‘Le Tour Toujours,’ warts and all: O’Grady remains a fan, sorta
- By Patrick O'Grady
- Published Jul. 4, 2008
“He’s not the Messiah! He’s a very naughty boy!—an exchange between Brian’s mum and his followers in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”
Pro cycling has finally gotten around to hauling away all that trash that had been piled up on its porch, stinking to high heaven, after the past couple of parties on the Champs-Élysées.
First Floyd “Beer Me” Landis gets smacked upside his backwards ball cap with a 3-0 Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling whose 58 pages boiled down to “Bwaaah ha ha ha ha ha ha. Plus you owe USADA a hundred large, Whiskey River.”
Then Michael “Chicken” Rasmussen takes one in the beak from the Monaco cycling federation for mistaking France for Mexico. This foul blow was tempered somewhat by his winning $1.1 million in a wrongful-dismissal suit against Rabobank, which should just about pay the lawyers and leave a little left over for continuing-education courses in geography and ethics.
That wraps up the 2006 and ’07 Tours de France. Now all we have to worry about is the 2008 edition, which is a story yet to be written; a tabula rasa.
What’s this “we” business, you ask? Where have “we” been since the last Foaming Rant was published back in January? I don’t know about you, but I’ve been trying to spend more time on the bike and less time trying to glean bits of cheap comedy from the news, which has increasingly taken on the woeful tone of a Greek chorus clad in equal parts pinstripes and Lycra.
Mostly I ride a cyclocross bike, but I’ve been out on the mountain bike a couple of times, and I’ve even begun doing some regular road rides, which always gives me the feeling that doom is squatting darkly around the corner, sporting a Cadillac emblem.
Despite soaring gasoline prices, the transportation revolution has yet to find much traction in my hometown. The only bike the locals respect is the Harley, the only scooter they know is Libby, and they think pedestrian is French for “speed bump.” So after a few of those white-knuckle, single-finger one-act plays scored for automobile horn and larynx I decided I might as well jot down a few final thoughts before I wind up under the wheels with my old pals Squishy the Squirrel and Flatty the Cat.
Riding the road always makes me think of bicycle racing, and bicycle racing makes me think of the Tour, with a capital T, the only one we’ve got. It’s the race that got me into cycling magazines and out of newspapers, and you’ve got to dance with the one what brung ya no matter how many times the spastic, dope-addled sonofabitch stomps on your Sidis.
I’m no longer a fan of any one racer, though I support what Jonathan Vaughters is trying to do with Garmin-Chipotle. I guess you could call me a fan of the idea of the Tour de France. “Le Tour Toujours,” says the official poster; “The Tour Forever.” I’m down with that.
This year’s Tour may be lacking a few elements — a prologue, the team time trial, time bonuses, the usual myopic oversight from UCI, WADA and YADDAYADDAYADDA, and two of last year’s top-three finishers — but it’s still the greatest show on earth, as long as you remember that it’s likely to be heavy on very naughty boys and light on messiahs.
So I’ll be following it once again this year, just as I have since I first discovered there was such a thing as the Tour. But not on TV. Signing up for premium cable to watch bike racing is like joining Weight Watchers for the hot chicks.
Every time Patrick O’Grady of Mad Dog Media opens his mouth, something foul wafts out — hence the replacement of “Friday’s Foaming Rant” with a new column titled “Dog Breath.” Look for it wherever fine breath mints are sold.—Editor
FILED UNDER: Tour de France TAGS: Tour de France
Patrick O'Grady
Patrick O’Grady joined VeloNews as its cartoonist in 1989 and a succession of editors has failed to dislodge him. He was a newspaperman from 1977 to 1991, but it felt too much like work, plus he never got any free bike parts. So he quit for the carefree life of a free-lance rumormonger, and now you have to deal with him, as do we. Sorry ’bout that. O’Grady lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with his wife, Shannon, and their cats, Turkish and Miss Mia Sopaipilla. He has more bikes than chins, but only just barely.