From the film’s website (https://flandrienfilm.com/): “Producer Shane Cooper and director Paul Willerton have teamed up to create a new feature-length documentary film, Flandrien. The film is set in the Flanders region of Belgium and explores the past, present, and future of cycling and local culture. The Tour of Flanders itself plays a starring role, as well as some of the riders who have been awarded the esteemed title of being a true ‘Flandrien.'”

The film premiered on Friday, June 16, 2023 in Belgium and is now available to watch on YouTube. The documentary features interviews with cycling legends including Johan Museeuw, three-time winner of the Tour of Flanders and the embodiment of the Flandrien spirit. As Museeuw reflects in the film on what defines a true Flandrien: the ability to suffer, the connection to the cobbles and bergs of Flanders, and an unwavering commitment to attacking racing.

The film offers an intimate look at Flemish cycling culture, from the passionate fans who line the Oude Kwaremont and Paterberg each spring, to the young riders dreaming of one day wearing the lion of Flanders. With stunning cinematography of the cobbled classics routes that define the region, Flandrien captures why this corner of Belgium remains the spiritual home of professional cycling’s hardmen.

The post Video: <em>Flandrien</em>: A Love Letter to the Cobbles appeared first on Flahute.

By Claude Aurillac-Issoire
Clermont-Ferrand, France (01 April 2026)
Translated from the original French.

My mother grew up in the shadow of the Puy de Dôme. My father raced as an amateur in the Allier valley in the nineteen-seventies — nothing serious, club races, a few regional events, once a small criterium in Vichy where he finished fifth and told the story for the rest of his life. I learned to read in a house where the yellow jersey was not a metaphor. When I tell you that the Puy de Dôme rises 1,415 metres and that the final kilometre averages 12.8 percent and that Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor duelled on its upper slopes in 1964 while an entire nation held its breath, I am not reciting statistics. I am describing the landscape of my childhood.

The Bedminster hill is sixty metres tall.

I read the Executive Order this afternoon, the document having been forwarded to me by four colleagues within twenty minutes of its release, each with a different subject line. The most accurate was simply: “Claude.” The order is eight pages long and divided into thirteen sections. Section Seven reads, in its entirety: “The Bedminster climb is very challenging. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.”

I read it twice. Then I poured more coffee.

I had expected, I think, a few paragraphs of the American President’s characteristic grammar dressed in governmental formatting — a Truth Social post amplified into official language. What I found was a document of genuine structural ambition, written by someone tasked with making a series of unpublishable ideas sound publishable, who had done their considerable best. Section Four requires all riders to use American-made bicycle frames — or those from countries the Secretary of Commerce has designated as Fair Trade Cycling Partners, a list that does not currently include Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, or Taiwan — and bans Campagnolo components outright. Section Five prohibits drafting for more than thirty consecutive seconds on the grounds that sheltering behind another rider is inconsistent with American values of self-reliance. Section Eight threatens Switzerland — its watches, its chocolate, its banking — if the UCI does not grant the Tour de Trump Grand Tour status within thirty days.

Section Nine, subsection (c), notes that Campagnolo “has been warned. Multiple times. Internally.”

I called Stefan Schoofveldt in Ghent. He had read it at a café near the Vrijdagmarkt, between a double espresso and a tartine he had not finished. Stefan has covered professional cycling for nineteen years, including every major one-day race in Belgium, three editions of the Tour de France, and a criterium in Aalst that was interrupted by a cow. He was, he told me, not angry.

“I am too old for outrage,” he said. “And too Belgian for surprise.”

He paused. I have known Stefan long enough to know that a pause from Stefan is not empty. “The second sentence of Section Seven,” he said, “is not the language of governance. It is the language of a man who knows, somewhere he cannot reach by executive order, that someone will tell you otherwise. That everyone will tell you otherwise.”

He then paid for his coffee and went home.

✦

I then called Chatham George Paulson-Thomas in London, who had been awake since five in the morning and who was, when I reached him, in the careful and slightly dangerous mood he enters when something has annoyed him sufficiently that he has decided to be precise about it.

