It's an arcane reference and I'm sorry.
There's a French author, Alfred Jarry, who was a bicycle fanatic and a bit of a wiseguy and his last last novel was a book called Le Surmâle which has got quite a bit of satire and humor in it, not all of which makes it across the translation I think.
Anyway, in the middle of his book an inventor develops the perfect cycling food that allows a cyclist to perform remarkably and indefinitely - in fact, he claims that five cyclists strapped together into a five-man-bicycle would almost represent a perpetual motion machine!
He builds such a bike and challenges any railroad locomotive in the world to beat them. As shown in the photo below, the bicycle is designed to avoid any distraction; the bicyclists just pump their legs; no scenery, no looking around - just ride.
It's a multi-day race, and on the middle day one of the cyclists, Dewey Jacobs, has a heart seizure and dies. But what's amazing is because of the way they're all strapped in, and the effect of the SuperFood on his body, the body doesn't stop cycling -- and after a while his body starts accelerating and behaving like a flywheel, balancing the motion of the others and insisting that they maintain their highest efforts, so that in a way Dewey Jacobs was a much better bicyclist dead than alive.
In fact, between the SuperFood and the dead Dewey Jacobs, the team of five beat the locomotive.
And then the book goes on to an elaborate sexual comedy of errors. Dewey Edwards has always symbolized the robotic, mechanical cyclist to me. (RAAM?)
Sorry, way long off-topic detour.
And the irony of a French author writing about pumping racers full of keep-going juice back in 1902, and a system that races them to their death, is somewhat prescient.
