🇫🇷 I Bet You've Never Heard of 'Pédaler dans la choucroute'
5 everyday French expressions that come straight from cycling
Today the Tour de France is on a rest day. Somewhere in a hotel room, a bunch of exhausted riders are lying flat on their backs, legs up on the wall, eating pasta and trying not to think about tomorrow’s mountain stage. Officially, nothing is happening. And yet French people keep talking about cycling anyway, just not the kind that involves an actual bike.
Like Pédaler dans la choucroute. Literally, it means "to pedal in sauerkraut." Not exactly the terrain professional cyclists dream of.
A surprising amount of everyday French comes straight from le vélo. You’ll hear it in the office, at the dinner table, from a friend who hasn’t touched a bike in years. So while the peloton rests, here’s a handful of the expressions it left behind.
Avoir la tête dans le guidon
Literally: “to have your head in the handlebars.” Picture a rider hunched so far forward, so locked into the effort, that he can’t see anything past the ten centimeters of road in front of his wheel. Applied to real life, it means being so buried in a task that you’ve lost all perspective on everything else.
✓ « Désolé, je ne t’ai pas répondu, j’ai la tête dans le guidon en ce moment. »
“Sorry I didn’t reply, I’ve had my head down lately.”
Perdre les pédales
Losing your pedals is as chaotic as it sounds: feet flailing, no control, everything unraveling at once. Perdre les pédales means to lose it, in whatever form that takes for you. Panic. Losing control of a situation. Losing the thread of what you were saying mid-sentence.
✓ « Il a complètement perdu les pédales pendant la réunion. »
“He totally lost it during the meeting.” Panic or something wildly inappropriate said out loud, depending on context.
Être déjanté
A jante is the rim of the wheel, the metal part the tire sits on. When a tire comes off its rim, it’s déjanté, and things get wobbly fast. Applied to a person, it means a bit unhinged, eccentric, off-the-wall. Usually in a fun way.
✓ « Son humour est totalement déjanté, mais j’adore. »
“His humor is totally off-the-wall, but I love it.”
Être en roue libre
La roue libre is freewheel mode, when you stop pedaling and let the bike coast on its own momentum. As an expression, it describes someone who’s stopped putting in effort. Coasting. Doing the bare minimum. Going with the flow without really steering anything.
✓ « Depuis les vacances, je suis en roue libre au boulot. »
“Since the holidays, I’ve basically been coasting at work.”
Pédaler dans la choucroute (ou dans la semoule)
Literally: pedaling in the sauerkraut. Or, in the gentler version, pedaling in the semolina. Both images show a wheel spinning uselessly in something thick, going nowhere no matter how hard you push. It means struggling to make progress, working hard for no visible result, on a project, in a conversation, wherever.
✓ « Ça fait une heure que j’essaie d’expliquer ce tableau Excel, je pédale dans la semoule. »
“I’ve been trying to explain this spreadsheet for an hour, I’m getting nowhere.”
Not one of these expressions is actually about cycling anymore. They’re about deadlines, bad meetings, and hitting a wall at 3pm, same as in any language. The French just happened to borrow the words from cycling, and they never gave them back.
If you want to hear more about cycling, I made a whole podcast episode on the Tour de France:
Podcast #49 : Le Tour de France, votre prof de français cet été
There’s a particular kind of French afternoon in July. The shutters pulled half-closed against the heat. The street outside gone quiet, the kind of quiet where you can hear a moped two streets over.
Got a French cycling expression I missed? Drop it in the comments.
À bientôt et bon Tour de France !
On Angleterre on dit ‘swimming in mud’ 🙃