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Guillaume Martin: "Nobody expected me before the tour"
Photo: KENZO TRIBOUILLARD / AFP
For Guillaume Martin, philosophizing involves two things: being constantly in motion, on the one hand, and calm, withdrawn and concentrated thinking at the desk, on the other.
According to the Cofidis professional, cycling combines the two in a strange way.
Cycling is movement while sitting.
This quite daring thesis - after all, who picks up a book while pedaling up the 2304 meter high Col de la Loze?
- sets up Martin in his reflections on cycling.
He expresses them through Gustave Flaubert, the advocate of philosophizing while seated, and Friedrich Nietzsche, who in turn claims that thoughts are only worth something if they arise in motion.
Read up in: "Sokrates auf dem Velo", Martin's "debut".
Here he lets well-known Germans compete against Greek philosophers, similar to the Monty Python classic.
Except that this time it's about cycling and not football.
Martin, in impressive shape at this year's Tour de France, could possibly afford to pick up a book on the ascent to the roofs of the Tour of France, that's how good the current third in the overall classification is.
The 27-year-old is a studied philosopher, so he tormented himself not only in long hours of training over the French mountains, but also through the demanding theories of the Greek, German and French philosophers.
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