Basque.....

Always going to be an odd race to watch, as to me a Basque is an undergarment of a certain style, normally underwired (screams of "no! no!" from me) (I hate underwiring) and generally in tasteful male-oriented shades of red and black. So every time the commentators use the word Basque, everyone watching on the sofa made a gesture with two hands, indicating an hour-glass figure. I'd like you to do the same.

So, tour of the Basque (*makes gesture*) Countries, or "Vuelta Ciclista al Pais Vasco" as it is catchily known.

Here's our strong, strong, team: and talking of strong, Jakob looked really strong on the first day.

Not that we could see all that much of him or the other Leopards, as the camera-bike work was just about the worst so far this year!

Hello clouds - nice shot of the sky: Hello trees - nauseating swoop as though dropping the camera. Hello wing-mirror, ooh look, I can see myself, hello mum.

Eventually it settled down, and Our Boys were nice and visible, but there wasn't any climbing, and Frandy just disappeared. Where are they? Safely in the peloton, apparently.

Day 2: Garmin on the front.  David Harmon, commentating, said of David Millar "To ride a race like this, you have to be in tip-top condition." LLB said "If he starts talking about tufts, we'll know he reads your blog!"

I don't think he does....

Anyway, with 3.5km to go we had the final climb, and Frankie has a go - "Go, Frankie!". He didn't win the stage, but he came in the first group just 2 seconds down: as did Andy, amazingly, even though I hadn't seen him at any stage in the last bit. And I was looking, trust me!

Day 3: "Some legs will be broken on the final climb." said the commentators. Not literally, we hope!

Lovely rolling terrain, looking a lot like the Peak District of the UK. My contemplation of the scenery was interrupted by the commentators discussing the "fact" that Fabian should change his body composition if he wanted to win le Tour. Shock! What would Cristin and Eli and all the other Fabu fans say? Change his body composition? No! No! He might end up looking like Frankie: 

Not much Leopard action today, with Andy sitting 12th, Frankie 14th.

This day, I noticed that Garmin were riding in the usual blue and white hats that make them pretty much indistinguishable from Team Leopard Trek, Sky, etc.

Yet, just one day after this race ended - on the 10th April - they were riding in Paris-Roubaix with the new all-blue helmets, which are a huge improvement and mean that it is now easy to spot Garmin from the front, as it is easy to spot Movistar (pronounced mauve-ey-star as I now know, not mooovey-star, oops) with their lime green topknots.

Leopards, take note! Change your hat colour!!

Day 4: David Harmon, commentating, said at 54km to go "If you're just joining us, you've missed absolutely nothing."

Hmm, I see what he means.  And I can see what people mean when they say that cycling is boring to watch: on these long, flattish stages, nothing happens!

Frankie was described today as "cycling without his air-cleaving accoutrements".

They're not going to let go of that, are they?

Although nothing seems to have come of it so far: the UCI haven't made any further moves to ban the wearing of a hydration system in the underslung position.  But then, as we know, the wheels of the UCI grind slowly, slowly...

Today, the camera-bike was not making any friends: first he stirs up a huge amount of dust and dirt, annoying the Carrots (Euskaltel) so much that they wave fists and shout at him: then he blocks a Carrot, nearly causing a crash:, and definitely causing annoyance:  then a Katusha rider has to shout at him to get out of the way.  And this was all on the flat!

After a lot of pedalling, Tondo ("Yay! Go Tondo!") and Frankie ("Yay! Go Frankie!") made a break, Frankie riding with his jersey open to show that there was no illegal aerodynamic enhancements hidden away in there. Tondo pulls away! No-one in the chasing group responded: Frankie was caught by the group, Tondo leads over the top but the catch is made, boo. Having just discussed the apparent fact that both Andy and Frank were not looking strong, suddenly Andy comes shooting out of the trees - we were on helicopter footage only at this point, presumably the camera-bike had been clubbed to the ground by irate cyclists - and races for home. Unfortunately he had Vinokorouv ("boo") sucking his wheel all the way,  and Andy ended up with 11th place in the stage.

Day 5: In the words of David Harmon "One of those days when nothing happens." Nothing happened until 2.4kms to go. No wonder the UCI are trying to find ways to make cycling more interesting for the casual viewer.

So, at 2.4km to go, the previously invisible Steve Cummings of Sky took off like a rocket: what we call "a TV break". A Carrot had a dig as well, but the stage went to Oscar Freire, as the commentators had promised all the way through the race. However, not for long: Sammy Sanchez gave him a helping push, apparently, and the pair of them were demoted and sent to the back of the peloton. That's a bit like the naughty corner, but there are fewer comfy chairs.

