Tour de Fence

July 10, 2011July 10, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 34 Comments

Good God. If this keeps up the winner of the 2011 Tour de France is liable to be a disembodied head in a glass jar, rolling onto the Champs-Élysées in a Radio Flyer wagon.

Nah. UCI would never go for that. Four wheels, and who knows what’s in that glass jar? Besides a rather battered head, that is.

It wasn’t the upstairs that got torn up on Johnny Hoogerland — it was the basement, thanks to a handy barbed-wire fence that he encountered at speed after a Euro Media car piloted by a mental defective and/or homicidal lunatic clipped breakaway mate Juan Antonio Flecha, who in decking it body-checked Hoogerland through that fence. It was nearly a hat trick, but the guy who would wind up wearing yellow at the end of it all, Thomas Voeckler, managed to keep the rubber side down.

Now, I’m not saying that the driver should have been dragged from his vehicle and had the mortal shit kicked out of him, but … actually, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Ejected from the Tour? Dude should be ejected from the planet, in a 55-gallon drum full of scorpions, broken bottles and an iPod playing “John Tesh’s Greatest Hits” at top volume.

Meanwhile, sounds like the old decreasing-radius turn did for Vino’, Dave Z. and the rest. Having had my own holy-shit moment in one of those broken-backed sonsabitches I can feel their pain, kinda, sorta. But I was alone for mine, not auguring in with a few dozen colleagues, and I managed to stay upright. Jeebus.

Massif, but not decisif

July 9, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

Rest and rehabilitation — Mighty Whitey bags some Zs on his Turkintowel while recovering from a nasty abscess.

There was a little fencing but no fireworks today at Le Tour, a stage in which nearly everyone seemed to be thinking, “Don’t fuck up.”

Super Spaniard flexed his quads a bit in the uphill finale, to no particular purpose, and pronounced himself content, though he had the Schlecks stuck to him like a couple of cheap tattoos.

Given the misfortune that has been plaguing the homeboys in this go-round it was nice to see Tejay Van Garderen ride strongly — until the final few kilometers, anyway — en route to the polka-dot jersey and the most-combative prize. And it was even more impressive to see big ol’ Thor Hushovd hang onto that yellow jersey on a hilly course, day one of two in the Massif Central. But right now Cadel Evans is looking like the man to beat.

All in all, it was a long day in the old VeloBarrel, and by the time I finally broke free for a short ride it proved very short indeed. The skies looked blacker than the Republic’s future under President Bachmann, and I wasn’t out a half-hour before the rumbling started, and then the rain. I just barely beat it home, for the second consecutive day.

The Turk’ was camped out on my drawing board, where he has spent much of the last week while being treated for an abscess under his right jaw. The big galoot is not exactly cuddly and we thought he was just being pissier than usual until he popped the damn’ thing. Talk about nasty. So off to the vet we went, and now we are both poorer and wiser.

Cats are strange beasts. If I had had that thing on me the Atlantis crew would have been able to hear me yowling from the International Space Station.

A comic-book hero is something to be

July 5, 2011July 5, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

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.

Two down, 19 to go

July 3, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

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!

July 1, 2011July 1, 2011 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

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.