“Let me be clear about the mechanism,” he said, “because I find that precision is the only reliable defence against the interpretive drift this situation invites. The mechanism is real. The tariff threat is real. The UCI cannot receive a unilateral instruction from a single government and comply without effectively dissolving its credibility as an independent international body.”

He granted — Chatham always grants — that the underlying frustrations were not without basis. That American cycling has been underserved by international governing structures. That the UCI’s record on doping enforcement and rider welfare is not a record anyone would defend in full. That these are real issues.

“They are not addressed by this order,” he said. “The order is not about the governance of cycling. It is about the reinstatement of a brand.”

Another pause. “What I find most dispiriting is the response it requires. Someone has to take this seriously enough to respond to it. Someone has to appear before cameras and be asked, with a straight face, whether Bedminster compares favourably to Mont Ventoux. And in the time that takes, other things do not get done.”

“The mountain does not care what you believe about it. It will exact from you precisely what the mathematics say it will exact, whatever you thought before you began climbing.”

I find I cannot quite share Chatham’s dispirited mood. What I feel instead — and I have been trying to identify it precisely since the order arrived this afternoon — is something closer to a helpless, liberating hilarity. Not at the expense of America, which has produced magnificent cyclists. Not even at the expense of the President, who has the distinction of being the only head of state in history to issue a formal federal document certifying the difficulty of his own golf course approach road. What I find funny — what I find, on reflection, genuinely, structurally, almost classically funny — is the nature of expertise.

The Tour de Trump ran for two years. It went through New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania. It was a real event. It produced real winners. Dag Otto Lauritzen, who took the inaugural edition, was a professional of genuine quality. The race mattered to American cycling in its time, in the modest and sincere way that all races matter. And the man whose name was on it appeared at the start lines, smiled for the cameras, said it was tremendous. He ran the race in the limited sense that a man who once owned a restaurant has run a kitchen. The pot never touched his hand. The spoon never left the drawer. But the story was his.

And now, thirty-five years later, from that story — from two seasons of mid-Atlantic stage racing, from a handful of start-line photographs, from the fact of having once been in the same zip code as a professional peloton — he has constructed a total, comprehensive, unassailable expertise. He knows cycling better than the riders. Better than the directeurs sportifs, the race organizers, the governing bodies, or the sport’s entire one-hundred-and-fifty-year institutional memory. He knows it the way he knows many things: completely, effortlessly, and without the burden of having learned it.

I find this funny because it is, in a very precise way, the opposite of what cycling teaches you.

Cycling teaches you that the mountain does not care what you believe about it. You can be convinced, absolutely convinced, that you are capable of a certain wattage on a certain gradient in a certain wind, and the mountain will simply present its kilometres and its percentage signs and wait. The mountain is not impressed by your certainty. It is a fixed quantity of altitude, spread across a fixed quantity of distance, and it will exact from you precisely what the mathematics say it will exact, no more and no less, whatever you thought before you began climbing.

This is why cyclists tend to be, in my experience, somewhat humble people. Not always — there are exceptions, and some of them won the Tour de France multiple times and were stripped of the results. But in general, the sport produces humility because the sport’s primary feature is a series of non-negotiable physical realities that do not respond to confidence.

✦

I have met Christian Prudhomme three times. Once at a start village in the Dordogne, once at a race organisation dinner in Paris where the wine was excellent and the speeches were not, and once in a corridor at the Palais des Congrès in 2019 when he was moving quickly and did not have time to stop. On each occasion he was courteous, precise, and utterly unreadable. He is a man who has spent thirty years in the diplomatic layer between professional cycling and the rest of the world, and he has become very good at occupying that layer without ever quite revealing what lies beneath it. I understand he held a press conference this afternoon. I understand it went well, in the sense that he gave them nothing to use against him. This is, with Christian Prudhomme, always the goal.

I know this face. I am from Clermont-Ferrand. We learn it young.

I looked up Campagnolo’s statement from Vicenza. It was a model of corporate serenity — ninety-three years of precision manufacturing distilled into three sentences of impeccable restraint. They have survived wars, recessions, the rise of Shimano, and the cycling industry’s periodic infatuation with electronic groupsets. They will survive a tariff. What I found more telling was the product photograph they chose to accompany the statement: a Super Record groupset. Not a press release photo. Not a logo. A groupset. At four thousand eight hundred euros retail. The Italians have their own way of making a point.

