“I love the smell of chamois in the morning. It smells like … victory,” is the mantra of the uneducated cycling fan who thinks Lance Armstrong is the alpha and omega of the sport.
The tifosi can get its cycling news from a wide variety of informed sources, but the average Joe relies upon the mainstream media, which, being lazy, prefer to rely upon a proven, familiar narrative — say, about a cancer survivor who is a seven-time winner of the Tour de France, the only race they know. Some sports reporters have the phrase programmed into a formatting key lest it become lost in their cavernous, vacant brainpans. They draw it like a pistol and blaze away wildly at the wrong targets, then go back to nipping at the office bottle and wishing it was football season.
The New York Times usually serves up better fare, but today the ordinarily reliable Juliet Macur sinks to the level of her less skillful colleagues, devoting exactly 203 words of a 727-word report to describing today’s Giro stage and the remainder to explaining Armstrong’s subpar performance to date and speculating about when he might “pounce.”
C’mon. The dude is 37, riding a grand tour with a few extra kilos, some hardware decorating his collarbone and a distinct shortage of racing mileage. If he weren’t Lance Armstrong he wouldn’t have made the team, but he is, and hats off to him for having the honor to ride the kilometers and take the beating. But if he has a pounce in him I have yet to see the merest breath of a wisp of a hint of it.
So let Big Tex ride his three-week training race and dream about a subsequent renaissance in Frogland, and give some props to the riders who are actually present and accounted for at this event. Let’s read about Levi Leipheimer, Thomas Lövkvist, Danilo Di Luca, Michael Rogers — all the poor sods who don’t have a convenient tagline programmed into some hack’s crumb-encrusted keyboard.
Someone has to ask the ugly chicks to dance, f’chrissakes, especially if they’re the ones busting all the moves.
