Forget what the "experts" have to say about the 2012 Tour de France. The only opinion that matters is the SkullKrusher's That's why I say: "Never mind the Experts, Here's the SkullKrusher."
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| "Dude, you are missing it! The riders are coming in one at a time in an endless parade of boringness!" |
I found out a few weeks ago that "prologue" is in fact not French for "boring." Imagine my surprise, since I've always wondered why anyone would care about these "prologues." That discovery and my ever-growing sense of responsibility towards the 14 listeners of my podcast and the 3 readers to the blog, led me to make a very important decision late last night.
I decided to forgo my 16th Brooklyn Lager at the bar, told the sloppy college girl I'd been working on to pay the bill and walked (stumbled) home. I think she followed me for a while, but it was dark, so who knows what happened to her. Anyway, I decided to come home before the sun came up in order to get a little sleep and wake up early to watch this "prologue."
I'll be damned if it's not exactly how I remember them from years and years ago, since I decided that I'd rather eat dry cardboard than watch cyclists, one by one, ride down some street. Ugh. I really, really, really don't get it. How can any kind of timed event in professional cycling be interesting? At least prologues are short in distance so you have a chance (if you try REALLY hard) not to doze off and see your favorite rider go from start to finish. There's absolutely NOTHING exciting about time trials. If watching just one dude at a time was awesome, every pro should record their training rides and sell the DVDs on ebay.
Let's say I were to show you 2 riders complete today's course. I'll pick Sammy Sanchez and Matthew Lloyd. They were both wearing funny helmets and riding bikes your dentist, the triathlete, drools over. Now take away the useless commentary and the commercials, and all you have is a dude on a bike. You will not notice a single difference between Sanchez' and Lloyd's ride, but in reality, the Spaniard took 25 seconds of the Australian. That's a lot of time in 6.5 kilometers. Still, it looked exactly the same. Maybe Sanchez had up to 35 second at some point, but Lloyd came back. Maybe Lloyd started strong and faded, allowing Sanchez to overtake him. THAT would be exciting, but we will never know because they were on course nearly 3 hours apart! Lloyd was showered and massaged in the hotel by the time Sanchez started to warm up on the trainer. Having the guys side by side will forever be more exciting, period. A local cat 3 crit will always be more interesting to me than the best of the best (Cancellara, Martin, Wiggins, et al.) going one at a time, giving me no frame of reference as to how they are "racing" each other. If the most exciting thing that happens in a race is a flat tire, it's not an exciting race.
So, needless to say I fell asleep after 10 minutes of the nonsense and woke up just in time to see Cancellara putting on this year's first yellow jersey. What a shocker. I checked the rest of the times and went for a ride. I was alone, you all would have loved it.
One thing's for sure, while the riders will have 2 days off in this year's Tour, I'm gonna have 4.
Wake me up when the racing starts. YAWN.
The Speed Metal Cycling Podcast is presented by NYC Velo, New York City's Bike Shop. 
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