Stefan, whom I texted this afternoon, replied in three words: “The groupset speaks.”

My father raced his criterium in Vichy in 1973. He finished fifth. He told the story for forty years — the race, the road, the riders who beat him, the café afterwards where someone bought him a beer. I am not unsympathetic to the impulse. A man wants his race to matter. A man wants the thing he touched, however briefly, however glancingly, to have been great. This is human. This is, in its way, rather moving.

But there are limits, and the limits are geological. The Bedminster hill is sixty metres tall. The Executive Order says it is very challenging. The Executive Order is incorrect in the way that a man can be incorrect about a mountain he has only ever driven, and the mountain will wait, patient and absolute, for the moment of reckoning it has been waiting for since before the race existed, before he signed the order, before someone took the photograph at the start line thirty-five years ago in New Jersey.

There is a climb I know in the hills above Clermont-Ferrand. It is nothing compared to the Puy de Dôme, nothing compared to the Galibier or the Stelvio or any of the climbs that have decided races and ended careers. It is a local road, not quite four kilometres, maybe seven percent average. I have ridden it perhaps two hundred times. On every occasion it has been exactly as long and exactly as steep as it was the time before. My belief about it, on any given morning, has had no effect whatsoever on its gradient. This is what cycling teaches, and it is a lesson the mountain delivers without sentiment, without variation, and without any particular interest in who is on the bicycle.

I spoke to Chatham again an hour ago. He had written fourteen hundred words of analysis and deleted them. “Someone has to take this seriously,” he said. “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.” Stefan, for his part, has not replied to my last message. He is probably home by now, or out on the bike. He has a very good bike. Campagnolo, as it happens.

I am going outside. The light over the Auvergne is still good. It is a good evening to ride.

Translated from the original French:

The post COMMENTARY—Sixty Metres: Do Not Let Anyone Tell You Otherwise appeared first on Flahute.

By Stefan Schoofveldt, with additional reporting by Chatham George Paulson-Thomas and Claude Aurillac-Issoire

At seventeen minutes past midnight Eastern Time, Donald J. Trump posted to Truth Social that the Tour de France was very overrated. Thirty-four minutes later, he announced he was bringing back the greatest bike race the world had ever seen. This is a record of what has happened. All times shown as EDT (UTC−4) / CEST (UTC+2). European times in 24-hour format. Updates added as events develop.

12:17 AM EDT / 06:17 CEST — The first signal

The post arrives without warning or context, as they often do. Cycling people, who keep strange hours by habit — the 6 AM ride requiring a 5 AM alarm requiring a half-conscious check of the phone at some intermediate hour — are among the first to notice it.

There are, at this hour, perhaps forty people awake and online who know what MACGA means. The rest of the world is asleep. The forty people begin texting each other.

12:33 AM EDT / 06:33 CEST

Dag Otto Lauritzen, reached by a Norwegian journalist whose name we are withholding because it is 6:38 in the morning in Bergen and he had not consented to being the subject of a news story, will later say he has “no comment at this time” and then add, after a pause, “What is happening?”

BREAKING NEWS — 12:51 AM EDT / 06:51 CEST — Tour de Trump

The forty people become four hundred. Screenshots circulate. The phrase “signed papers” generates immediate and intense speculation about what, precisely, has been signed, and what authority it might carry over a private French sporting organization whose legal domicile is in Paris and which has been staging professional bicycle races without American governmental input since 1903.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: We have begun attempting to reach the White House press office, but it is 12:44 AM in Washington.]

1:14 AM EDT / 07:14 CEST

The mention of Campagnolo causes a particular kind of distress among road cyclists that is difficult to explain to non-cyclists and only somewhat easier to explain to cyclists who do not understand what Campagnolo means to people who do. Several European component industry figures will later say this was the moment they understood the situation was serious.

1:38 AM EDT / 07:38 CEST

A White House official, who asked not to be identified because they value their continued employment, confirms by text message that an executive order has been signed. They will not describe its contents. They will not say when it was signed. They add, unprompted: “I am going back to sleep.”

