thirst

tour of oman stage 3

It is exhaustingly hot.

I’m hiding in the shade of the arcade outside the library of Sultan Qaboos University trying to fix my blouse. You see, it’s a billowy thing held together at one junction by a handful of stitches, and one’s tragically come undone. Unless I want to incur indecency charges, I have to find a solution, fast. This quest has eaten up my entire morning, and I’m lucky that my colleague Daniel miraculously has a safety pin on the inside of his shirt. Before the start, I have to use the bathroom in the library. The entrances are separated by gender, as is the rest of the building. I’ve never been forcibly segregated before and in the moment I don’t quite know how to feel about it. I’m torn between my feminism and my respect for following the ways of other cultures.

Feminine woes aside, the day begins. Riders seek the shadows of palm trees for relief from the blistering sun before lining up at the start, something they wait quite a long time to do. They want to avoid baking in this heat any more than they have to. Today is the first GC day, featuring two climbs: one outside Muscat and another punchy twist at the end of the stage. Today won’t be enough to win the race, but it will sort out the favorites and how they appear to one another. For now, we’ve got a long day of breakaway following to do in the press car.

If yesterday’s travelogue was about architecture — strip malls and houses — today’s is about the almost complete absence of that. I say almost because we’re driving through the city now, and there’s tons of new construction left and right, big empty concrete voids of half-finished mid-rises beckoning the new. The buildings are all the same height — eight to twelve stories tall — which gives this part of the urban fabric a feeling of compactness; however the lack of street trees and continuous sidewalks give it an attendant eerie sparseness. The finished buildings borrow from all kinds of architecture — the SketchUp-modern push-pulled massing popular in American mid-rise development, some Arab version of 80s art deco with oversized peach Ogee arches splitting an ordinary office building, a hint of deconstructivism, but not enough to break the bank or the ease of the post-and-beam cast concrete way of building.

I spend some time photographing the breakaway as they approach a grand mosque. The mosque is beautiful, pristinely white with regal gold accents. It has pride of place at the top of a stately hill. Religion is so clearly the focus of life here even in this newest part of Muscat’s contemporary, commercialized world. Our breakaway perhaps pays no notice to architecture. There’s six of them, one from every team you’d expect to be up there: Burgos-BH, Intermarché Wanty Gobert, Bingoal Pauwels Sauzen, Novo Nordisk, Euskatel Euskadi, and Bardiani — the only team missing is the Oman National Team, as their rider missed the initial break, and after a struggle, failed to get back on. The most interesting man in our breakaway is Euskatel Euskadi’s Peio Goikoetxea. If that difficult-to-spell name sounds familiar, it’s because the Basque rider was in the first stage’s breakaway and is currently wearing the most combative rider jersey, which is a lovely gold. Goikoetxea is absolutely committed to keeping this jersey. Not only is he in the breakaway again, but while he’s in the breakaway he wins the king of the mountains points on the first climb, and both intermediate sprints. Right now, he’s the unsung hero of this race, a swashbuckling adventurer keen on getting his name out into the world. There’s a kind of ebullience in the way he rides, pulls off, takes turns.

Just as soon as we’re outside of the city, we wind up the first climb, which is unexpectedly steep at eight percent. It’s actually winding, too, in that the hairpins are deep curls that lurch up the Mars-like red rock face. At the top, we park and wait for the break, watching soigneurs hand out bottles. (One of the Bingoal soigneurs is wearing a kuma cap and cut-off shorts in addition to the team’s fluorescent gilet. It’s very much a look.) Goikoetxea is first up the climb by quite a large margin, a statement of total intent. He flies by in the gold jersey. Further down the road, expats line the walls of stone and watch the proceedings, looking too tan in their Western clothes. When we get back in the car, we trail the break as it descends. It’s unreal how fast they ride downhill — proper highway speeds, even through the difficult curves, and for a moment I forget there’s cyclists out front at all, that’s how quickly we’re driving. But then the natural momentum runs out and we are left clipping along at a bicycle’s pace.

The sprawl from behind the mountain range, thanks to the highway, knows no natural boundary. The houses here are less colorful than yesterdays, more functional. On our way out of town, the sound of prayer chants blares from the airhorns at the top of the mosques, the songs impassioned and warbling from the distortion of traveling a long distance through moving air. Then, just as soon as the city swallowed us earlier, there are no more houses, only shale-like strata of rock being picked away by backhoes and bulldozers for some unknown purpose. Race radio comes on and announces the result of the first intermediate sprint.

“Peio’s really going for it, huh,” I note, but my colleagues both have headphones in. Outside, the rock formations are layered in diagonal sheets and there appears to be no logic to the height of each crag. In some of them, porous-looking holes appear, making the rock seem like sponge. What causes these holes I don’t know, but judging by how dry it is out, I have a hard time believing it’s water erosion. We’ll cross bridges beneath which the ground is completely dry, and their attendant signs have a tinge of irony when they pronounce the beds as streams or rivers. We’ve truly entered terrain governed by the whimsy of oases. I can’t tell if such a landscape is beautiful or severe. Perhaps both.

