WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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- I'm standing on the Oosterscheldekering,
the largest part of the Dutch Delta Works.

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It is a megastructure.

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An enormous dam, nine kilometres long

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with four kilometres of sluice gates
that can be closed

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to hold back extreme high tides
and stop the Netherlands flooding.

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It took a decade to build
and it is a rallying cry

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of human planning,
survival and achievement.

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And it is not what I'm here to talk about.

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There days ago, a forecast came in.

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A storm is going to hit,

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winds will gust up 120 km/h
on this barrier.

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And so a different rallying cry went up.

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Three words: "We kriehen sturm".

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A storm is coming.

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Because today is NK Tegenwindfietsen,

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The Dutch headwind cycling championships.

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Several hundred Dutch people
looked at this weather and said,

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"We're going to have a bike race in that".

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- The course is eight and a half
brutal kilometres.

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It's a serious event,
with permissions and everything.

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We have a limit of 300 participants.

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All the bikes are the same.
No gears, and just an ordinary brake.

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And it's a typical dutch bike.

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- Have you done it?

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- Yes, two times.

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- How difficult is it?

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- Very. I do triathlon in my spare time
and it's just as hard.

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- At high speed, up to 90% of the drag
on a cyclist is from air resistance.

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And I naively assumed,

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because it's been 15 years
since I've studied high school physics,

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that it'd be an equal
action-reaction thing.

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Double the wind speed, double the drag.

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But that's only true when
there's no turbulence.

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In a situation like this,

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the drag increases with the
square of wind speed.

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Double the wind speed,
quadruple the drag force.

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The difference between
cycling in a 15 km/h headwind

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and a 120 km/h gust is
64 times the added drag.

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- Why are you doing this?

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- I don't know. [laughs]

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I really don't know.

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- Do you regularly do bike races
and things like this?

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- No, just bike for fun.

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- How do you think it's going to be?

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- Hard! Very hard!

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- Succes!
- Dank je wel!

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- And sure, it's a good, weird
human interest story, right?

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People are doing a
deliberately difficult thing

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and hurting themselves just
enough that it's interesting.

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But this is a good place for it.

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Because not only are humans
literally pushing against the storm

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and saying, "we can beat you",

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they are on a physical
monument to doing just that.

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There's a big rock in the
middle of the barrier,

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with an inscription that translates as

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"Here the tide is ruled by
the wind, the moon and us".