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GF offers you a link to 273 images that you can download; you might be in this album, read the article to find the download link!
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////In this article, we won't talk about the winners or those designated as winners.
Why? Because it's annoying? No!
The Enduropale du Touquet Vintage is the only motorcycle race in the world where everyone is a winner, deserving... The only race in the world where the last (as in the bible) is the first, Hallelujah!
This year you needed 7 things to face the vintage race: take steroids, have teeth made entirely of carbon (brrr, brrr...), balls of titanium, whiskey in your tank, a GF jersey, a helmet with reverse air conditioning, and a damn heated seat!
For those who don't know yet, the Touquet Vintage is reserved for motorcycles dating back to the time when movies were rented on VHS tapes, i.e., before 1990, the era when the Honda 250 CR looked more modern than the Free Enterprise in Star Trek. As for the riders, well, you just need to be a living being, which means a mollusk, a bear, or a human, male or female, from 18 to 98 years old, can compete in the coldest region of France.
Human... I'd say superhuman because you have to be able to face a race in the sand with near-zero weather conditions on a track that looks like Verdun, dressed like a little opera rat, meaning that when you're stopped, you're in a jersey and helmet, but when you hit the gas on the coast of Hauts de France, it's like you're in your underwear and the motorcycle gods are throwing buckets of sand in your face to thank you for bringing out bikes that don't fly over the dunes but dig into them.
More seriously, now that I've finished trying to be clever and prove to you that I can be witty, I'd like to tell you about the admiration I feel for all these entrants, these lovers, these fanatics of old motorcycles, mostly guys between 40 and 60 and more, who are resisting progress and the inexorable passage of time. Long live Vintage... I wonder about the notion of vintage because ultimately it's a race for guys clinging to their youth who want to go back in time with old bikes... There's something fishy about this story, don't you think?
Imagine... Doctor Emmett Lathrop "Doc" Brown (Back to the Future trilogy) on a 1971 Ducati 450 RT, yeah!
"Clinging to youth is not just a futile and neurotic ego concern. This anxiety is the fruit of our individualistic, utilitarian society, where everyone tends to exist only through their performance and their value in the market of seduction. In the dominant discourse, old age is almost always spoken of in terms of uselessness, loss, and decadence. No longer pleasing, being a little less effective, is to run the risk of no longer having a place, of being excluded from society or from love. It is to be symbolically condemned to disappear.
So, failing to be young, we try to appear so. If not to please ourselves, at least for others. To preserve as long as possible the presence of desire, of interest in their eyes."
In short, PSYCHOLOGIES.COM can try to define what drives us to face such a grueling discipline in the middle of winter, at 16, on a modern motorcycle! But I know, because I'm like you, alive and full of still-green sap, even if I'm made of dry wood. I too like to believe I'm a hero forever, for my wife, my children, and my friends.
I also have nothing to prove to myself because my pleasure is not in winning, my pleasure is in the adventure, in the rawest sensations, shivering in the first few minutes because the cold burns you, burning with impatience on the starting line, crying with excitement in my helmet as we are all launched at full speed in a horde of 500 smoking motorcycles that risk hitting you on unstable ground. My heart races and accompanies my increasingly rapid breathing, drowning out the sounds outside my helmet. My temples synchronized with my heartbeat, my wrist rigid, my reactions sharper than ever and gracefully facing the dangers provided by a relative speed, and my brain scanning the reactions of my motorcycle produced the year of Joe Dassin's "L'Été indien"... One eye on the crowd, damn, I'm beautiful even if my front wheel never left the ground, even if I didn't start the Vintage race this year, even if from the roof of a Motoblouz truck I followed with my lens the guys wearing my race outfits, others I sponsored, from where I was, I could feel you, I could sense you!
GF offers you these lines and the accompanying photos, so help yourselves! Well done, guys.
Articles and photos: Laurent Scavone
Bell Moto 3 helmet available on our website[/caption]
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Ossa 250 VINTAGE + Bell helmet + GF vintage moto shoes[/caption]
Simon from "Simone garage"![/caption]
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Hubert's Ossa[/caption]
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Mathieu Pechon wearing a customizable vintage outfit from Gentlemen's Factory[/caption]
image download link: https://photos.app.goo.gl/ekNXb1GpAjB6CyKM9