Andy still sitting in 11th, only 18 seconds down, but the last day is a time trial....

Day 7: ITT.

We join it part-way through, as always: Jensi is sitting at 7th position, go Jensi! and Jakob at 3rd, Yay! Jakob!

Something strange happened: Radioshack 8 (Rovne) was doing strange leg movements - a momentary knees-out gesture. Cramp? Skin-suit pinching in an awkward place? Trapped hair? Will we ever find out?

Bearing in mind that the last time I asked an obscure question like this, it was about Johan Van Summeren, who then went on to win Paris-Roubaix.

Will we therefore see great things of Rovne?  Who knows.

Meanwhile, Johan V-S is famous for more than That Moment (*sighs*), apparently a few years ago he ran over a cat.

See picture.

Caption: (from the cat, of course) "I can has tubular?"

(Note: if this means nothing, you need to learn about LOLcats, who have inexplicably bad grammar and speeling, but extremely good humour. Wups, 10 mins later, after a quick digression and four pages of lolcats, I'm baaaack!)

Back to the cycling: another strange expression from the commentators: "Kessiakov is carrying a bit of timber this year."  Hmmm. Presumably this year's slang for "putting on a bit of weight." Or possibly "building up a bit of muscle"?  This must be coffee-moment-provokingly funny for all you lot in America where the non-related expression  "to have wood" is well known.

Oh, pay attention, it's Chris "Face of Pain" Anker Sorensen. We laugh as he wobbles off the launching ramp.

David Harmon is still calling Jakob "Fool-slang", this is getting annoying. I might even have to ask LLB for permission to use his laptop to Tweet in and tell him so.

How odd - Sammy Sanchez has just done that very same gesture with the knees! It must be a time trial thing... anyone know what it's all about? Suggestions welcomed.

Andy finally finishes his TT, and guess what, he's looking back over his shoulder again. If the wind changes, his neck will get stuck in that position, you know.

And then it's all over, phew, we ought to get medals for endurance. Andy is 12th in the GC, and according to the Team Leopard site, they are happy that he's "riding well for this time of year."

And if they are happy, then we are happy!

Fleche Wallone - yes, I know I'm late!

Yup, I know I'm a bit late with this, but I've been snowed under with work, and LLB and I only get to catch up with the cycling we've recorded during the week, at the weekend. Pardon the sentence construction.

So we all know what happened, (Phil Gil won it) therefore I won't bother with the blow-by-blow report - if you feel the need to relive it, pop over to Miss Fede's Blog for the full details - and I will just add my few extra comments.

To start with, in England we have a tradition in sports reporting that sports are given time slots for their coverage, but if they over-run, then whatever is supposed to follow it gets delayed. This is very sensible and logical: after all, what's the point in watching the bulk of a race/match.competition then missing the last ten minutes when you find out who won.

Normally, tennis is the culprit - they schedule it a slot, but it can over-run by a significant amount, causing chaos amongst the following programmes.

We don't mind that too much - tennis is popular, I understand it: but snooker? (*voice rises indignantly*) Snooker?!

Anyway, eventually the damned snooker finished (yawn) and our live coverage started, and there we were, all agog to see Andy and Frankie in a race together, along with Contador. Would there be hugs? Would there be fireworks? Would there be elbows in the peloton, and hissy fits?

No, of course there weren't, we barely saw Contador, leading LLB and I to suspect that although he's fully prepared to win everything in Spain, he's keeping a low profile out in the real world, until the Longest Enquiry In The History Of Cycling (sorry, Lance) finishes.

Once again, terrible wobbly camera-bike work: makes me wonder how Tour de France can get it so right, and everyone else get it so wrong. Also, have they not heard of steady-cams? I can't imagine it's technically that difficult to get a steadier image from the back of a bike.  OK, before all the camera-bike fans shoot me down in flames, I admire the camera bikes tremendously, not just the nerve of the cameraman who has to trust his pilot with his life, but also the skill of the pilot who is controlling an inherently unstable top-heavy bike while his passenger commits every crime known to pillion passengers in the sense of leaning left and right, up and down, unpredictably..... but notwithstanding that, as a viewer, I want clear images, please!

So, finally the coverage started, and SaxoBlank and the Leopards (sounds like a 50s pop group with a girl drummer...) were pulling hard at the front.

David Harmon, commentating, said "And we are online live now in Australia." and there was a chorus of "Hi, Leelu!" from LLB and I. Then I distinctly heard Brian Smith, the other commentator, talking about Jakob FOOGLE-SLANG and I thought "oh no, Leelu's going to erupt off the sofa, spitting and cursing!"