2:03 AM EDT / 8:03 CEST

Mont Ventoux rises 1,617 meters over 21.5 kilometers of exposed Provençal limestone. It has ended careers. It has ended a life. Tom Simpson died on its upper slopes in 1967. The Bedminster hill rises approximately sixty meters over roughly eight hundred meters of New Jersey road. We are not making a comparison. We are simply reporting what was posted.

2:27 AM EDT / 08:27 CEST

Armstrong’s publicist in Austin does not respond to a request for comment sent at 4:11 AM EDT (3:11 AM MDT). This is, to be fair, a completely reasonable position to take at 3:11 in the morning local time.

6:09 AM EDT / 12:09 CEST — Europe wakes up

It is ten minutes past noon in Aigle, Switzerland, and the UCI’s communications office has arrived, had coffee, noticed forty-seven press inquiries, a Truth Social post describing their organization as “very sneaky,” and a threat — now confirmed by a second White House source — of retaliatory tariffs on Swiss chocolate. They issue a brief statement that says they are “aware of the announcement” and are “consulting with member federations.” In UCI terms, this is the institutional equivalent of closing the curtains and sitting very still until the noise stops.

6:51 AM EDT / 12:51 CEST

In Paris, it is approaching noon. Christian Prudhomme, the director of the Tour de France, holds a brief, unscheduled press conference at the ASO offices. He is wearing a very good suit. He looks like a man who has spent the last two hours being extremely diplomatic in a language other than the one he would prefer to use.

“We note with interest the American President’s announcement,” he says. “The Tour de France has operated continuously since 1903 and is one of the great sporting institutions of the world. We would be happy to share our experience in race organization with any interested parties.”

He is asked whether ASO considers the Tour de Trump a competitive threat.

He smiles the particular way the French smile when they are choosing, with considerable effort, not to say what they actually think.

“We consider all sporting events worthy of respect,” he says.

He is asked about the tariff threat on French wine, cheese, and berets.

The press conference ends.

7:31 AM EDT / 13:31 CEST — The Executive Order

The White House releases the text of the Executive Order. It is eight pages long. It is formally titled “Restoring American Excellence in the Sport of Cycling and Reviving the Tour de Trump as the World’s Premier Stage Race.” It cites Article Two twice. It contains a section — Section Seven — that is two sentences long and addresses, exclusively, the difficulty of the Bedminster climb.

Section Seven reads: “The Bedminster climb is very challenging. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.”

Section Nine imposes a two-hundred-percent tariff on Campagnolo components. Section Nine, subsection (c) notes that the Secretary of Commerce has requested procedural clarification on the Campagnolo tariff. The request has been received. The Secretary has been asked to proceed.

The full text of the executive order is published separately.

8:08 AM EDT / 14:08 CEST

A directeur sportif for a Belgian WorldTour squad, who asked not to be named because he genuinely could not afford the attention this morning, calls us from what sounds like a car. He has been reading the executive order.

“No drafting,” he says. “Thirty seconds. For three weeks. Has he ever — I mean, has he ever actually watched a bike race?”

He is told the President has watched multiple stages on YouTube.

There is a silence.

“The Campagnolo tariff is the most offensive part,” he says finally. “Two hundred percent. Do you understand what Campagnolo means to cycling? It is not a component. It is a philosophy. Granted, none of us use it at the WorldTour level anymore, but still!”

8:47 AM EDT / 14:47 CEST

We have asked several cyclists. They have, unanimously, not commented.

9:22 AM EDT / 15:22 CEST — Armstrong’s phone call

A source familiar with the situation confirms that Lance Armstrong received a phone call from the President at approximately 1:04 AM CDT / 8:04 AM CEST, which is to say, in the middle of what any reasonable person would describe as the night.

The call lasted twenty-two minutes. The source describes it as “not a conversation in the traditional sense.” The President spoke at length about the Tour de Trump, the mountain stages of the Tour de France (“tremendous, very exciting, like a rally but with bicycles”), the anti-drafting provision (“you go to the front, you race, you don’t hide behind people, very simple”), and the prize money, which he described as “tremendous” but declined to quantify.

