VeloCast

Have to agree with John's comments regarding the winter Olympics & winter sports in general. Pretty much the only sport I watch during the winter is the Biathlon that's shown on Eurosport. These guys (& girls) are phenomenal athletes. Skiing round with heart rates in the 170's or higher, then trying to compose themselves to shoot 5, 2.5cm targets at 50m - it defies belief. I'm sure the mighty Ole Einar Bjorndalen could have been a top cyclist if he had chosen that path - he has an amazing engine.

Did rather choke at any notion of Bert being Le Patron. As John says, he's largely invisible. I rather like Tim Moore's descritpion of Hinault's demeanour as being like: 'he'd just been told that some bloke up the road was prancing about in a wedding dress singing, 'Bernard, Bernard, je m'appelle Bernard'!

"Senor Pistolero is feeling tired today, there will be no racing." Stop it, you're killing me...

Steve has it about right, although during the races Mr. A chose to race, he could dominate quite enough to pursue his personal vendettas (Simeoni f'rexample).

Wasn't there a rumour that he was a prime mover in the rider protest at the Giro too?

Congleton and Audley are near me, as it goes - there's some lovely riding around there on the cheshire lanes.

Left turn on red is pointless exceptionalism. Drivers are crap at keeping up to date with current law (as use/misuse of ASLs shows). If they *really* want to do something legislative, enforcing the laws we have now would be a better strategy.

...and Peebles is such a sensible name for a town!

Peeved of Wisbech/Congleton/Stratford on Avon etc etc etc

Aye, fair point. ;o)

J

Regarding Le Patron, I suspect Hinault will be the last true bearer of that mantle because race specialism became commonplace in his aftermath. So whilst Armstrong might have carried the mantle, the fact that (during his 7 win run in the TDF) he was invisible in Europe, if not always physically certainly competitively, until May and was then gone for good by the end of July meant that a good percentage of the pro peleton probably never raced against him. Furthermore the European riders resented that cherry picking style and were never going to be as dominated by him as their predecessors were by Hinault, Anquetil etc. The effect of specialising is also exacerbated now by the increasingly global nature of the sport. La Vie Claire didn't have to race in America, Qatar, Australia, South East Asia etc, so their squad was probably half the size of a current Pro Tour outfit, which further meant that more of the riders were exposed to Hinault's dominance. So I suppose familiarity bred repsect rather than contempt, whereas the average top pro of the noughties had less need to fear Armstrong because he'd rarely come across his throat grabbing racing persona.