Apart from that, not a terribly exciting race, until we got to the part where Andy was leading Frankie and the Peloton (another 50s group, this time biker boys in black leather with greasy quiffs) down the penultimate hill, LLB and I were eating Easter Eggs at the time, and he took advantage of my total concentration on OGL to steal bits of my egg while I wasn't looking. What a swine, eh?

Finally, we had Frankie leading the peloton up the Muy de Huy: not for long, but at least he got 7th. The leader board on Eurosport showed Andy as coming 4th. Uh? We clearly saw him dying like a dog on the last climb - how did he get in 4th? Did he teleport? But no, it was a mistake, he came 44th. At least Frankie beat Contador, who came in 11th. Oh, and my favourite Carrot, Igor Anton from Euskaltel, came in 5th, so I was pretty pleased with the results.

Now, in the last post there was a comment from CeCe about Andy and his new girlfriend - possibly - and here is the photo we were talking about: gorgeous photo, isn't it?  The sort you could imagine made into an arty print, on textured fake-canvas paper, with no frame.

So if anyone knows the story of this photo, do tell.

Incidentally, there have been some ludicrous search terms leading to the blog in the last couple of days: things such as:

"Andy Schleck girlfriend April 2011."   Interestingly specific.

"Andy Schleck girls"  Yes, we've all tried that one, haven't we.

"frefre eisen sex tv"  Don't ask me what that's all about, I haven't a clue.

"Fugl scarves"  Aha! That's more like it! First and Second for Schleckland, closely followed at Third by Miss FeeDee. Yay for the Schlecklanders!

Finally:

"Is Andy Schleck gay" Well, what a question.

a) No, he's not.
b) If he is, it's none of our business.
c) Even if he is, I don't care, he's still adorable.
d) No, he's not.

That's it for now, short blogs this week: lots to do!

Amstel Gold

Aw, and it nearly was Gold for Our Glorious Leader - he had his moment! Alas, he didn't quite win, as we all know now, but oh! so close!

Our Eurosport coverage was a bit sparse, we were well through the race before we joined it, and at the end it was cut off before we even got the final positions of more than the top 10, so I didn't actually know where Andy finished until about an hour ago.

So, how did the race look to me? Well, it started with Leelu screaming about the, er, substandard streaming. No, not in person, on Twitter... LLB and I were sitting waiting ready to watch, but we let the recording start and run for about 15 minutes so that once we start watching, we can fast forward through the adverts. I can thoroughly recommend replacing your outdated video recorders with Hard Disk Drive Recorders, by the way. We can even replay, pause, etc in the bit we are watching, while it continues to record it for us!

Anyway, we were wasting time to give it a head start, and LLB had Twitter up. "OOh!" I said, "can we see if Leelu is still up? I bet she's watching it." so we found her, and sure enough, there she was, complaining about the stream which was breaking up. So I quickly signed in just to give her a shock and tell her off about using bad language (no, I didn't really do that). And BY THE WAY MISS FEEDEE what's all this about the hunky young Lithuanian? I shall tell Andy of you......

Eurosport started by telling us why Rabobank were wearing slightly different jerseys in this race,and making a big thing out of the fact that they'd asked permission to do so, unlike Certain Other Teams (ie Radioshack) in the TdF last year. However, they didn't tell us what the "rose" thing was all about: we assumed it's another cancer charity of some kind. Nice jerseys, though: still sufficiently blue, white and orange to be recognisable.

Then suddenly it was oh dear, poor Katusha, having problem: uh? What problems? We paused our viewing to look it up on google! Oh, drugs again, this time it's the Biological Passports, five of them were seized. Good thing Rob Hayles wasn't commentating, he'd have something to say about that.

Note: Rob Hayles - ex Track and Road cyclist, now a commentator - had a horrible experience when his bio passport seemed to indicate an irregularity, back when they'd just been invented, and he was banned from participating in the Worlds. Then the UCI were told that track cyclists have a different training regime from road cyclists, so their bio passports are bound to show differences which are not irregularities, but are artifacts of the way in which they train and race. Once again, the UCI shoots itself in the foot. Rob was exonerated, but you can only imagine that it's left a mark.....

Back to Amstel Gold - Ryder Hesjedal appears to be texting. "On the rce, nce dy, lking fwrd to airprt"  perhaps? Oh, he's not texting, he's just trying to open a gel.

By the way, am I the only one who took several races to realise that Ryder was his first name? I kept hearing it as "rider Hesjedal" as opposed to "driver Hesjedal"  or "mechanic Hesjedal" perhaps. Do you know, there are times when I think I'm not as bright as I think I am....

