How the Race Was Won (HTRWW for short) is a series of analysis videos by American cycling fan Cosmo Catalano. The videos are known for being short and to the point, but also containing a fairly large amount of snark and funny observations. The videos have gained a strong following by cycling fans.
The series began in 2009, with fairly low resolution videos and the implication that Cosmo was watching the races in question on pirate streams, and a varying amount of videos have been produced every year, depending on how much free time Cosmo had on his hands. No videos were released in 2011.
There have been certain problems for the series, Comso has been producing the series for free for years, with an episode taking around 15 hours to make. In 2016, the series was picked up by Australian cycling news website CyclingTips. This partnership lasted until the 2017 edition of Milano-San Remo, where Eurosport took down the video with a copyright strike. This ended in a partnership between Cosmo and Eurosport, with Eurosport hosting HTRWW videos for the 2017 edition of Giro d'Italia on their website.
Cosmo's own homepage, with links or embedded videos can be found here
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How the Race Was Won provides examples of:
- Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: Inverted example in the coverage of Paris-Roubaix 2016. Sagan made what might have been the greatest bikesave in the history of bikes. Or saves.
- Deadpan Snarker: Cosmo.
- Funny Background Event: Inevitable in cycling, and often shown in the videos.
- Running Gag:
- Wait for it, Sylvain Chavanel.
- Riders with funny speech bubbles.
- Take That!: Directed at cycling journalists after his recap of the 2010 Liege-Bastonge-Liege, where he spends a minute of a 4:45 video calling out cycling journalists and ends it with "I'm Cosmo Catalano and that's how you do your job".
