A comic-book hero is something to be

Planet of the Meerkats
"Get your lens off me, you damned dirty ape!"

I had to skip out on the final 10km of today’s Tour stage, as Herself’s mom was in town and we were off to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo to wallow in critterage.

But I can’t let the day go by without saying how cool this Graham Watson photo is.

As a longtime comic-book fan, I look at this and see echoes of Neal Adams’ treatment of The Batman, The Avengers, The X-Men and other caped crusaders. It makes the riders appear superhuman, yet still capable of suffering; a reminder, I suppose, that even when we suspect a rider of breaking the rules, he still has to race the race.

And the zoo? Extra cool. I haven’t been there in years, and while there were a few disappointments — the Amur tiger was in hiding, for example — the otters were a hoot. And the only thing that beats watching a grizzly dog-paddle around in a glass-walled pond on a hot day is watching a pair of lar gibbons — both of them missing left hands after injury and amputation — swinging around their cage as if nothing had ever gone awry.

And there were the meerkats, of course. They look like a bunch of little old men who survived the apocalypse and somehow crossbred with prairie dogs. This little dude looks like Charlton Heston minus the firearm and the Second Amendment attitude.

Thor hammers and Tyler nails it

Thor packs a big hammer, and today he used it to drive Garmin-Cervélo teammate Tyler Farrar to his first Tour de France stage win, the second consecutive victory for the Argyle Armada in this year’s edition.

Getting a leadout from the reigning world road champion — who also happens to be wearing the yellow jersey — is a rare honor indeed, and Farrar was well aware of it.

“When you have the world champion and yellow jersey leading you out, you better do a good sprint,” he said. And he did, dedicating the win to his friend Wouter Weylandt, who died in a horrific crash at this year Giro d’Italia. Chapeau to Farrar, Hushovd and Julian Dean for putting on a very classy act.

And chapeau to the farmers who rigged up that nifty “bicycle,” too. That actually made me smile, something I rarely do during Le Tour.

Two down, 19 to go

It was fine to see Jonathan Vaughters and his boys get that long-overdue stage win and a yellow jersey today. I’m not so jaded that I can’t appreciate the significance of it.

But I am jaded enough to enjoy the thought of seeing the UCI’s saddle-sniffers sentenced by Rod Serling to an eternity of trying to clap a level on M.C. Escher’s “Relativity.” Fuck these people. If I want a pro bike fit I’ll consult someone who doesn’t need a Plexiglas bellybutton to see what he’s up to.

Hur-ry, hur-ry, hur-ry!

The 2011 Cirque du France erects its big yellow tent tomorrow, and for some reason I’m having a hard time getting excited about following all its high-powered critters around with a broom and dustpan.

I used to videotape these deals. Not just Le Tour, mind you, but every bike race I could find, over the air, on cable or satellite. These days we have rabbit ears and stream the Innertubes, and I will watch pro bike racing when I’m on the clock and earning, period.

Asshole by Vonnegut
This is Kurt Vonnegut's drawing of an asshole, from "Breakfast of Champions."

The sport can still be thrilling, even beautiful, in the same way that a chuckling stream is lovely to look at until you notice the rusty, half-submerged shopping cart, the dirty soapsuds, the trash littering the banks. Fishing it on weekends from the Mad Dog pirogue is bad enough. I can’t imagine swimming in it, day in and day out. Not anymore.

I work part-time for VeloNews.com as an editor at large, pushing pixels on Saturdays and Sundays to help keep the site lively and give the full-timers a break. It’s been years since I covered a race in corpus, and I’ve never been on site for anything approaching the grandiosity of Le Tour.

Still, I do have a few acquaintances in the pro peloton, people I like to watch for their work ethic and esprit de corps. We’re talking water-carriers here, not stars. And 20-odd years of helping cover the folks they work for has led me to distrust the theatrical, explosive assault, the stuff of must-see TV.

In all sports, not just cycling, the pros are supposed to make the impossible look effortless. But all too often, when a pro cyclist en route to a big payday casually generates more watts, day in and day out, than the Grand Coulee Dam, we’ve found out afterward that there was more than fresh spring water running through his turbines.

For example, how Riccardo Riccó manages to find a job in cycling doing anything other than patching flats and huffing glue in a Formigine bike shop remains a mystery to me. And Super Spaniard … if the Court of Arbitration for Sport eventually rules against him and the Spanish cycling federation over his clenbuterol positive from last year’s Tour — last year’s Tour! — he’s gonna leave more asterisks in his wake than Kurt Vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut. Now there was a guy who knew an asshole when he saw one. Too bad he never took up sportswriting. He could draw, too.