Category: Bicycle racing

Éirinn go Brách

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments

Imagine my surprise. You can teach an old race new tricks.

After just one day of the same ol’, same ol’ — line up the choo-choo, hop aboard, let your boyos break everyone’s legs before you lop off their heads in the final 5km — the peloton finally muttered, collectively, “Fuck that shit,” and put the boots to Team Sky from the gun.

And an Irishman won the stage, which makes it so much sweeter. If there’s anything a Mick loves more than a free pint of the black, it’s a Limey on the deck where a bold lad can give him a bit of the auld shoe leather. A right proper hooley it was.

Sure, Zoom-Zoom Froome is still in yellow. But today is about the wearin’ of the green.

Two jerseys down …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Zoom zoom.
Zoom zoom.

The last couple of days at Le Shew Beeg have been, um, interesting, no?

First Cannondale lays waste to all the fast-twitch boyos and puts Peter Sagan in command of the points jersey. And then Sky croaks all the GC guys on the first mountain stage and goes one-two, stage and overall. Zoom-Zoom Froome even snatched up the polka-dot jersey for dessert.

Minibars in the Saint-Nazaire hotels will be in dire need of restocking on Monday’s rest day if Tintin and his mob tap that 55-gallon drum of whup-ass again tomorrow on a five-climb stage. And it goes without saying that the whispers have already begun.

“You have to ask them why they could not keep up,” said Richie Porte, Zoom-Zoom’s chief lieutenant. “Look at us all season, we are so consistent. This has happened all year. Look at Dauphiné and Paris-Nice. This is not really a massive surprise.”

No, it’s not. But maybe it should be. Here’s hoping we’re not in for a two-week victory lap that raises more questions than it answers.

Vulneratus non victus

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
HTFU
The bracelet says “Harden the Fuck Up.” That’s Aussie for “Vulneratus non victus.”

It means “Wounded, not conquered,” and it’s the O’Grady family motto. ’Tis a suitable one for Stuart O’Grady, who has broken nearly every bone in his body at least once in his long tour of duty as a pro cyclist. (He has another, of course, part of which you can see in the wristband I’m wearing.)

Happily, today Stuey was in fine fettle and helped drive the Orica-GreenEdge squad to victory in the team time trial at the 2013 Tour de France. The Aussie squad nipped the world champions in that discipline, Omega Pharma-Quick Step, by less than a second.

Alas, Cannondale’s Ted King was less fit today. Battered and bruised from that stage-1 crash, he was quickly dropped by his team, rode in alone, and saw insult piled atop injury when the wankers who run the race decided that he had finished outside the time cut, a hard-hearted and dubious ruling that drew widespread condemnation from riders, journos and fans.

It’s a bitter ending to King’s first Tour. But Stuey’s proof that a wound need not spell defeat. He’ll be back.

Give me a break

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

Being a newsman of sorts (OK, you can stop laughing now) I like it when actual news occurs.

As Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey and I rambled through today’s coverage of stage 2 it seemed we were in for the classic Tour de France non-event: The Doomed Break Reeled In At the Very Last Minute.

Except it wasn’t. Not all of it. Jan Bakelants (RadioShack-Leopard) made a break from the break and hung on to win by a whisker, the last man standing from a late six-man escape. First Tour, first pro win. And it came with a nifty yellow jersey, too.

People who were supposed to win didn’t; people who were supposed to get the maillot jaune didn’t; and the only impediments to forward motion were gravity, eejits at roadside and a loose mutt who will probably never chase a guy on a bicycle again but came away with a fine tale to tell around the fire hydrant: “Jesus, Lassie, there were a couple hundred of the sonsabitches coming after me at 50 km/h! I ’bout shit my flea collar!”

Eventually all the Right People will take charge, of course. They almost always do. But in the meantime we seem to have an actual sporting-news story on our hands.

Extry, extry, read all about it. …

No Furthur

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Magic Bus
A magic trip, indeed.

Today’s first stage of Le Shew Beeg on Corsica proved once again that comedy is incapable of matching reality pedal stroke for pedal stroke, and indeed may have fallen off in a roundabout somewhere and been run over by a publicity-caravan vehicle, strafed by a French jet or run through by Napoleon’s ghost.

If the poor sod who stuffed the Orica-GreenEdge bus under the finish-line scaffolding didn’t instantly get the ax, he will spend the remainder of the 2013 Tour enduring bus-stop jokes.

“Dude, you shouldn’t be driving the tall bus, you should be riding on the short bus!” That sort of thing.

This is horribly unkind to people who really do suffer from cognitive impairment, like the feckin’ eejits who decided to move the finish line out 3km only to move it back again in less time than it took The Gorilla to decide he’d had enough of that bullshit, rip off his own derailleur and eat it.

Jesus wept. The guys in charge of Ken Kesey’s bus had it more together than this lot, and they were all on acid.