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Yellow talisman tape at the Tor des Géants: what was on those legs
A Chinese fu — a brush-written Daoist talisman — went round 330 km of the Aosta Valley on a runner's quadriceps in September 2026. Here is what the writing is and where the idea comes from.
On 16 September 2026, Jiaju Zhao crossed the line first at the Tor des Géants in Italy's Aosta Valley — roughly 330 kilometres around the Gran Paradiso and Monte Rosa massifs, with something near 24,000 metres of climbing stacked into a single continuous race. Photographs from the course showed something most European spectators had never seen on a runner's body: a strip of bright yellow tape running down each leg, printed with red brushwork.
It was not sponsor branding. It was a fu — a Chinese talisman.
What people saw on the legs
The tape sat where kinesiology tape normally sits: down the quadriceps and along the outside of the calf. The colour was the giveaway. Talisman yellow is not a sports colour. It is the yellow of paper charms sold at temple gates, of the strips that get pasted above a doorframe at New Year, of the slips a Daoist priest writes standing up with a brush held nearly vertical.
The red marks on it are not decoration either. A fu is a written object. It has a head, a body and a seal, and it is read top to bottom, the way a memorial to heaven would be read.
Tie the talisman to your legs before you go. That sentence is older than any race in Europe.
Where the idea comes from
Chinese readers recognised the reference immediately. In Water Margin, the fourteenth-century novel, there is a character named Dai Zong — the Divine Traveller, marshal of the messengers. Dai Zong binds paper charms to his calves and covers five hundred li in a day. Bind four instead of two and the number doubles. The charms are called jiama, and when he stops, he unties them and burns them.
That is the whole mechanism, as the novel tells it: something written, bound to the legs, carried for one journey, and then released. Not equipment. Not a supplement. A rite with a beginning and an end.
Why a runner would do this
Three hundred and thirty kilometres is long enough that the body stops being the interesting problem. Everyone at the front of that race has trained. What separates the people still moving on the third night is harder to name, and runners have always reached for objects to name it with — a rosary, a photograph in a pack, a name written on a wrist, a lucky pair of socks that has to be the same pair.
A fu is that, with a fifteen-hundred-year-old grammar behind it. It does not promise anything. It marks an intention, in a form that has been used to mark intentions since the Han dynasty, and it stays on the body for the length of one effort.
The object itself
What travelled with him was, physically, a strip of tape. Ours is rayon face with hot-melt adhesive, the same construction as any elastic sports tape — nothing exotic, nothing medical, nothing we would dress up. The difference is what is printed on it, and the printed charm is not a stock graphic pulled from a catalogue. It is brushwork by a Daoist priest, reproduced as written.
One roll is five metres, pre-cut into twenty strips of 5 by 25 centimetres. Four strips make one application, so a roll is five long days.
