Outrage repeated ad infinitum is like an overlong intervals session. At some point you come up off the saddle and then sit right back down.
I’m not even in the saddle for the news about Stuart O’Grady and the rest of them from 1998. I’m back at the house, with the bike on its hook, and looking longingly at that unopened bottle of Bushmills in the kitchen. My performance-enhancer of choice for longer than I care to remember, even if I could.
So, instead of me struggling to gin up an anemic burstlet of apoplexy, how ’bout we take a trip down memory lane to August 2007, when “Friday’s Foaming Rant” still bestrode the narrow cycling world like a Colossus?
That’s No. 2, a’ight. (I’d credit the shooter but I can’t nail down its source.)
I thought cycling fans worshiped the hard men at the spring classics until I endured the online wailing, the virtual gnashing of teeth and the rending of digital garments that accompanied Peter Sagan’s gruesomely juvenile fondling of a podium girl at the Ronde van Vlaanderen.
Heavens to Merckx. A 23-year-old jock does something knuckleheaded in front of the cameras and from the caterwauling you’d think HBO had canceled “Game of Thrones.”
Some perspective, if you please. Ours is a sport focused on men who compete wearing garments that would shame a Lexington Avenue shemale for the honor of getting trophies that look like Home Depot garden-center remainders and air kisses from killer hotties who are holding their breath until they can rub up against something that smells better, like the homeless guy talking to himself on the train, or maybe a paycheck.
Then the guys in the plastic pants work up a big one and ejaculate a frothy fluid all over anyone within range.
I mean, as George Carlin once quipped, you don’t have to be Fellini to figure this one out.
Was Sagan out of line? Of course. Did you ever do anything stupid in public without the questionable excuse of being The Next Big Thing In Pro Cycling at an age when many a young fellow has just graduated college and is trying to decide which Mickey D’s can make best use of his B.A. in English? Seems likely. I know that if Twitter had been around when I was 23 I’d never have lived to see 24.
Hot links from two prominent bicycle-racing websites.
It would have been swell if the podium girl in question had swung around and slapped the smirk off Sagan’s face and hissed, “Only the winner gets to touch me!” Or if Bernard Hinault had suddenly appeared out of nowhere and hurled him off the stage. Then we could all move on from our long international nightmare.
But this tempest on Twitter strikes me as a bit over the top.
How about a little outrage over the lack of opportunities for (and coverage of) women racers? Doesn’t anyone find it disturbing that slender models smooching smelly Belgians get more TV time than women pros? Has anyone on the fainting couch noticed that certain bicycle-racing websites derive some of their revenue from links that could more charitably be described as “questionable?”
Maybe it’s time cycling did without the podium ceremony, in which beautiful women are among the spoils claimed by victorious male gladiators. It seems anachronistic, a bit of theater that has outlived its usefulness, a dinosaur long overdue for its date with the tar pits — you know, like the UCI.
The biting of the medals, the spraying of the bubbly, the raising of the arms (at which the podium girls take a few paces back) — it all makes for lousy imagery, until some hormone-crazed showboat decides to play a little grab-ass.
And then what on the cobbles is a thing of beauty starts to look like your cousin’s wedding, with drunk Uncle Buster mistaking a bridesmaid for an hors d’oeuvre.
• Late update: Young Master Sagan apparently has been taken to the woodshed, from whence issues this video apology.
• Even later update: Good lord, the putz has apologized and they’re still at it on Twitter. These people need to get laid. Get jobs. Get stuffed. Jaysis.
Editor’s note: Today’s edition of “Friday Funnies” was written Oct. 12 for the November 2012 issue of Bicycle Retailer and Industry News.
EPO all in my veins
Lately things just don’t seem the same
Acton’ funny, but I don’t know why
‘Scuse me while I pass this guy. — from the affidavit of Dave Zabriskie, recounting how he serenaded Johan Bruyneel on the U.S. Postal Service bus in 2002
A fine wine turned to vinegar.
I’VE OFTEN JOKED that in helping to cover professional bicycle racing I was aiding and abetting a felony.
Well, whaddaya know? Turns out I wasn’t joking after all.
The revelations from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s investigation of Lance Armstrong will be ancient history by the time you read this. Indeed, they were mostly off the front pages in less than two days, swept aside by Smokin’ Joe Biden flooring Paul “Lyin’” Ryan in their vice-presidential punch-up, the European Union winning the Nobel Peace Prize and rumors of a sexy new iPad mini on the horizon.
Ho-hum. Just another rich white guy getting away with something. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along; move along.
In the cycling media, however, it was all Lance, all the time. Nothing new there, either. Whether he was winning a Tour de France, berating an Austin doorman or boinking an Olsen twin, Armstrong was always good for the bottom line. Chamois-sniffers and haters alike dove headlong into every story and then went to war in the comments. Making money off Lance Armstrong was easier than stealing from the collection plate at a church for the blind. Continue reading “We are all Armstrong’s domestiques”→
Some folks are expecting The Cyclist Who Shall Not Be Named (TCWSNBN) to ‘fess up on Friday in Austin, during a fund-raising hoo-hah marking the 15th anniversary of Livestrong.
Alas, while Bob Dylan famously noted that “even the president of the United States/Sometimes has to stand naked,” I don’t see The Boss pantsing himself in front of all those yellow rubber bracelets. Anyone who wants to see that hard ass in the cool breeze is gonna have to take an active role, and they’d best pack a lunch, ’cause Big Tex plays for keepsies.
My fabulously uninformed opinion is that he’ll use the occasion for yet another spirited defense of the indefensible, maybe launch a line of yellow rubber crucifixes, and fight a bloody, noisy delaying action until the last lawyer sprawls dead at his feet. I don’t see surrender. I see the Alamo.
Let’s assume for argument’s sake that he’s as guity as a yellow dog caught collar-deep in a trash can full of chicken bones, bacon grease and Benjamin Franklins. Where’s the percentage in coming clean now? The UCI has yet to weigh in — Fat Paddy and Lyin’ Hein are still trying to get their big-boy pants screwed on, I expect — and then there’s always the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
And besides, the only people who would buy a weepy mea culpa at this point are the Walking Deadstrong, that hard core of soft brains who, if they saw him mainlining EPO in a porta-potty at a sprint tri’, would blame Greg, Betsy, Tyler, Floyd and Obama, in that order.
I’ve been wrong before, and often in spectacular fashion. But I don’t see Big Tex coming clean until the End Times are truly upon him, which will be when the money runs out. Then he’ll “write” a tell-all book, hit the rubber chicken/morning talk show circuit and get back on that gravy train.
Mad Blog Media 