And then OH NO! Tumbling Leopards! We were just saying that the peloton looked a bit nervous when oof! over they went, and there was Frankie right in the middle of it, one of the earliest to go down, although please note I am not suggesting that he was the one who caused it. However, he was almost definitely the one that Fabian ran into! And ooof, poor old Fabian went down hard. We replayed that bit several times, and it really did look as though Fabu went straight up the back of Frankie, as Frankie was just hitting the deck.

Oddly enough, in Cycling News, Frankie says that he was behind Fabu, and Fabu went down first. Well, as they were there, and we were only watching the rather limited images shown to us, then they must be right. But I must day, it looked as though Frankie took out Fabu.

Fabian took a moment to get back on his bike, he was wringing his wrist and looking pained: but then, as though made of rubber, Fabian bounced back on his bike and the two of them were off. At first we thought that Frankie was bringing Fabu back, but then Frankie's bike broke (drat) and Fabian went off like a rocket!

Even the commentators were saying "Good lord, look at him go!" and raving about his bike handling skills. And going "fffffffff!" (sharp intake of breath through small gap in teeth) as he screamed around the cars, around the corners, around more cars, between the motorbikes etc. It looked as though he was at least rocket-powered, but I understand from Fede's blog that his bike also turned out to be broken,  but he did manage to finish.

Meanwhile, Our Glorious Leader is in the leading group. He's at the front. Ooh!  He's looking back over his shoulder. Why, Andy, why? You all have radios, you know that Fabu and Frankie have had both crashes and mechanicals and aren't going to be there. I've noticed a couple of times this year that both Schlecks seem unable to ride at the front of a group without having their chins on their shoulders. As Rincewind said: "When running away from something, never waste time looking back over your shoulder: nothing you will see will make you run any faster, and you might just trip over something."

Ok, so there are sound tactical reasons for looking back in some situations, they just seem to be doing it a lot.

End of digression;

Andy at the front! Andy pulling away! No-one can go with him! Yay, Andy! Andy pulls it into a gap! Not a huge gap, but if he can just keep ahead until we reach the much-hyped Steep Bit At The End then he might be in with a chance. We all know he's not a sprinter, but he's pretty darned good at climbing, and the commentators have told us all the way through the race that it ends in a "nasty little kick". Go, Andy!

Jakob, meanwhile, is doing a textbook illustration of How To Play It When Your Teammate Has Made A Break.  He hung on, always near the front but not doing any pulling, but not letting himself get more than three or four away from the front. And every time anyone made a move, he was there on the wheel.  Thus he saves his own energy, but if anyone else tries, he can go with them and then there will be two of them in the lead group. And he did it perfectly, and when Gilbert made his move, Jakob went too.

As we all know, Andy didn't quite make it up the hill alone, Gilbert did it, and Simon Gerrans from Sky just squeezed Jakob into fourth place.

At that point Eurosport wound it all up, so I've had to go online to find that Andy came 11th, Little Fab 20th, Frankie 22nd,  Maxime 63rd and Fabu 64th.

So that was the Amstel Gold, then! Not a terribly exciting race, except for when Andy was leading for the last 5 kms or so. Lovely countryside.

Now, as we're a bit short of photos today (Firefox is crashing every time I try to search for an Image) I can show you some ideas for the Schleckland Flag which I will be waving at the Tour of Britain later in the year.

Figgy suggested using silhouettes of certain noses to form the outline of a country, so I found a kaleidoscope site which allowed me to upload my own pictures, then kaleidoscope them.

Here's the first effort:

OK, it's a bit scary, actually.

So I tried again, and I thought this one was a bit nicer, even though neither of them are really suitable for putting on a flag. But they were fun to do!

Our Glorious Leader!

D'aaaaw, he's so cute! Andy Schleck resisting make-up. Or possibly some last-minute fluffing.

Why? "Because I can!"  No, actually, it's because I don't have time to write up the 3 days of de Panne properly, and I am not prepared to do it in a hurry, but I didn't want you to think that I'd disappeared, or gone off Our Glorious Leader or anything like that. 

And this weekend we have Amstel Gold, yay!

Before I go, a quick word on the passport saga - LLB, while we were watching one of the Belgian races, commented that we could easily go there and watch it. Except of course for the little matter of my passport.

"Why don't you just send off the forms?" he said, in mild annoyance.

So I dug out the forms, which were buried under a pile of stuff. Then I couldn't find the photos. I know where they were, I know where I left them, safe and ready, but out of sight so I don't have to look at them too much.

Two days later, still no sign of them. Then, aha! a brainwave. Perhaps I tucked them inside the old passport, ready to be sent off. Yes! That must be it! Makes sense, logical, sensible, just the sort of thing I would do.