Armstrong asked about the prize money three times. Each time, the President confirmed it would be tremendous and moved on.

Armstrong’s role as Special Advisor on Cycling Affairs appears in Section Ten of the executive order. Section Ten notes, in subsection (b), that Mr. Armstrong “has agreed to this appointment” and then, in the same sentence, acknowledges that “he has not explicitly confirmed this, but the President is confident he will.”

Armstrong has still not commented publicly. His publicist says he is “reviewing the opportunity.”

His phone, we are told, has not stopped ringing.

9:55 AM EDT / 15:55 CEST

The Office of American Cycling Excellence, established by Section Eleven of the executive order, does not yet have a director, staff, offices, a website, or a phone number. Section Eleven describes its budget as “to be determined” and adds, in the following sentence, “It will not be a lot. We are cutting spending.”

The OACE is, at this point, a name and a mandate. The mandate is, in full, to organize the Tour de Trump, enforce the executive order, negotiate with the UCI and ASO, manage the golden jersey supply chain, and “generally promote American cycling excellence at home and abroad.” The budget for this mandate is to be determined but will not be a lot.

10:28 AM EDT / 16:28 CEST

The Campagnolo company issues a statement from Vicenza. It notes, with dignity, that the company has been producing precision cycling components since 1933. It expresses confidence in its products. It says it looks forward to “continued dialogue with all stakeholders.” It is accompanied by a product photograph of a Super Record groupset. At current retail, the groupset runs to roughly €4.800 ($5,560 US). Under the proposed tariff: approximately €14.400 ($16,700 US).

Several American retailers who stock high-end Italian components have begun calling their buying offices. None of them wish to be quoted. One of them says, off the record, “I have $200,000 in Campagnolo inventory.” He does not say this in an unhappy way. He says it in the way a man says something when he is trying very hard not to smile in front of a journalist. Then he adds: “My summer reorder is already placed.” He says that part very differently.

11:02 AM EDT / 17:02 CEST — The press briefing

The daily White House press briefing. Maren Forsythe of CyclingPost — credentialed, though until this week her credential had never been especially competitive to obtain — is, for the first time in her publication’s history, in the first row.

Forsythe asks about the anti-drafting provision — specifically whether any professional cycling body has been consulted on its enforceability.

“I think what’s interesting,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt says, “is that the mainstream media and their allies in the so-called professional cycling establishment are already trying to undermine a pro-competition measure that the American people overwhelmingly support. The anti-drafting provision levels the playing field. It rewards individual effort. That’s a very American idea, and I’m not surprised that certain outlets find it threatening.”

Forsythe notes that the question was about enforceability, not ideology.

“The OACE will release technical enforcement details in due course,” Leavitt says. “Next question.”

Forsythe asks about the Bedminster climb.

“The President has visited that property hundreds of times,” Leavitt says. “He has personal and direct knowledge of that climb. He considers it a world-class competitive ascent and I think the American people trust the President’s judgment on that.”

Forsythe asks how it compares, in terms of elevation and gradient, to the climbs of the existing Grand Tours — the Stelvio, the Galibier, the Angliru.

“I’m not going to get into a comparison of mountains with a reporter who I think we all know has a predetermined narrative here,” Leavitt says. “The President certified the climb personally. That certification stands. The stage information will be released by the OACE.”

Forsythe asks when the OACE will have staff.

“That’s a process question and I’d refer you to the Office of Management and Budget,” Leavitt says.

Forsythe asks what the gradient of the Bedminster climb actually is.

Leavitt looks at Forsythe for a moment.

“The OACE,” she says, “will be releasing detailed stage information in due course.”

Forsythe sits down. Several colleagues in the briefing room are studying their shoes.

11:22 AM EDT / 17:22 CEST

The UCI has not confirmed this call took place. A spokesperson says they are “in ongoing consultations with member federations.” This is exactly what they said at eleven this morning. It is likely what they will say tomorrow.

