Good Lord, where does the time go? It seems only yesterday that The Cyclist Who Shall Not Be Named was curled up in Soaprah’s expansive lap, singin’ the blues. And now here it is time for that race he was so fond of.
This isn’t just any old dash around Frogland, mind you. It’s the 100th Tour; the defending champion, Brave, Brave, Brave Sir Wiggo’, has bravely run away; and our old friend Andrew Hood says that while everyone has his eye on the final week, that first week could be a doozy.
So, naturally, Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey will be covering the bugger from stem to stern, starting at dark-thirty on Saturday morning. As usual, I’ll be playing Ed to his Johnny, which is to say I will be slouched on the couch, belching besotted witticisms such as, “Hey-yo!” and “You are correct, sir.”
So mark your calendars. And in comments, give us your picks for the final yellow jersey in Paris. Here, I’ll get the ball rolling. Now me, I think Zoom-Zoom Froome has peaked too early. …
Today is the neighborhood’s biennial yard sale, an event during which one hopes against all reason that strangers will cart off one’s useless bullshit and leave money in its place. This makes the tooth-fairy tale seem reasonable by comparison.
And now for something completely different: There is no truth to the rumor that Bradley Wiggins is skipping the 2013 Tour de France in order to stand in for the late Graham Chapman in a revival of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”
The view from the DogDeck during a respite from cycling rumormongery.
The 2013 Giro has been fun to watch, but I won’t weep when it comes to an end this morning in Brescia.
Working each stage with Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey sort of fills up the morning, which is a time of day I normally reserve for trying to get the old motor started — stomping on the pedal with the key twisted in the ignition and the hood up, occasionally slouching forward to spray some ether into the carb’ and kick the sumbitch smack in the grille until black smoke farts out the rusty tailpipe.
This takes time. There must be at least two cups of strong coffee, followed by a leisurely breakfast taken while scanning the headlines to see what the gummint stole from us during the night and sold to the Kochs for pennies on the dollar. Fuckers are worse than crackheads. Steal the pennies off your dead granny’s eyes and the copper bottom right off your skillet, they will.
There’s none of this gradual easing into one’s morning during a grand tour. It’s up and at ’em, right from the gun, trying to entertain people who’ve already been up for hours, some of them in other countries where they actually know stuff and aren’t shy about correcting you a nanosecond after you sleep-type something exceptionally boneheaded.
And holy shit! Just about the time the peloton scrapes the Giro’s ice off its Oakleys it’ll be time for the Tour. It’s the 100th edition this time around, so there will be extra cluster in the fuck, and I can already hear my last few brain cells sputtering like a candle whose wick needs trimming.
Mister P and I are still on the fence as regards LUGging the Tour. ScribbleLive finally figured out how many viewer minutes we were doing and they’ve started to wonder how we’d feel about being bent over a desk with our trousers puddled around our ankles and some banjo music playing. There are other options, of course, but most are equally pricey or woefully inadequate.
And then there are the ruined breakfasts to consider. Twenty-one of them, to be precise.
So, yeah. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, we have one more Giro stage to get through. Swing on by Live Update Guy to say arrivederci.
The RadioShack-Nissan press wizard snapped this shot of one of the tacks pulled from a rider’s tire.
Just when you thought stage 14 of the 2012 Tour de France couldn’t get any worse, it did.
The Pyrénéan stage, with its two category-one climbs — which no less an authority than John Wilcockson had expected to provide “the best chance yet” for Cadel Evans, Vincenzo Nibali or Jurgen Van den Broucke to yank Bradley Wiggins out of his golden palanquin — turned into a nothing-burger of a training ride, with a break a quarter-hour up the road and the GC guys back in the bunch trading organic chamois-cream recipes. (Handy household hint: If you see Mark Cavendish at the front of the bunch on a climb, nobody is busting his balls. Except maybe Cavendish.)
That was bad enough for those of us trying to keep a live update, well, lively.
There were some 30 punctures, though whether that refers to tires or riders remains unclear. Evans had three flats of his own — the first left him standing atop the final summit with a teammate who also lacked a functional rear wheel, awaiting neutral service, AAA or the Better World Club, whichever would accept his Credit Lyonnais credit card.
Evans finally got going again, and maillot jaune Bradley Wiggins asked the bunch to ride piano until the defending champ got back on, though Europcar’s Pierre Rolland, Lotto-Belisol and Liquigas-Cannondale apparently missed the memo. Those rascals soon got sorted out, however, and that was that, although Rolland should consider himself out of the Miss Congeniality competition this year.
Robert Kiserlovski got the worst of it — Jani Brajkovic flatted after that last climb, Kiserlovski apparently swerved over to give him a wheel, Levi Leipheimer T-boned him, and Kiserlovski left the Tour with a busted collarbone.
Oh, yeah — there was some actual racing going on. Luis Leon Sanchez popped out of that break while green jersey Peter Sagan was having a nosh and rode solo to the stage win. Sagan had looked like the man of the hour until Sanchez caught him with his mouth full.
“Yes, I should have kept a better eye on him,” Sagan told Cyclingnews.” In the last few kilometers I needed to eat. I wasn’t expecting him to attack me at that point. He is experienced and I am not bitter about it. Even if I’d managed to stay with him I might not have won.”
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.”
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