So I went to get the old passport - er? Where's the passport gone?

Paris-Roubaix and Ridiculous Tuftage

Thanks to MJ for bringing this to my attention: don't scream all at once!

This is Kevin Ista of Cofidis winning the award for best Helmet Hair after the event.

Check out Steephill TV for more photos - including some superb shots of the winner and his girlfriend, but be warned, in an ultimate unkind moment, someone has taken a close-up of Johan Van Summeren as he crosses the line, and you can see right down his throat, through strings of phlegm and piles of dirt. Not pretty. Not kind. But ignore that one, and skip over to the others.

And as for the last one, I agree with the question, what IS Fabian thinking?

Paris-Roubaix - blood, sweat and cobbles

"The Hell of the North" they call it - and they aren't kidding. It's supposed to refer to the number of battlefields encompassed by the route, but having watched all those bodies all over the road, well, I think the name just stands by itself.

Our coverage in the UK started with interviews from before the race - despite me shouting "get on to the live coverage!" at the tv - and some of those were priceless.

Some un-named journo to Geraint Thomas of Sky (my second team) "Does your track background help you across the cobbles?"

Well, let's think, shall we: what does a professional career on the track entail? Riding round a perfectly smooth, flat, banked, wooden track, with perfect straights and perfect curves, for a start. Not exactly like cobbles. Normally in an indoor stadium, so no wind, no rain, no dust: hmmm, not a lot like cobbles, then. Also no road furniture, no spectators within clobbering range, no stray animals, no grass, no mud, no helicopter overhead: no motorbikes churning up the dust right in front of your face when you are trying to lead the race: actually, no, nothing like riding cobbles.

Sometimes I wonder how some of these journos have the nerve...

Anyway, after a brief look at Cavendish saying that he was there for the experience and would be acting as a domestique (*pause for hysterical laughter*), at last, we got on to the racing.

Aww, poor Tom Boonen, you have to feel sorry for the guy: three times winner of this race - and after having the longest wait after a mechanical since Andy Schleck lost his bike in the Tour (that's where Matti "Here, have my bike" Breschel got his name),  he then had another fall and although he got up and carried on, he didn't finish the race.

Watching, it was clear that the Rabobank rider took Boonen out, but any suggestion that it was deliberate, as Rabobank's Maarten Tjellingi (great name) was in the lead at the time... just can't be true.

Even though feeling very sorry for Boonen, I had to be a bit cross at the same time, as Team Leopard were pushing their group on at that time, and we were just - at last - getting a good bit of Leopard coverage, when it cut to Mr Boonen and that was the last time we really saw much of the team.

And oh! those crashes! I'd heard so much about how slippery the cobbles can get in the rain, and how it normally rains at this event, but it was bone dry: yet there were still bodies all over the road. And half the time, on the tarmac sections!

There was a lovely bit where Flecha (Sky) and Lars Boom of Rabobank were having an argument about something: our Eurosport commentators had no idea what was going on, but the TV feed showed it a couple of times: Boom clearly pushed Flecha, twice - very playground - and then shouted back over his shoulder at Flecha.  I'd love to know what that was all about!

Ah, Fabu, what can we say? A great ride, a great rider,  and although we would all have loved to see him get first again, well, second wasn't bad. Although there he was, after the race, doing self-towellage! Cristin, where were you!!

And frankly, I thought Van Summeren deserved the win. He rode well, he took his chance, he pedalled and pedalled and pedalled, and while Fabian was doing heroic things overtaking the chase group, he just kept on pedalling.

And you have to love seeing him and his girlfriend/wife at the end: warning, this is the girly bit, so boys can just skip ahead or go somewhere else.

Remember "Friends" where Ross finally kissed Rachel? She's telling the girlies all about it:  "well, at first it was really gentle, and then he sort of leaned into it, ("ooh" from the girls) then he ran his fingers through my hair, ("aaaaw" from the girls) then it got sort of intense, ("aaaah" from the girls)" meanwhile in the other apartment Ross is telling the boys; "Dude, I kissed Rachel." "Tongues?" asks Joey. "Yes." he says. "Cool!" says Joey.  It's that sort of thing.

Van Summeren, who - by the way - makes Our Glorious Leader look a bit short and ever so slightly stocky,  comes off the track, press and soigneurs all around him, he pulls his girlfriend into his arms and just holds here there, tucked under his chin. OK, he's 6' 5" so she's probably accustomed to that view.... so he holds her there for a long, long moment. Then he kisses her on the forehead (she's probably accustomed to that, as well), then on the lips, bending himself in order to do so: then they exchange a few words at a distance of like an inch or two: then finally they do a big kiss. D'aaaaw! And with all those cameras around!  Excuse me while I melt a bit.