11:37 AM EDT / 17:37 CEST

The Palm Beach County Commissioner’s office confirms it has not been consulted about Stage One’s road closures, which would require shutting approximately forty miles of public road for a full day. A spokesperson says the county is “reviewing the matter.” This is everyone’s favorite phrase today.

The Trump National Doral golf club has not responded to questions about Stage Two’s proposed finish on its grounds.

Bedminster is, by all accounts, still sixty meters tall.

Images of the jersey design have now been posted in the press room.

11:46 AM EDT / 17:46 CEST — Rider reaction, outside Girona

A rider for one of the major WorldTour teams — who declined to be named because he has a contract with a sponsor whose management is based in the United States — speaks briefly from a training ride outside Girona. He is still on his bike. He is riding Campagnolo.

“I read the order,” he says. “All of it. Section Seven is — I mean, have you been to Bedminster? I’ve been to New Jersey. It’s not the Dolomites.”

He is asked about the anti-drafting provision.

“If you take away the peloton, you don’t have bike racing,” he says. “You have a time trial that goes on for three weeks. Nobody can sustain Grand Tour watts without shelter for twenty-one days. The fastest riders in the world would be in medical tents by Stage Three.”

He pauses. Something passes across his face — not quite a smile.

“The golden jersey is hideous,” he adds. “I’m sorry. But it’s hideous.”

He rides away.

11:51 AM EDT / 17:51 CEST

No prize total has been announced. The OACE has not been contacted because the OACE does not exist in any staffed sense.

Armstrong’s publicist says he is still reviewing the opportunity. He has been reviewing it for over nine hours.

11:54 AM EDT / 17:54 CEST — Latest update

The morning ends more or less as it began: in motion, unresolved, and generating more questions than it answers. The UCI has consulted. ASO has noted. Campagnolo has expressed confidence in continued dialogue. The Secretary of Commerce has requested a clarification that has been overruled. The Bedminster climb remains, by all independent measurement, sixty meters tall.

Professional cycling is a sport accustomed to improbable weather, unexpected suffering, and events that make very little sense while they are happening. Its people are not, generally, easily surprised. They have seen riders fall asleep on descents and cross finish lines bleeding. They have watched men climb mountains in conditions that would ground aircraft. They have followed races through floods, strikes, and at least one kidnapping attempt.

They have not, until now, been subject to a presidential executive order regulating aerodynamic behavior in the peloton.

This afternoon, the UCI will consult further. ASO will note further. Armstrong will continue reviewing. The golden jersey will be, by all accounts, very gold.

And somewhere in Vicenza, a factory that has been making the finest bicycle components in the world since 1933 will begin a very difficult conversation with its American distributors.

The Tour de Trump has not yet announced its start date. The executive order says the OACE will provide this information “in due course.” The OACE has not yet hired anyone.

But the papers have been signed. The President was there when they were signed. He ran the whole thing personally.

He remembers it differently now. He always has.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a developing story. We will update as events warrant. It is not yet noon. Stay tuned for commentary from one of our correspondents.]

The post BREAKING NEWS: Trump Revives Tour de Trump, Slaps 200% Tariff on Campagnolo appeared first on Flahute.

Richard Sachs stands as an icon. He also breaks conventions as an iconoclast. He likes to say, “I didn’t want to be a framebuilder. I became one.” This phrase neatly captures the serendipity that shaped his career: a young man who intended to become a writer ended up becoming one of America’s most revered builders of the most finely wrought handmade bicycles in America.

For more than fifty years Sachs has worked in modest New England workshops, cutting and filing, brazing and aligning, coaxing steel tubes into machines that carry an aura well beyond their mechanical purpose. Yet if you ask him, the story begins not with the bicycles but with words, and with his persistent need to arrange them.

In 1972, Sachs planned to enroll at Goddard College in Vermont to study writing. When the college deferred his admission until the following spring, he began looking for something to occupy his time. An advertisement in the Village Voice caught his eye. A bike shop in Vermont needed help for the summer. He boarded a bus and answered the ad in person, but the shop had already filled the position.

One decision led to another, and soon he flew to London, where he apprenticed at Witcomb Cycles. “Apprenticing” perhaps overstates his role: Sachs spent the better part of a year sweeping floors and lugging boxes through what he later described—fondly, if with a wince—as a Dickensian factory.

