Even in the darkened IMAX theater, it's easy to identify the cycling fans.
I'm here at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle watching “Wired to Win: Surviving the Tour de France.” The movie tells about how the human brain learns, reacts, motivates. The film uses the 2003 Tour de France as a vehicle for this lesson.
In some Tour footage used to demonstrate motivation, Lance Armstrong is shown riding up a slope in the Pyrenees trailed by Iban Mayo and Jan Ullrich. I've seen this before. All the cycling fans have.
“Oh!” several people nearby gasp when a spectator's souvenir snags Armstrong's handlebars and he falls head over heels to the pavement.
The noncyclists in the audience must be the ones who gasped. Cyclists — at least the Tour followers — know this scene, the Col du Tourmalet on Stage 15, when Armstrong came “this close” to losing.
Overall, this movie is more about the brain than about the Tour de France.
There are some breathtaking aerial views of the peloton struggling up the Alps and Pyrenees and a big-screen cyclist's-eye view of parting the crowd of spectators near the summit of a climb. (I would have liked to have seen the same head-on viewpoint of heading down a mountain at 60 mph, although there is a scene showing what would happen if a cyclist missed a curve.)
But these scenes just made me want more of the big view. Instead, I got Tour footage — like Armstrong's crash — from OLN, but this doesn't fill the screen. The remainder of the film consists of computer animations of the brain and nervous system.
The film, a project of Partners Healthcare and sponsored by the National Science Foundation and Ortho-McNeil Neurologics, among others, is probably a good science less for the kids. But it might be a disappointment for cycling fans who are expecting to see a lot of racing action in the IMAX format.
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