Finally they managed to get him onto the podium - crikey, he's tall! And thin! I did have the slightly unworthy thought that the podium girls were going to have a bit of difficulty kissing him: and I could imagine him thinking "If you intend to hang a medal around my neck, you are going to have to get up here on the podium with me." But as it turned out, an incredibly short man came out to do the presentation, and not only hung a medal round his neck, forcing him to bend double, but insisted on kissing him as well, forcing him to bend, er, triple! And as for the presentation cobblestone, well blimey, what a ridiculous trophy to give someone after six hours of racing, when you'd imagine they can barely hold their arms aloft, let alone a hulking great cobblestone...

So, Van Summeren:  we already know him, of course, he's the Garmin rider who, at Quatar, rode with his sleeves folded up inside so that the blue band didn't show. And in the Loope race, he was of course Garmin 2, the one having the argument with Garmin Base about rolling his sleeves up.

So if Fabian had to be beaten by someone, I'm jolly glad that it was someone with a Schleckland history.

I have nothing to say about the Basque Tour yet, as we've only managed to watch the first stage, but I have learned something: when watching tv coverage of a race, it's no good leaning to try to get the camera to swing round a bit so that you can check out your team's riders.... is it just me that did that?

Ultimate Tuft

"What!" I can hear you screeching:  "Puma Babe (*"I wish!"*) has gone bonkers again!

No, I haven't gone bonkers, although the thought of being able to watch Paris-Roubaix on Sunday LIVE is quite thrilling: and knowing that in spare moments, we have all that footage, lots and lots of lots of it, of Our Glorious Leader and other fave Leopards pedalling for glory in the Basque country. And of course the beauty of having recorded it, is that if there are any "particularly good" bits, I can watch them again! And again!

Yay!

Talking of which, I've just checked the Leopard site, and has anyone noticed the incredibly poor quality of the official Leopard Trek photos for the Basque Tour? Take a look! They're all pixellated and horrible! Perhaps Mean Old Mr Watson the photographer has finally realised that everyone else and his dog are just pinching his photos off the site, and featuring them in blogs, tumblr etc without bothering to ask, so he's only putting up poor quality photos?  That'll teach him to say "no" to someone who asks politely.

So, what about this photo then? LLB brought to my attention that there is a cyclist called Svein Tuft - no, really, you can look him up on google. Until last year he rode for Garmin, but for some reason he's downgraded himself to a Canadian pro-continental team called SpiderTech. Great name. Both his, and that of the team.

And that's him, in his Garmin days, undergoing a specific sort of torture for cyclists in the space legs. I kid you not, that's what they're called. Something to do with compression - presumably considered to be funkier than support hose or tubigrip.

Sadly, though, Mr Tuft will never be a member of the Tufty Club, as he lacks the necessary appendage, ie hair.

Which means we will have to return to Our Glorious Leader for true and wonderful tuftage.

As an aside, I have just discovered, while looking at pictures of Andy researching this blog, that if you type into Google "Andy Schleck" and hair, on page four, you get my avatar! Bizarre! Look! There I am, sandwiched between Cute Overbite ("Hi Maggie!") and my favourite photo, er, second favourite photo.

I'm impressed!

So, back to Tuftage:

Gotta love that fluffy "I've just been rubbed down by my soigneur and have seen neither a comb nor a mirror since" look.

I have to wonder what the photographers behind him are up to - he's over here! You've missed him!

And now, just because I can, here's Andy being fluffed prior to the photo shoot:  you can tell he's not taking it all too seriously, can't you?

Looks a little as though she's struggling with what's left of his hair - this is not long after that brutal chop he had for the Team Leopard Trek presentation back in January - and is trying to fluff up the remains.

Ah, what a terrible job, having to run your fingers through Andy Schleck's hair while the two of you laugh and joke together......

Day Trip to Flanders

Yay! Go Fabian!

Day Trip? Well, come on, you can't really call it a "Tour", can you? One day? I know Flanders isn't exactly a huge place, but still...

Also known as Ronde Van Vlaanderen, the Unofficial Belgian National Championship started in 1913 and, since changing it's date so as not to clash with Milan-Sanremo, it's become quite a big thing, with narrow lanes, cobbles, steep twisty climbs, and lots of them, all close together. It's the race where you sometimes see pictures of riders pushing their bikes - because if one rider falls or fails, everyone behind him comes to a dead halt and they just can't get pedalling again.  Mmm, think I'll have a go at it.... "not".

