…that it takes the French to validate someone like Lance Armstrong.
perhaps it’s the faintly onerous sense that cycling is for ‘sissies’… but howtheheck can someone say, with a straight face, “a cyclist never feels the knee-knocking, throat-closing pressure of a crucial putt or free throw, nor does he need the incredible hand-eye coordination and other skills required in baseball, football, soccer, and other sports” (Skip Bayless, espn.com).
are you kidding me?
has this Skip guy never gone downhill on a bike? really fast?
bicyclists have the highest (you read that right) rate of physical damage of any other athlete… every one of these guys/gals goes down hard, & fairly often… so much so that they have an entire set of stock phrases for the (inevitable) event: “touching the floor”, “losing bark”, etc. like any decent (american) football player, bicyclists ride under amazing amounts of pain. lance just last night on letterman described the Tour as a “combination of a marathon, chess, and NASCAR… the endurance, the strategy/tactics, & all the road tricks of drafting, etc”.
he didn’t mention bumping your opponent into the wall, threatening to knock him spinning and/or crashing in flames, ie. the ‘mind game’ first introduced & popularized by Dale Earnhardt… but lance didn’t have to. ever see a bike team gang-up on some other hapless guy? shuffled, knocked, & elbowed, the other guy doesn’t stand a chance… & he better have the heart to not give up, esp. when he goes down. boy, that can’t be as tough as missing a putt, can it?
i’ve driven sports cars north of 130mph and never felt the gut-wrenching fear of 40mph downhill on a ten-speed…. & that’s chicken-sh*t to pro’s like Lance.
huge heart, low lactid acid, who gives a poo — in the end, that’s only the raw materials… the guy still had to get on the bike, over & over, fine-tuning himself to overcome (small) obstacles like, oh yeah, brain cancer.
you’ve gotta be frickin kidding me.
Tags: rant