Something interesting about a small race like this one is that the lack of full broadcasting makes the whole event seem strangely quiet. Without pictures, there are no tactics to over-analyze, no shifting moves around the peloton worthy of comment, no alliances to ponder, no faces to zoom in on. All I know as a correspondent is what I see with my own eyes and what the radio tells me. This is how cycling used to be a long time ago, before I was born. For the men in the breakaway, there’s no constant helicopter hovering over them until the last leg of the race. Save for the motorbikes and the occasional horn beep, these men ride in silence. I don’t even know if the teams are using radios. At the moment, the race is calm. If it is calm for us, I’ve noticed it’s often calm for the peloton also.

We are in the desert now.

For miles, it’s empty save for power lines, mountains, rocks, and weathered foliage. Donkeys crowd around what little shade is provided when the sun strikes a wall at a certain time of day. Man once discovered that if he builds, he can create shadow, and in the shadow the temperature difference is that between bearable and unbearable. The very few houses here in this nothing place are smaller, as though they know the limits of their own resources. The emptiness only makes each oasis, when they spring up, that much more remarkable, miraculous even. The color palette of the desert is for the most part one of dull browns and grays and sand and the pale, chlorophyll-lacking foliage of whatever life thrives in the rubble. But against this endless backdrop, the oases are shockingly, vibrantly green, so green one wonders whether they’ve ever really seen green before.

Where we’re at now, there’s nothing, truly, truly nothing. The race is alone with the road and the power lines and the inhospitable landscape. We pull off to get pictures. They’ve got a helicopter with the breakaway for a bit droning on and on. Across the desert, we can see the race approaching, and as it does, everything metallic in it catches the sun and flashes across the rippling heat. I swear the riders can see the twinkling of my engagement ring before they can see me.

There’s something powerful about a landscape wherein one knows that, if left to their own devices for survival, one would almost certainly die. The fact that we settled land like this at all is a testament to the fortitude of the human spirit. And it’s boundary-less, anarchic. As soon as we traverse one range of mountains there are more mountains, mountains of all different colors — browns, grays, blues in the distance, taupes, beiges, even hints of green here and there. The grains of their rocks sometimes form shelf-like mesas, or diagonal sheets that are reminiscent of the bows of ships sinking into the earth. I start to wonder if the Empty Quarter, the vast dunes of Arabian sand, are really out there. Behind which mountain?

Where are we? The desert distorts everything, invokes feelings of helplessness and frailty and exhaustion; it disorients and wears down even the strongest of wills. And we’re exiting it. The road undulates in short humps, through roller-coaster like dives and jolts, and suddenly, we’re out on the highway again, and I’m frankly shocked that such a thing exists after all this wilderness. Its existence is almost absurd to me, comical even, that after such barrenness, civilization and infrastructure are right there, lurking in the shadows. So much for my oasis fantasy.

At its largest, the time gap between breakaway and peloton was two minutes and forty seconds. Now it’s around two. Umberto Poli, the long haired Italian from Novo Nordisk, abandons the group out front. We watch him pull off to the side of the road in search of shade from a nearby berm. He unzips his jersey and douses himself with water from his bottle. Then there were five. We take the highway for some time and Poli’s late surrender is a sure sign that the stage is about to end. As we crest a hill, the mountains disappear and off in the distance, in another moment of surreality, is the sea. Or is it? Could it be a mirage? Could it simply be sky, heat, and horizon quivering together, melded by desperation and the temperature? I genuinely can’t tell. It takes us a few kilometers to see out across the valley, and yes, it is in fact the sea. But the sea and the cloudless sky still seem almost indistinguishable.

The highway lurches into an exit, and we pull into the main boulevard at Qurayyat. It’s a long green street flanked with turf grass and flowerbeds attended by gushing sprinklers, which, after a day in the desert look pretty good right now. We hear over the radio that another one of the breakaway riders has been dropped, though who it is remains uncertain because the radio cuts to static during the announcement. It matters little because with thirteen kilometers left in the race, they’re all brought back. The car lurches up the final climb, which isn’t as steep as the first, but still, it’s a couple of kilometers longer than I’m willing to ride a bike up.

Once we’re out of the car at the finish, we know nothing. We can only wait. There are no televisions or jumbotrons or even broadcasts of the race radio. There’s no cell service. If we want to know who wins, we have to wait for the winner. And he comes around the bend dressed in yellow in red, ketchup and mustard, the kit of Uno X. It’s the young Dane Anthon Charmig, a shout for this stage thanks to his similar performances in the earlier Saudi Tour and the Tour of Turkey last year. His arms are outstretched and he’s smiling. He slows. Intermarché’s Jan Hirt follows, shaking his head. Elie Gesbert of Arkea Samsic is third. After he rolls to halt, I stop watching them come in. I stop watching anything. I find the press bus and climb into it, thankful that there’s air conditioning and the sun isn’t beating down on me anymore.

I can’t imagine riding a bike in this weather, in this terrain. As I look out the window at Charmig dumping a water bottle over his boyish face, I can’t imagine winning in it either.