So, despite initial disappointment that it was only one day, we settled in front of LLB's tv with big mugs of tea, piles of biscuits and fluffy teddy-bear slippers (*waves to Hippi and Hoppi*) to enjoy watching Fabian Cancellara flatten everyone again, Live! yay!  and here are my Random Thoughts (as Miss FeeDee says!) on the race..

On Eurosport, we started in the studio, with comments and introduction from Rob Hayles, right - this is about the only photo I could find of him smiling - who is a former track star as well as road cyclist, and often has interesting comments to make.

LLB says he ought to be more animated, and I have to agree, he is a bit on the deadpan side, but I enjoy listening to him. Had to laugh, he says "Lay O'Pard" instead of Lepper'd, but we don't know why, and no-one else mentioned it.

LLB and I have speculated in the past that some people are kowtowing to the Lay O'Pard camp for political reasons: Leopard may well decline interviews or not give preference to journos etc who don't pronounce it "correctly".

Side Issue: In my opinion, letting Trek issue that press release was the stupidest thing they did, and whichever PR person thought of it should be shot. They would have been well within their rights to make a statement saying that in Lux/europe generally, it's pronounced Lay O'Pard and that's what they'd prefer to hear, but they should never have tried the ridiculous CAPITAL LETTERS  business.

Leaving that aside, they really should have given some thought to how the rest of the English-speaking world would pronounce it. In the same way, within Luxembourg they call it Letzeburg (with umlauts that I can't easily do) but they accept that the rest of the world calls it Luxembourg. Sometimes they call it Lux too: I seem to remember Andy tweeting about going home to Lux. Not home to Letz.  Oh, that was in the days before I broke Twitter, of course.So, you'd think that they would a) realise that the entire English-speaking world was going to say Lepper'd, and b) accept it.

I still want to be there the first time that a team member calls it Lepper'd!

But I digress. Not a surprise to anyone who reads this regularly.

Our coverage on Eurosport started at 123kms to go, and there was Stuey! At the front! With Wouter Weylandt and Young Dominic, Mr Orange Head himself! Confusingly, Dominic and Wouter were both wearing hideous orange glasses: oh Dominic, keep your hat on, or they will clash!

Once we went to live pics, the commentators changed to David Harmon and Sean Kelly, and David Harmon mentioned that he had been asked to write an article on How To Make Cycling More Interesting To Watch.
Well, here's a suggestion, get some common sense into the team kits: organise some sort of central office who keeps a record of team kits, so when a team is making a new kit, or changing an old one, they can see what everyone else is doing, and can decide whether or not to adjust their kits accordingly. I am certain that if Leopard, for example, knew that Garmin were radically changing their kit to black/white/same shade of blue, making three teams with very similar kits, they would have re-thought theirs.

Also, I think that watchers would be more interested if they could pick riders out for themselves more easily: Sky started it with having the rider's name on the side panel of the jersey: I'd go a step further and ask for the rider's name to be very prominent on the side and on the shoulders as well - so we can see it from the front as well as the side. After all, footballers do it, and there are less than two dozen of them. We have nearly 200 to sort through! Maybe something on the hats could be changed? Perhaps each rider could be allowed to personalise the back section of his hat? All comments welcomed, and the best ones will be forwarded to the UCI.

Talking of the UCI and the race radios ban, we had a lovely gimmick in this race - webcams in four of the team cars, so we could see and hear what they were saying on Race Radio.  The teams were Garmin, Quickstep, Saxo and Omega Pharma Lotto.

Why? When radios are just about to be banned, why bother with this? Were they perhaps trying to prove that they are only used for safety reasons? Well, that backfired, as we clearly heard the Garmin DS telling his guys not to work, while Fabian and Chavanel were storming away out the front. Intriguingly , he seemed to feel the need to explain these tactics: you can read his rather defensive comments here in Velonation, if you are interested. Otherwise the only good part was watching Uncle Bjarne Riis having his head hugged by his driver when Nick Nuyens just made it over the line. Who, we wondered, was steering the car at this point? I was expecting a report at any second to say that several riders had nearly been mown down by an out-of-control team car, but it appears they were lucky. And yes, they were moving, you could see the scenery moving past.

This was a very interesting race from the point of view of Peloton Dynamics (oh dear, I can see you all running away in dismay - come back! I'll put in a picture of Andy!)



Here he is, rolling his own.

Note for non-UK readers, "rolling his own" means making cigarettes by rolling up loose tobacco in filter papers.

Is usually done by men well over the age of 70, and by young "chavs" ( short for "mentally/morally/socially retarded blokes" ) who are trying to look "hard" or "tough" by pretending that they are adding substances other than just tobacco to their cigarettes.

