Oh, cycling is a cruel sport. One wonders what Chris Froome and Tejay van Garderen might have been able to do today had they not been restricted to dragging around their respective team leaders, Bradley Wiggins and Cadel Evans?
Poor old Evans looked like he was trying to choke down a double-decker shit sandwich on the final climb while TVG appeared as fresh as a daisy. And Froomey shelled the yellow jersey while towing him past a group of stragglers and had to back off the gas lest Wiggo’ call him a nasty name at the team dinner this evening.
“Wankers & Cunts.” Hmm. That would be a great name for a XXX theater, eh?
Meanwhile, chapeau to Pierre Rolland. He was on the floor at one point after trying (and failing) to tripod around a hairpin corner, and he got up and won the damn’ stage. A fine performance for the home folks.
Les flics came for Rémy Di Grégorio on the first rest day of the 2012 Tour de France, dragging him off to the Bastille on suspicion of using products other than baguettes and mineral water to fuel his race around France. Zut alors! Say it is not so!
His team, Cofidis, as you may recall, is all too familiar with this sort of thing. David Millar and Phillipe Gaumont in 2004; Cristian Moreni in 2007; the party never stops. Each time the team trots out the old zero-tolerance twaddle. Same shit, different day.
Come to think of it, Bradley Wiggins — presently wearing the maillot jaune in the Tour de France — was among the Cofidis riders who went home after stage 16 in 2007. I don’t suppose any of the cunts or wankers in the press corps will wish to shake off their bone-idleness, get off their arses and apply themselves to discussing those dark days with him.
Speaking of which, Sean Kelly, a man with his own flair for language — whatever language it is that he’s speaking — thinks that Wiggo’s press-conference tirade is an indicator that while he may be strong in the legs, he’s weak between the ears.
“Bradley has always been fragile,” Kelly told Cyclingnews.com. “A puncture or another upsetting incident can make him lose his head. Last year, (Cadel) Evans experienced some mechanical problems behind (Alberto) Contador, in the stage to L’Alpe d’Huez, and if it had been Wiggins, he would have panicked. But to win the Tour, you have to know how to stay calm, overcome adversity, whatever it may be — and that, I’m not sure he’s able to do.”
Wow. Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome crushed it today in the Tour’s first big time trial, opening up a 10-gallon-can of whup-ass on Cadel Evans and everyone else — including El Fabuloso, Fabian Cancellara, who must be pinching himself to see whether he’s still asleep and having a nightmare.
I was over at Red Kite Prayer, helping Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey track the race for our friends sentenced to cubicle farms worldwide, and we had a record haul in terms of contributions to the tip jar— in no small part to some silly little hooter logged on as Two700c, who complained about “politics” being injected into the play-by-play (oddly enough, it was one of our least political live updates ever).
Two700c slagged me in a snippy note to Charles, which goes to show you that not even the anonymity of the Internet is comfort enough for at least one timid Tea Bagger. Still, I feel obliged to thank him for helping us rake in a pile of coin. I’ll be donating a portion of the proceeds to the Democratic Socialists of America.
If you’re not already joining us for the daily live updates, swing on by. Always room for another pinko in the Party photo.
But it’s not all politics, all the time. Today, for example, I reprised one of my favorite National Lampoon covers to urge readers to contribute to the Cause.
If you don’t support this website, we’ll kill this dog.
Sean Kelly, one of the hard men of the peloton when I was first becoming interested in the sport way back in the day, implies in a chat with the working press that this modern lot is a shower of eejits — and I’m not inclined to argue with him after watching stage six of Le Show Beeg, in which pretty much everybody save the Eurosport commentators, ASO management and Paddy McQuaid found themselves on the tarmac, in the ditch or inside an ambulance.
Sean Kelly back in the day, as photographed by Cor Vos
“These kinds of crashes happen, but you have to ask, how did it happen?” Kelly told my man Andrew Hood over to VeloNews.com. “Nobody wants to brake anymore. Everyone is pushing to be in the top 30 riders. Everybody is taking so many risks, and they will have crashes because of that.”
From your lips to God’s ear, Sean a chara. Today’s appalling clusterfuck on a narrow section of road, which left dozens of riders on the floor and sent several out of the Tour altogether, looked as though someone from the Spandex Liberation Army had set off a roadside bomb as the peloton rode past. Andy tallies up the body count here.
Some crashes can be blamed on course designers. Others can be chalked up to ineptitude (yes, pro cyclists fuck up just like we do, only at higher speed). I don’t know whom to pin this one on, other than upon the collective mindset that everyone — sprinters, wanna-bes, winless guys fretting over next year’s contract, GC men and their minders, and anyone in a Euskaltel-Euskadi jersey — just has to be at the front, all at the same time.
There isn’t enough room. Forget about UCI regulations — it’s a violation of the laws of physics. You can’t squeeze a thousand pounds of Lycra through a garden hose. There’s gonna be an explosion. And we saw it today.
Editor’s note: Incidentally, in case you’re wondering where I am lately, I’m helping Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey with running commentary on the 2012 Tour over at Red Kite Prayer. Well, maybe “helping” isn’t quite the word we’re looking for here. “Hindering” may be more accurate. Whatever. I’m there, and you should be too. See you.
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