When he returned to the United States, he helped launch Witcomb Cycles U.S.A., building frames as best he could from what he had observed in England, since he had received little, if any, formal instruction. By 1975, he struck out on his own, hanging out a shingle as Richard Sachs Cycles. He has not worked another job since.

The irony strikes you immediately. The aspiring writer, eager to arrange sentences on the page, ended up arranging steel in a jig. However, both pursuits shared uncannily similar goals: precision, beauty, and a sense of order in the face of chaos.

This collision of avocations produced Arrange Disorder, Volume 1, a seventy-two–page chapbook that distills a half-century of life at the bench into what Sachs describes as “anecdotes, advice, musings, opinions, reflections, judgements, inspirations, sense, and nonsense,” stemming from a series of essays published on his website under the same title, “Arrange Disorder.” By his own estimate, he has produced more than seven hundred thousand words: each essay running a few hundred words, written not as memoir so much as meditation.

The book’s title, like much of Sachs’s own language, operates as both wry and revealing. Now in his seventies, he describes the project as an attempt to “arrange all the disorder (until now) and get ready for that proverbial fourth quarter.” The phrasing works both literally—straightening the workroom, finding some order in a life of entropy—and metaphorically, acknowledging that the effort itself may matter more than the result. On his website, he writes with characteristic bluntness: “I like order I crave order I live a life of disorder. Deb calls it walking entropy… That’s why I arrange disorder. I try.” He adds, almost as an afterthought: “The closer I get, the further it moves from me. The order, that is.”

The book, then, represents a way of fixing on paper the rhythms of thought that had long accompanied the rhythms of the workshop. “I’m a career framebuilder,” he writes. “Working alone, I make bicycles. I want people to know what I think and what I’ve seen.”

Solitude drives both activities. In the shop, Sachs once produced as many as 140 frames a year. Now, by choice, he makes fewer than fifty. The reduction, he insists, stems not from age or infirmity but from his deepening obsession with quality. Each frame, he believes, ought to bear the full weight of everything he has learned.

The comparison to writing demands attention: the solitary labor, the compulsion to revise endlessly, the belief that perfection hovers just beyond the reach of one more pass with the file, one more tightening of a phrase. Sachs admits as much: the tinkering, the selfish, infinite pursuit of something better, always better. It is not a matter of knowing when to stop, but of knowing when not to proceed.

What gives Arrange Disorder its particular resonance stems not from its catalogue of experience but from its tone—a meditative register that links framebuilding to older traditions of craft. Sachs shows less interest in other bicycle builders than in the kind of makers who preceded the industrial age: luthiers, watchmakers, tailors, ceramicists. The thread that binds them together, he insists, involves “practice, respect for a craft’s history, and mastery.”

To read him means glimpsing a craftsman who regards his work less as production than as dialogue—between hand and material, between tradition and innovation, between disorder and the fragile order that briefly, sometimes, emerges.

Riders know Sachs best for his bicycles, which they often describe as the closest thing to perfection a working machine can achieve. But Arrange Disorder suggests that the “accidental framebuilder” has always worked as a writer—one who simply found his subject in steel, in silver and flux, and in the restless pursuit of order within entropy. In an era of mass production and digital automation, his bicycles and his words alike remind us that some things resist hurrying, resist programming, and resist perfection—they only submit to pursuit. The accident, as it turns out, is destiny.

• Arrange Disorder, Volume 1 is available at https://richardsachs.com/product/arrange-disorder-volume-1/ for $28.00 plus shipping.
• Arrange Disorder, Volume 2 is also available at https://richardsachs.com/product/arrange-disorder-volume-2/ for $28.00 plus shipping.

Do yourself a favor. Save shipping charges and buy both.

The post The Accidental Framebuilder appeared first on Flahute.

Those days feel increasingly distant under the expanding reach of Life Time, Inc.

The transformation is perhaps most heartbreaking at what used to be the spiritual heart of gravel: UNBOUND Gravel in Emporia, Kansas. Once a grassroots celebration where friends planned their entire year around reuniting on those Kansas roads, it now carries the weight of corporate expectations and the inevitable distance that comes with scale. At the 2025 edition, after rain turned the Flint Hills into a clay-thick quagmire, what happened reminded us how much we’ve lost along the way.

