Tour de France Tip of the Day: Pack Ear Plugs

The French have a lot of culture. Their food from Provence to Brittany is heavenly, the wine is fit for Bacchus and the countryside invites picnics at every turn.

What some Frenchmen do lack though is the ability to allow a person to have a free-ride, or if someone is enjoying a situation above their station - then they will try to jeopardize that situation.

There should be a word for this phenomenon. It could well be the venomous opposite of serendipity (stumbling upon something wonderful by accident) – let me call it venomdipity.

Take the movie “Jean de Florette”. The gist of the movie is Gérard Depardieu inherits a rocky farm that apparently has no nearby spring – or water. He toils and struggles, until he almost dies from fatigue as he carries water from over a faraway mountain by the bucketful.

Short of death, and a beaten man, he discovers that the local villagers have always known that there is a spring a hundred yard from his crops. The bastards didn’t tell him. Venomdipity is what it is!

Imagine sleeping in the camper van after a hard drive over the Col du Galibier to the next mountain stage – a bottle of grungy Cahors red emptied, looking forward to the next Contador attack the following day – when at 12:45 am a car starts honking from a long way off and then hoots right outside our camper door.

This carries on intermittently as locals drive passed the camper vans and tents. Then the early morning locals – maybe they work at la boulangerie in the village – why else would the idiots be driving at 3:30 am and hooting all the way down the mountainside. This is venomdipity at its worst.

I can only think that they despise us as gypsy-like tourists.

So be warned – pack ear plugs.

Limerickazakhstan

There once was a cyclist from Kazakhstan
Who blood doped during and before le tour began
One day in July
After being caught he preferred to lie
And somehow he’s still Astana’s number one

Ban White Shorts

It may seem absurd that I want to ban white clothing from the peloton, especially since Mama wears predominantly white robes. But I am making explicit reference to white cycling shorts.

It only recently dawned on me why the Fd'Jeux team have alternate blue cycling pants (note that Agritubel are still unaware of their faux pas).

It happened in a race a few years ago that started in perfectly good African weather – hot and balmy. Dark storm clouds soon ballooned overhead and then gushed down on us.

The water-roosters sprayed into my grime filled eyes. I perched my Oakley’s onto the edge of my nose as I looked onto the rider in front of me. It was with shock that I noticed his white shorts had become see-through, completely revealing.

There is no way to rewind a memory, or erase chunks of mind data (I contemplated a pre-frontal lobotomy, but I need all the grey matter I’ve got).

Snow professionals advise new skiers in snow abundant regions - “Don’t eat the yellow snow!"

I say that it should be emblazoned on every cyclist’s short purchase – “Don’t wear white cycling shorts in the rain!”

Dumb and Dumber

It has been brewing for a while – a venting session against the dopers (another against the prepatore is to follow). My vexation this time is squarely reserved for the Teutonic pixie – Stefan Schumacher.

Not only because of his dumb and dumber antics of attacking in back-to-back mountain stages, but also for taking two stage wins while doped up to the gills. Add to this the fact that he still wants his Quick Step contract honoured for 2009! Does this man not know his own intellectual limits?

Now Bernard Kohl, his awkwardness apparent on the podium and in just about any social gathering, was a slightly more tolerable cheat. He didn’t go on a day-to-day blitz session like his Prussian counterpart. The Austrian was seemingly contrite and made a number of heart wrenching public apologies.

We will probably find Herr Schumacher and Kohl in a few years time delivering the post or selling DB railway tickets in Dresden. That is where all bad pros spend their post-cycling careers.

Last year on July 15th, Stage 8 to Tignes, Stefan Schumacher was struggling up the 20 km Cormet de Roselend climb.

I was positioned just 5km into the climb. Papa was some 60km’s away near the finish at Tignes.

Schumacher was behind the main group - alone and soundly dropped. And this is where I gleefully beat a rival fan to a keepsake that the German discarded. And now I can’t believe that I have a talisman of his – a jettisoned Gerolsteiner water bottle from his cage (probably where he belongs).

Prepatore - doctors or preparers who help cyclist's to dope

Family Tree

Allow me to introduce my fictional self. I am the product of Didi “the Devil” and the Specialized Angel. My name is Gabriel.

Papa

Mama

Prologue

Allow me to introduce my fictional self.

I am the product of Didi “the Devil” and the Specialized Angel. My name is Gabriel.

I am their offspring – their sprog. I consider myself “Cycling’s offspring.”

If you look carefully at old footage in the 1986 Tour de France on stage 15, when papa prodded Greg LeMond on the Alp d’Huez and almost knocked the Badger over, you will notice me in my diapers on the roadside. I am the one with the dummy (hey, the dummy isn’t papa).

That doesn’t mean I am some LUK – Specialized hybrid, but I am special!

It also doesn’t mean I wear the same outfit for twenty-one days on the trot, like papa does.

With these two characters as my parents, one can’t help but be a cycling fan.

Mama and Papa are not together anymore – their brief body rubbing occurred, after too many Leffe’s, in the back of a 1973 Citroën camper van parked at the entrance to the Arenberg forest in April 1985 – the day Marc Madiot won the Paris-Roubaix.

My problem with having such different parents is the strong opposite forces that drive me. The good and evil counterweights my parents have brought to my DNA results in my slightly bipolar nature.

The definition of bipolar is not a bi-sexual with a Finnish heart rate monitor – rather I am prone to scurrilous outbursts, and these outbursts are mainly reserved for errant cyclists and all things to do with cycling – or just not to my general liking.

For example, why the hell does France 2 – the French TV station – keep on cutting away from papa when he is prancing around with his trident? But I will save this particular bugbear for another time.

And then in my lighter moments – my angelic side – I can sing mellifluous cycling ditties (my own creations) as sweet as Tom Boonen’s young girlfriends can.

But sometimes my musings are one garbled mess, where I am both sickly sweet ... and generously prickly at the same time. I hope you will understand (I don’t), so have a wonderful day and ta-ta ... well, just go away!

Till later.