Welcome, everybody, to something a bit special on the second rest day of the 2025 Tour de France.

Ian Trello, you've been working on a podcast series, we're calling rabbit holes.

And it goes all over the place but the the idea of it

is that you take a subject take a topic and you go pretty deep on it the first one was on

Greg LeMond that was a lot of fun and during this tour you're going deep on the basics is

that the best way to put it?

Yeah, I think so. So it's kind of like a sub-project within the rabbit holes universe,

which we're calling the Beginner's Guide to Pro Cycling. It's me and Holly Johnson, who's a

journalism professor from the US, who is a relatively new cycling fan and came to us with all sorts of questions,

very reasonable and rational and well-argued questions

about why cycling is the way that it is.

So we've been working through these things.

We were like, we have no idea how to somebody else.

Well, that too.

That's not true.

We felt that it would be useful to

have something that's a little bit a little bit of a decoder of cycling a

confusing and strange sport mm so a decoder ring a decoder ring yeah I

don't know what that is you don't have decoder rings is that that like a Ouija board thing? No. If you eat enough cereal as a kid, you get a decoder ring. But what does it do? It has like a... I'm not sure I can explain this in the amount of time that we have. It's like a color and then there's something underneath it and then you can see what's behind the decoder ring but only with the decoder ring

Joshua Robinson of the Wall Street Journal is just itching to get into this. Yeah, it's usually a couple

of concentric cardboard discs that allow you to like spin them around and make a code and also decode.

I don't know if this is a decoder ring then, because this is a podcast with two

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