Multiple riders shared troubling accounts of being injured and left waiting far too long for help. Danish rider Klara Sofie Skovgaard crashed hard, splitting her helmet, dislocating her shoulder, and tearing open her knee. She developed hypothermia lying in a roadside ditch while drones and helicopters flew overhead capturing footage for broadcast. It wasn’t medical staff who found her—it was fellow racers who stopped, abandoned their own races, and stayed with her until help finally arrived hours later. (Note: see CyclingWest.com editorial Abandoned in a Ditch)

Other riders described crashes into barbed wire, concussions without follow-up, and long stretches of remote course with no medical presence. The silence that followed was perhaps more telling than any statement could have been.

It’s telling that even their routine race recaps read like fill-in-the-blank templates, spending more words on management’s excitement about being in “enter city name here” than celebrating the people who actually raced and how their stories unfolded.

Since 2010, Life Time has steadily acquired many of America’s most cherished gravel and endurance events—Leadville (2010), Chequamegon MTB Festival (2011), Unbound (2018, when it was still Dirty Kanza), Crusher in the Tushar (2019), Sea Otter (2021), along with founding new events like The Rad Dirt Fest and Big Sugar. The promise is always the same: more resources, better athlete experience, greater exposure. But something essential gets lost in translation.

Ask anyone who’s been going to these events for years, and they’ll tell you the same thing with a kind of wistful sadness: it doesn’t feel like our race anymore. The annual pilgrimage has become a bucket-list item. The family reunion has turned into a festival where you might recognize a few faces in the crowd.

What we’ve lost isn’t just about high entry fees or lottery systems, though those changes sting. It’s about the replacement of volunteers who cared deeply about their local event with staff who see it as just another weekend gig. It’s about riders becoming demographic data points rather than the weird, wonderful people who used to define this sport. The stories that mattered—about seeing God after bonking at mile 147, about small acts of kindness from strangers, about finding something true in the suffering—have been supplanted by content creation and social media metrics.

The events still market themselves with familiar imagery—flannel shirts, dirty bikes, “gravel family” language—but it feels like watching actors perform a version of your own memories. The small-town charm is carefully curated now. The finish-line moments are filmed for promotional use. What was once authentic community has been repackaged and sold back to us as an experience at 200 bucks a head, with VIP upgrades and branded merchandise like a 1970s rock band’s nostalgia tour, complete with overpriced, underwhelming t-shirts.

Perhaps most sadly, gravel didn’t need rescuing. The sport was already growing beautifully through regional scenes, word-of-mouth recommendations, and a shared understanding of what made these gatherings special. The corporate intervention didn’t create this culture—it purchased something precious and, perhaps inevitably, began to change it into something more manageable and profitable.

This doesn’t mean gravel cycling is over. But the gravel that many of us fell in love with—the one built by passionate organizers with hand-painted signs and duct-taped coolers—now lives in the margins. It survives in smaller, unsanctioned events, in camping trips that happen to include some riding, and in routes shared quietly among friends rather than promoted through press releases.

The real gravel continues wherever people gather to ride for the simple joy of it, for the stories they’ll share afterward, and for the annual tradition of coming together to remember why they love this strange, wonderful sport. It lives on in spite of the packaging, not because of it.

Gravel was never supposed to be polished or easy to scale. That was part of its charm. But in a world where everything must be systematized and monetized, we’re left mourning not just the loss of specific events, but the loss of a way of being together that felt rare and worth protecting.

If the heart of gravel cycling survives—and we have to believe it will—it’ll be because people remember what made it special in the first place. Not the professional photography or the livestream coverage, but the quiet moments: the shared water bottle at mile 80, the person who stayed back to help fix your flat, the understanding nod from someone who knew exactly what you’d been through out there.

Those moments can’t be bought or sold. They can only be protected, treasured, and passed along to the next rider who needs to know that somewhere, somehow, the real gravel family is still out there, still gathering, still riding toward something that can’t be captured in a press release.

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