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Tour Thousand and Eight
// 31st July
I am busy. Much busier than I have been in a long time. But that doesn’t matter, what does matter is that the Tour de France was great.
Myself and the other rad kids stayed up late and watched nearly all the stages of the tour. So much fun. There were quite a few highlights and funny incidents, which due to not being written down, have been forgotten.
A serious highlight was the doping testing. Riders were caught and ejected straight away in a targeted testing scheme, which seemed to work really well. It means that at the end of the race only two early stage results are in doubt. Riders will be more loathe to take on the man next year I think.
There were a few crashes, one spectacular fall down the side of a mountain, but the one that sticks in my mind was German-Australian Heinrich Haussler’s collision with a rather large woman who ended up splayed out on the ground like a starfish, with her top end heading down into a ditch and her feet up on the side of the road.
Unfortunately Cadel Evans couldn’t hold it together in the final stages. Team CSC Saxo Bank - namely the spittin’ Schleck brothers and one Stuart O’Grady - had Evans under the pump and he couldn’t run with Carlos Sastre when he made his break and got a lead large enough that Evans couldn’t make it up in the time trial on the second last stage. I was hoping that if Evans couldn’t take the win then Vladimir Efimkin could come up with something, simply because of the endless humour gained by yelling “Come on effing-keen!”
I was a bit sad that Mauricio Soler dropped out after stage five. After his efforts last year I would have liked to see him on the mountains again. I was thoroughly entertained by Stefan Schumacher though, who came from nowhere to take the stage wins in both the time trials. Insert pun about his namesake in the Formula 1…
Throughout the tour we refined an idea that we thought would make the tour much better. The idea was equally inspired by the picture breakup when transmitted from the motorcycles catching the action, Greg LeMond’s beast of an exercise bike, the Tour computer game advertised on the Tour de France website, our general tiredness, and the hysterical idea of using sandpaper to create road rash on cyclists who have fallen off their virtual bike. If you can’t guess from that, our idea was to make the entire tour a computer-based simulation. The idea that after a crash your bike disappears and then reappears stationary and blinking in the middle of the road may have contributed too. We figure that this way the tour can go anywhere you want it to - across the world if the organisers so decide. It also means that the organisers do not need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on caravans of vehicles and numerous helicopters to get footage. The idea was confirmed as feasible when Catalyst ran an advert for a science in sport episode showing the following;
This system would also negate the need for helmets, and that’s what all the riders want. One big downside would be that Škoda would get even more control over the graffiti on the road, and we’d be left without the word ‘SEX’ with an accompanying arrow pointing towards a caravan plastered across the road. Ima totally buy me a Škoda.
3 Comments on “Tour Thousand and Eight”
I’m back! whew. You know, I didn’t watch much Tour, but I thought the stack on starting ramp would have qualified somewhere in the ‘falls’ section. Thanks for your help on ‘plutonic’ and ‘platonic’ too. If you hadn’t've been there, things could gone crazily wrong.
July 31st
Ode not to be working and back at uni to watch the tour or late night soccer. You could turn it into a drinking game. Everyone picks a top 10 cyclist and everytime the commentry mentions them you have to drink!
August 1st
that bloke is f-boming keen
August 2nd