Originally Posted by
Marcus_Ti
All of it? No. But there's a reason you see beautiful flowing pavement and stretches of brand new black asphalt in HD--with seldom any livestock manure staining in the farm-country....not cracked and seem-filled concrete with holes missing.
When was the last time you watched TdF (or any other Grand Tour), and saw a single big old unfilled/patched pothole? How about open expansion joints in white-top every 10m? Chip seal? Rumble bars? Heck even a sub-road-level manhole cover is remarkable and news-worthy, it almost never happens, and when it does there's usually a crash (there was one this season IIRC). About the only road hazards to navigation the peloton ever sees are overzealous and sometimes unmarked traffic calming devices (and the odd fan or crowd barrier footing).
The UCI peloton either gets the most virgin roads to pick from for anything other than very extenuating circumstances (after lobbying race organizers), or they are repaved to be such if they are not, or in the case of some of the those mountain goat roads they're made, or very grudgingly made-due with...or the riders raise holy hell with the organizers. Remember the beachside prologue a few years ago, on IIRC Vuelta, that had a few different surfaces (pavers, tarmac, and sand on pavement, and some wooden boardwalk)? You'd think the Vuelta organizers were serial arsonists for how the roadie peloton divas kvetched and moaned. There was a segment on NBC during TDF a few years ago detailing the road cleaning crews that clean the roads the day of before the race comes through IIRC.
Real paved farm roads in livestock country (where they exist)....they're brown asphalt, and "mud" is a euphemism.
You're right. As a rule, they don't hold races on bad roads, but they are hardly all perfect or new as you claim. And I'm sorry all the roads you have to ride on are all garbage. A lot of the roads I ride on are rather poor, too, but maybe if being able to ride delicate bikes was important to us, we'd go somewhere else and only ride on the best roads, like pro racers do, huh?
By the way, we have different understandings of the expression "Farm road." I grew up in Texas, where it was short for "Farm-to-Market road", a specific system of minor rural highways. Although typically they have no shoulder, they're all paved and striped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm-to-market_road Evidently such naming of a type of state-maintained roads is unique to Texas - I didn't realize that, for most people, "farm road" probably suggests something quite different.