GOODBYE JURE 

Jure told me that one year his crew pulled up beside him in a van with a huge poster-sized photo of his son. He had no idea that they had made it, and he said when he saw it, he got this energy, he didn’t know from where, that allowed him to start pedaling faster than he had in hours. Seeing his son, he said, made the pain get “smaller and smaller and smaller.”

I can’t yet process that Jure Robic, a man so filled with life, is not alive anymore. But I keep thinking about how his mind worked while he was on that bike. If everything he said in the interview is true, then in his last moments, as he biked along a forested road in his beloved Slovenia, he was filled with a feeling so good words couldn’t express it, and if there was any pain at all, he would have conjured up the image of his son and his wife, and they would have been there with him, as the echoes faded, making the pain diminish altogether.

lulu miller