Superb owl painted on a Tour de France road 🤭

kinda like the most interesting thing about olympia is the people who try to extinguish the flame

A lot of the locations look somewhat remote, but the original graffiti looks so intentional and symmetrical for something done as a prank.

They are, since it’s a mountain stage, but during the Tour a lot of people go there to watch. Some viewers are very involved, making banners, sometimes wearing costumes, painting (technically illegal but tolerated) words of encouragement on the road, so I’m not surprised that the penis-drawers would make the effort to draw them symmetrically.

I really wish I could follow along with what they’re saying, based on the comment section.

The language isn’t the easiest to follow, it’s really informal and the sound often isn’t very clear. At the beginning, they say that they’re going to the col du Tourmalet. (It’s a famous mountain pass in the Pyrénées mountain range that’s almost always part of the Tour.)

Basically, they’re riding in the car, then one of them say “there, a dick”, then step out to paint and the older guy describes what he’s doing and/or gives instructions to his younger collegue (apprentice?). Rinse and repeat.

At 0:38, Older Guy says he’s drawing a circle around, and tells Younger Guy to try to draw legs. Then OG explains to the camera that they’ve just made a little owl to hide the sight of the genitals to the public, but he doesn’t seem very satisfied with the “legs” YG has painted. :-)

(Uiltje is “little owl” in Dutch. In French, he calls it a hibou, not a chouette — I believe that Dutch, like English, doesn’t make the tuft-based distinction. By the way, when he says « petit hibou » the guy is making the liaison (that is to say, pronouncing the word « petit »’s terminal T) when he shouldn’t. That kind of mistake is actually fairly common among native speakers.)

At 1:23, OG says they’ve found four (dicks) in five kilometers. (« Quatre à l’actif, sur cinq kilomètres. »)

At 1:35, OG says “a dick, oh fuck” and sighs, then says “we’ll try to give it wings, [inaudible] butterfly”. OG laughs, tells YG “I’ll do it” and says something about YG “messing around” (? « Tu fais n’importe quoi. ») but while he paints the eyes and antennae, YG paints the wings in a nice big circle, and OG tells him “well spotted” (« bien vu » — maybe it’s more like “well done” in this situation?) in a satisfied way.

At 1:57, OG says “another one, oh fuck”, then another word I can’t understand. Outside, OG says “I’ll give it two eyes” (« Je vais lui faire deux yeux. »), then he adds they find a lot of those in mountains passes. It ends with him saying something like “Okay, come on, let's go for another one”.

The older guy is a pensioner called Patrick, who’s been doing this as a side job for something like fifteen years. Apparently, he’s well-known enough in some circles to have been asked for his autograph several times.