Bring me sunshine all the while.

The UAE Tour gets underway this morning at the site of a giant solar power station. The only truly disappointing book that Ian McEwan wrote (to date) was Solar. I can’t help but feel the two must be connected, but for the life of me, I’m not sure how.

“Sham 1” (Shams 2 and 3 will follow and will be more gigantic still) went online in 2013, turning out 100MW of power; enough to supply 20,000 homes apparently. When Ian McEwan writes his novels, he tends to spend years researching some avenue of science until he’s attained a PhD-level understanding of the subject, which is exactly what he did with his knowledge of physics in writing Solar. I’ve not got years to do this. The race rolls out in 20 minutes, so this info-burst is going to have to be brief: “Sham 1” deploys parabolic trough technology, which focus the sunlight using a quarter of a million mirror sections. It is 2.5 square kilometres in size and that is all I can be bothered to copy and paste from wikipedia. After all, there is a World Tour bike race about to start. More marvels will follow.

Live pictures arrived at around 09.10, UK time. And…it was overcast. Cloudy in fact, and maybe a bit windy. Before they waved the race off, there was the usual pre-recorded sequence of riders on the podium trying manfully to smile to an audience of absolutely no one who wasn’t part of the race entourage. After all, the podium was set up in the car park of a power station in the middle of nowhere. Who in their right mind would have gone out of their way to stand there and admire Tim Merlier and his teammates from Soudal Quickstep? I mean, I would obviously. But apart from me.

So excited were the editors of the TV pictures about the presence of Tadej Pogačar at the race, that they clipped up a 5 second sequence of the world champion hanging his bike on a rack and wandering off, smiling vaguely, and they played it twice. Back to back, exactly the same thing. Only in cycling would such a thing happen. I doubt they even noticed, and if they did they probably just shrugged. In football broadcasting, someone would have been sacked.

They rolled out, passing giant “Sham 1” trucks that looked like oil tankers, but had some bizarre antennae attached to the top that resembled those highly unusual listening devices developed in the Great War. This technology remained unexplained.

On the front of the bunch there were Pogačar and Merlier, but also Oded Kogut, the Israeli national champion. This takes some thinking about, geo-politically. But in a fast changing world where the old order is being cracked, all manner of unlikely alliances and tolerances are being formed. Then the flag dropped.