgium or Switzerland or whatever it might be that year.
--The Tour de France has five individual competitions going on throughout. Each day, five riders get the honor of wearing certain jerseys to indicate their success in one of these competitions. We learned all about what they mean. The overall race leader will wear a yellow jersey. A white jersey will be worn by the rider with the best overall time for rider under 25. The most aggresive rider everyday will wear a red number the next day. There is also a points competition going on, mostly related to sprinting, and the leader in this competition wears a green jersey. Lastly, the best climber each day is awarded a polk-a-dot jersey to wear the next day.
--Every team has a sponsor. Cycling is known as the sport that innobles the spectator because the athletes come to your front door. Therefore, the fund the race, sponsors are essential, admission won't do it.
--After Lance Armstrong, who has won seven times, the record is shared jointly by four riders who have each won five Tours. Jacques Anquetil in the sixties, Eddie Merckx in the seventies, Bernard Hinault in the late seventies, and Migeul Indurain in the eighties.
This was all essential information as we headed in to the next two phases of the event. Ironically, at this point, the fairly good turnout that came for the presentation summarily filed out the two exits. Dr. Hudson called out to them, but to no avail. Apparently, few were interested in the design contest or the race. Don't worry, I stayed.
The design competition wasn't as daunting as it had originally sounded. Each team, which shrunk to four or five members by the time all the quitters were gone, were given a poster with the outline of a jersey on one side and the outline of a bike on the other. The assignment was to find sponsorship for your team and decorate your bike and jersey accordingly. It only took about five minutes or so.
The four entries were l'Equipe Poisson, L'Equipe Crayola, L'Equipe MacDo, and L'Equipe Carrefour. Team Crayola was judged to be the most attractive and colorful and received prizes for their work. Team Carrefour was also awarded the victor's laurels and prizes because their sponsors were Carrefour and France Telecom, and those are both deep pockets. I was on team Carrefour and I also just finished a project on the French stock market, le CAC 40, and those two events coincided nicely. The bikes also reflected the creativity and the spirit of each of the four competing teams.
PHASE 3So we moved on to phase three, the actual contest. The Tour de France! We were given the rules. There were seven checkpoints around campus. At each checkpoint was an officer of the French club with a question concerning something that Dr. Cropper discussed in his presentation. You could go in any order, but if you missed a question, you had to go to another station before coming back to the question that you missed. Lastly, you had to carry your bike with you the whole way. With that, we had five minutes to decide our plan of action and we took off.
Everyone ran up the steps of the JFSB with great vigor. We reached the top and found out that it was raining. Raining hard. There was a split second when everyone kind of looked at each other as if to say "are we really going to do this?" but just like in that scene in Rat Race when they all take off to race for the money, there wasn't any time to process it. We just went. Our trajectory was this:
The Joseph Smith statue in the Courtyard of the JSB
The Maesar Building
The 12th floor of the SWKT
The cloister of the JFSB
The statue of the family just south of the Wilk
The gardens in the MOA
The statue of Brigham Young in front of the ASB
Off we went. For the first half of the race, it was an all-out sprint. We made it, easily answering the questions, through our first four checkpoints. At this point, I was getting tired. I am not in amazing shape and this was grueling. We had lost one of the girls in our group early on, in fact, before the first checkpoint. I feared that I would also be left behind. We took the long way to the family statue which was frustating, and I almost spoke too soon and almost missed the question about why the leader jersey is yellow (its because the newspaper that sponsored the first Tour de France was printed on yellow paper) We then set our sights on the MOA. We ran
toward the HFAC and saw another team heading in the same direction. We seriously hadn't seen any other teams so far, since everyone went their own way, and so it was hard to know if we were doing well or not. Either way, we weren't going to lose to these chumps. Within the HFAC, we didn't have the natural courtesy that the other team did (we didn't stop running) and this proved their downfall. We made it to the gardens, then the Brigham Young statue and it was just a final sprint home. This was the hardest part of all, but we did it. And who did we find in the courtyard in front of the JFSB? Our missing team member. Reunited, we ran down into the room where it all began and happily discovered that we had taken FIRST PLACE!!!! And by at least a three minute margin. A handsome victory.
There we are, the winning team. I am on the far right. Interesting info, the young man on the far left is Brett Decker and I trained him as a missionary in Quebec. I did not know he was going to be there. It was unplanned. And I don't know who the girls are...but we won!One by one, the other teams trailed in, soaked and disappointed that they were defeated...especially Team Poisson. Then the truth was revealed. There would be more than one winner. Just like in the Tour de France, there was more than one competition going on. The fastest sprinters (the first ones to get to the checkpoint at the JFSB) were awarded the green jersey. The best climbers (the first ones to the SWKT checkpoint) were awarded the polk-a-dot jersey. And the overall winners (TEAM CARREFOUR) were awarded the yellow jersey.
The top two teams also got the award of eating these gigantic pastries. Much bigger than the ones that were awarded for the design competition. Unfortunately, I had run so hard that I was too sick to eat anything. Haha. Besides, I was getting engagement pictures taken the next week. It just wasn't wise. But the french club officers who sat out in the rain while we ran around to them were more than happy to eat all the rest of them.
Overall, it was an amazing activity and everyone who committed themselves to it had a blast. I learned alot, won alot, and got some great exercise. GO FRENCH CLUB!! And reader, GO TO FRENCH CLUB!!! The next activity is going to be awesome. It's in about three weeks and is Star Academie. A French American Idol essentially, however there will be a comedy portion as well as a musical portion and a talent portion. We'll see you there!~Pete
