21 stages later it comes to this

i found this photo from the website of the german documentary "hell on wheels", featuring the 2003 tour de france. on this photo is rolf aldag, a super-domestique on the german telekom team, just sitting on his handlebar on his laid-down bike at the end of the tour in paris. man, he looks damn tired and doesn't care one bit about all the celebration going on around him. after 21 stages of giving it all for your team, it comes to this.

in minutes, the promenade will be full of parades and soon the spectators will be all over the place. this photo was literally right after the riders rode a loop around the champs-elys\'ee, the final thing that a racer has to do in the tour de france. but of course, rolf is too tired to care, after 21 days of racing on behalf of his team leaders. not for himself, but for his team leaders. very few people know about rolf, since his work is done before TV coverage comes to live and outside of those photos and clips of lance armstrong. but without his work, his telekom team would not have finished on top of the team classification, and neither would his team leader vinokourov been able to finish on the podium in paris.

i just thought that this photo had that introspective kind of poignancy, and thought that you might appreciate it, too. brad mehldau writes after goethe that memories often become the exact vessel for which the grandeur of a moment reveals itself. perhaps it's more than mere grandeur that memories amplify. perhaps it is also the hollowing of grandeur of fleeting moments. and oh boy, can i wait to get my hands on a copy of "hell on wheels".

“Oh, it is the same with the distance as with the future! A vast, twilit whole lies before our soul; our emotions lose themselves in it as do our eyes, and we long to surrender our entire being and let ourselves sink into one great well of blissful feeling. Alas, when we approach, when There has become Here, everything is as it was before, and we are left with our poverty, our narrowness, while our soul thirsts for the comfort that slipped away.”
– from The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe