OK, that's enough of the mild messing about and pretend time wasting, here's a REAL blog about cycle racing...
Yes boss, sport in general has interested me in recent years not just for the stupid OBSESSIVE athleticism involved, but because of the spectacle, the farce, the business and the corruption. I like the intrigue, the cheating, the mental IDIOCY of SEVERE training and OBSESSIVE eating and training and NOT eating and SEVERE training, all washed down with a vast and complicated cocktail of drugs or marginal gains, to gain medals or prize £$£$£$£, or stupid trophies that can be bounced up and down whilst fizzy wine is sprayed everywhere in an idiotic fashion.
IT'S NUTS!!! GOOD NUTS!!!
Why do I like this....?
Because it's fun to watch and I feel it reflects and replicates (in a more fun and meaningless environment) the real worlds of politics and life in general...
Yes boss, sport is a perfect mirror of the REAL world and so for me it's a MUST SEE!
Until recently, the sport that interested me the most was cycle racing.
The thing I initially liked most about cycle racing wasn't just the sheer FUCKING PHYSICAL AND MENTAL BRUTALITY OF IT, but the fact I didn't have the first idea what any of the sponsors were, or who the riders were? It was more or less a completely exotic sport for me : the colours, the locations, the names of the riders all sounded like abstract noise, or little known performance artists.
Djamolidine Abdoujaparov
Jann Kirsipu
Udo Bolts
REALLY?!?!?
After a year or 2, the thing that then intensified my interest was the ridiculous levels of intrigue and guess work surrounding who was doping on what and when.
Who would be caught and who wouldn't?
Would they get a a ban or would they magic up an excuse that would wash?!?!
It was an endless duck shoot and some ducks were definitely more equal than others.
Yes boss, the first tour I ever watched on TV was 20 years ago.
In that Tour, Mr 60% Bjarne Riis dethroned Miguel 'Mr clean who (to this day) has never been fingered' Indurain. Then there wasn't much at all known about the RAMPANT DOPING going on - either by the fans or the mainstream media, though reading back old cycling magazines from then it's hinted at plenty...
The first dodgy dope suringe was publicly popped 2 years later when the Festina scandal broke, and since then it's probably been the thing cycling's best known for - and the only thing that's kept the sport going and expanding...
Controversial...?
Not really...
Cycling has become more WAY MORE POPULAR since Lance Armstrong and despite his mea culpa the growth and interest has remained. Lance MADE Trek as a company and increased the business of a whole bunch of other cycle related companies. 10s of thousands of people took to the bike for sport or fun and they started watching the Tour. Lance shouldn't be getting stripped of those 7 tour titles they should be throwing an extra 1 in for general promotion and global advancement of the sport.
And you'd have to say the same for Bradley Wiggins. Yes boss, before him, did anyone in the UK really give a shit about road cycling? Sure Lance had a bounce here as well and Cavendish helped it all along, but it was Bradley who really put it on the map and sold MILLIONS£$£$£ worth of bikes and assocaited accessories in the UK. It was him who got the MAMILS on the side roads.
Anyway...
I haven't been so bothered about cycle racing this last coupla years
Why?
Well, since the simpleton gnome that is British Cookson has taken over at the UCI and Team Sky have raised their ugly blue and black heads from the lowland swamp, everything has become far too familiar and close to home.
Yes boss, when I was first into cycle racing there was 2 UK(ish) riders in the peloton tops, and at least one of them would usually fall off at an early stage of the Tour and the rest of the season you wouldn't really see them. Nowadays there's 15 or 20 UK riders and they WIN regularly and BIG all year round - on the flat, in the mountains and in the time trials, and with these wins the exoticity of the sport goes, and in come the dumb flag sucking fans...
By dumb flag sucking fans, I mean the same idiots who's sport watching lives are defined by things like 'Super Saturday' at the London 2012 Olympics. Idiots who can only enjoy sport in the context of it grandifying their rotten stinking country and therefore themselves and their own misplaced self esteem. Flag huggers, chimps, queen loving simpletons who choose to think North Korea is the worlds worst propgandist cult country, rather than being capable of taking a more honest and close look at the UTTER control under which they live and work in dear old blighty...
Yes boss, the first 2 years I cycled to the Alps to watch mountain stages in 99 & 2000, there was no Union Jack flag waving 'RA RA TIMMY!!!' UK hoards plaguing the mountainsides. Then no-one in the UK give a flying fuck about cycling other than those who were actively invovled in it or the odd freaks who watched it for probably much the same reasons as me.
Nowadays the British are all over it like a plague
DULL DULL DULL!!!
But it's not just that the British are all the sport that irritated and put me off, it's the alleged dawn of the new 'clean' era of drug free cycling...
Yes boss, I remember being outside the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square at the launch of the Tour De France when it left London in 2007. There I saw that silvery bearded shit Bob Stapleton. Bob was the guy who took over the DOOMED T-mobile team after they became doping credibility untenable. He took them over and gave them the most NAUSEATING name for a team ever
'HIGHROAD'
WHAT A CUNT!!!
Yes boss, I saw him standing up there on the way into the launch like some smarmy silver fox I Claudius and felt an almost overwhelming urge to yell
'OI STAPLETON!!! FUCK OFF YOU FUCKING PURITAN CUNT!!! YOU TAKE THE HIGHROAD, PERSONALLY I PREFER THE LOW!!!'
I resisted the urge, but I've never been sure if that was the right decision
But yes, since the later part of the first decade of this millenium there has been this slowly exploding myth that professional cycling has cleaned up its act. That the bad old days were over and a new clean anglo american era run by bearded fair players was upon us...
Has this REALLY meant cycling is no longer a sport plagued by cheating in all its forms?
Of course not, it simply means the cheating is done in a very British way. The rules are bent, the coverups go right to the top, it happens by having more $£$£, and the whole notion of 'British fair play' is daintily pedalled like a LIT UP Mo Farah. Shit, it's a wonder they didn't get Hugh Grant to wobble and wibble in as President of The UCI...
And you know what...?
People have SUCKED IT UP!!!
Yes boss, I never ceased to be amazed how the PURE, CLEAN AND WHOLESOME Team Sky thing was so widely bought. Not just by so many people, but by so many people who should know better...
For me Sky were unbelievable first and foremost because they're ultimately funded by Rupert Murdoch. That cunts name being attached is all you need to know about what levels the team will go to win. Yet you got all these people with no genuine long term interest in cycling except its the latest way to wave a Union Flag and feel good about themselves and their appalling job at British Aerospace building weapons designed for mass murder, sucking it all up like Murdoch is a fresh young virgin bambi who's only interested in decency, innocence and honest long term commitment...!??!
Well, my interest in cycling wained and I've not been to see the Tour since that time in London in 2007, since the UK has become the country to beat. I've barely even watched it on TV these last 2 years. And who wants to go all that way to some lovely foreign muntains only to be caught up with a bunch of sick UK flag waving shitheads?
NAIVE ONES AT THAT?!!?
But now things are flipping once more...
Yes boss, Team Sky have been caught shifting dodgy Theraputic Use Exemptions and most likely HAMMERING the cortico steroids in the off season (when bizarrely there's no testing for such things?!?!)
LOOSE WEIGHT KEEP POWER!!! That's been the ugly mantra this last while and Sky have no doubt been making the British Kite Standard on it, and you have to imagine that's only the tip of the iceberg...
It's even less of a surprise that Chris VROOM VROOMS absurd mountain MENTAL LEG SPINNING attacks can't possibly REALLY be only driven by his withered veiny stick thin legs and emaciated torso....
They'll be FAR more to come on that one...
And you know what...?
Now that Wiggins is being dragged through the shit, the whole Sky house looks more than a little rickety and the talk is this last decade has been beset by an even darker more rampant age of mechanical and chemical cheating than ever before
I'm getting interested again...