The thought that Our Glorious Leader would smoke roll-ups is just so ridiculous that I don't even need to emphasis that This Is A Joke.

So, Peloton Dynamics. Well, I know a lot about this, as for the first several years that I watched pro cycling, I didn't really watch individual riders at all, I just used to watch the play of colours within the peloton as the teams formed, broke up, reformed, moved up and down, etc.  I'm sure someone has written a very dull paper on the subject, drawing contrasts between Peloton Dynamics and the Brownian Motion that we all remember from school.... but you can clearly see, in the helicopter shots, how the teams form and reform.

Normally, the middle of the peloton surges forward, and people drop off the sides, being re-absorbed or falling right to the back.

But in Flanders, in these very narrow lanes, where the cyclists are all fighting to get to the front, they use the road gutters, the pavements (if in town), even the grass verges, in order to avoid getting squashed and risking falling. So, in the helicopter shots, you can clearly show them making their way fast up the outsides of the peloton! Fascinating stuff. A typical conversation on our settee went like this:

"Oh look, two of them are going round the outside."
"Round the outside?"
"Round the outside."
"Two buffalo boys go round the outside" etc

There was a lovely moment when Joost Posthuma - recovering well from his earlier crash - was in the front of the peloton approaching a tight corner and, along with several others, totally failed to take the corner. Wups! Luckily no-one fell off, but he lost several places in the peloton thanks to that, and it must have affected his rhythm.

On other random thought that has occurred to me before, is to feel sorry for the mobile Marshalls, the ones who stand on traffic islands gesturing with a yellow flag as to which side of the obstruction would be the preferred route. It must take a lot of nerve not to flinch when the entire peloton is bearing down on you, and you are armed only with a whistle and the yellow flag. No wonder they keep their helmets on. Personally I'd be wearing shin-pads and a body-protector as well! I wonder how often they get clobbered?

Actually I quite fancy doing that, if I had to pick a job within a cycle race - that's assuming that several of you have already beaten me to the Wet Sponge option. I mean, you get your own motorbike and high-vis bib, and you get to whizz around in a group, up the back roads from one set of obstructions to another: then you stand there and risk being trampled on for five minutes, then back on the bike and whizz off to the next danger spot. What fun! I imagine they are all fully radio'd up, so there would be cross-chat and gossip during the intervals, and the occasional panic: "Base to RoadRat 15! Get over to [name of small village] immediately, there's a nasty traffic island that needs an attendant!" Yup, that would just suit me.


Talking of roundabouts, had to add this - did anyone else see the, er, incredible roundabout art:

It appears to be made up of dead bicycles, so I'm not entirely sure what it is saying about their committment to pro cycling.

Perhaps it's a temporary thing, and all the townspeople bring their pushbikes along on the day, then come back the next day and reclaim their property.

Possibly an opportunity to upgrade, ha! ha!

At this point I'd like to add a quick word of support for David Harmon the Eurosport commentator at this point, harking back to the double question of making the races more interesting, and the kit conflicts. He was excellent in saying things like "So-and-so riding for Rabobank in the orange and blue" and "so-and-so in the blue with yellow shoulder flashes, that's VacansOleil." On the one hand it's a nuisance that we need this level of help in spotting the riders, but on the other hand, thank you David Harmon!

Finally, I get back to the actual race: what an exciting race to watch! All that narrow stuff, all those streets, and as for Fabian's enormous effort, what can I say? Actually the shouted conversation between the Quickstep team car and the Leopard team car says it all: the Quickstep DS was yelling out of the window, "He's too strong!"   And considering that he's not a sprinter, Fabian did an amazing job right at the very end there. Great ride!

Was it my imagination, by the way, or did Fabian slip a gear on one of the final hills? Drat, I don't know which one, but it was when Gilbert attacked. Fabian went to respond and it looked as though he faltered, just for a moment: he looked down at his bike, then he was up, up and away again.

I'm very pleased to be able to talk about a race soon after the event instead of being a fortnight late.. next week we are recording the Basque Tour - which actually has a really catchy and singable name, what was it again?  (*pause for googling*) Vuelta Ciclista al País Vasco. That was it. Great name... "not". But next weekend we have Paris-Roubaix live on Sunday, so we will be watching that one as it happens. Which means that we won't have enough time to watch all the Basque footage... and Team Schlux are sending a dream team: Frankie, Andy, Jensi, Jakob, Steff'n'd'neff'll, MM, Anders and Little Fab. It's going to be impossible not to read the cycling news this week! Perhaps we'll save it for later in the month when there isn't as much to watch live..

And finally finally: did you know: since 1993 the cobbled ways have been protected by law - and this is all thanks to cycling!