This year’s Tour de France isn’t over, but the winner was determined this morning when teammates Wout van Aert and Jonas Vingegaard finished 1-2 in Stage 20, a 40-km individual time trial. Vingegaard, who’s more than 3 minutes up on pre-race favorite Tadej Pogacar, will wear the yellow jersey when the Tour finishes with its ceremonial ride in Paris tomorrow.
Even for a band given to histrionics for their own sake, releasing this song as a single was ridiculous, yet it actually charted — No. 24 in the US, No. 11 in the UK and Top 10 in several European countries.
Roger Taylor said Freddy Mercury came up with the idea for the song after he saw a stage of the Tour de France pass by their hotel in Switzerland, complete with the idea of the bicycle-bell section of the bridge. By that point in their history — the song appeared on their 1978 LP “Jazz,” which contained no jazz — the band was accustomed to Mercury’s outré ideas, so a bicycle-bell bridge is what they did.
Taylor also said that Mercury’s lyrics aren’t at all autobiographical — he didn’t much care for bicycling, and in reality he was a Star Wars fan.
Though the clip claims to be the original video, it’s not. The original video for the song featured 65 nude women, all professional models, riding in a mock race; despite judicious editing, it was promptly banned in several countries. You can see it on YouTube but it’s age-restricted.
