The Tour Down Under is home to a huge yellow bike with an important message – and some fascinating logistics.
Dave Rome, Matt de Neef, Cor Vos, and SA Department for Infrastructure and Transport
Foreword
Almost two months ago, we began the process of looking into the story behind the Tour Down Under’s huge yellow bicycle – a cartoonish inflatable that rises in the heart of Adelaide every January. Research was done, emails were sent, interviews were scheduled and recorded, photos were taken, and this article was written and put into the editorial pipeline for the day you are reading it.
At exactly the same time as I was tapping away on the last words of what I hope is a feel-good story about the Tour Down Under’s Big Bike, someone in a delivery van gave it a “glancing blow” with a rooftop ladder, putting a 30-centimetre hole in it. Look, it’s on the TV and everything!
Happily, the Tour Down Under’s Big Bike is set to make a full recovery, so instead of grumbling about the worst/funniest possible timing for this incident to happen (specifically with regards to this Very Important Story), we’ll just run it as if it was still standing proud, indomitable, unpunctured above Victoria Square. And you’ll just have to pretend that you don’t know that the Big Bike is currently crumpled on the ground, waiting for a big yellow patch of PVC to get delivered from who knows where.
Deal? Deal.
Back to our previously scheduled programming …
At any Olympic Games, the torch – rising high over a stadium or square in the host city – is a visual metaphor for the event: it lights up when the event is on, is extinguished when the event is completed, and for the duration, spreads the good vibes of international sport.
In Adelaide, the home of the Tour Down Under, there’s not a TDU flame, but there is something arguably more awe-inspiring: a bright yellow, 15-metre (50-foot) high, 35-metre (115-foot) long inflatable bike in the centre of Victoria Square. For most of January each year, this enormous inflatable looms large over the entire event village clustered beneath it: the team mechanics’ marquee, the public expo and stages, and much of the event infrastructure.
The Big Bike, as it’s affectionately known, has been a feature of the Tour Down Under for years, across a couple of different iterations. The first version, in a fluorescent yellow, was a collaboration with a South Australian government road safety initiative (the Motor Accident Commission [MAC]) imploring riders to “be safe, be seen” with “safer clothing, safer equipment, safer riding”. The current version, a more tranquil shade of yellow, came about after the MAC got disbanded, and encourages road users to “Think! Road Safety”.
These are important considerations. But as important as road safety is, there are other questions (at least for me) that are sparked by an inflatable bike this gargantuan. Nothing to do with the symbolism of it or anything so high-minded, but the specifics: Where do you get one from? How much does it cost? What do you do with it the rest of the year? What happens if it springs a leak?
You know, important questions like that.
Did we do a good job with this story?