Richard Serra’s sculpture The Matter of Time is one of the centrepieces of the permanent collection at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Its huge rolled steel curves, lines and surfaces, bending and warping in space, force its viewers to contemplate time unfolding, both chronologically as they walk through the massive but claustrophobic organic shapes of the sculpture, but also metaphysically: according to the artist, The Matter of Time explores the idea of time existing and being experienced in multiple ways. “Time is the focus,” he told ArtForum magazine in 2005. “It’s not time on the clock, not literal time; it’s subliminal, it’s subjective.”
The favourites of the 2023 Tour de France would well understand the idea of time existing in both objective and subjective ways. Basque Magazine described The Matter of Time as creating “stratified temporalities” and the general classification is already separating into broad layers: Adam Yates, the stage winner in Bilbao and the first yellow jersey of the race, finished four seconds ahead of his twin brother Simon.
A dozen more riders, including double winner Tadej Pogačar and defending champion Jonas Vingegaard, came in 12 seconds down, and it is inevitable that the eventual winner of the Tour and probably most of the final top 10 are among these first finishers. The next group, 27 riders, were 33 seconds behind Yates. Bonus seconds on the line added a more subjective experience of time to the first GC listing of the race. Layers upon layers.
Stage one of the Tour set the GC battle alight from the very start (Image by James Start)
For some fancied riders, the subjective experience of time today was slow and painful but also mercilessly fast. Alexey Lutsenko, seventh and eighth in the last two Tours, was dropped on the Côte de Vivero with more than 30km to go, the small space that manifested itself between his front wheel and the rear wheel of the rider in front of him soon expanding into a deficit of almost 10 minutes.
Richard Carapaz, third overall in 2021, crashed on the Vivero descent, and badly hurt himself, taking minutes to remount his bike then conceding a quarter of an hour by Bilbao. For Enric Mas, three times a Vuelta runner-up and fifth here in 2020, time is up altogether. He crashed at the same time as Carapaz and never got back on his bike, standing dazed and static by the side of the road as the peloton rushed ahead, putting time and space between themselves and the…