Andy Fails To Make Friends Down Under..

Oops, bit of a disaster on the final day - it's been a bit tricky to piece together what actually happened, but it does appear that Andy had a mechanical quite early in the race, a chain problem - and we all know  how he feels about chain problems - and abandoned the race.

Personally, I would have thought more of him if he had taken a new bike and pedalled on to the end: it would have been proof that he was not in pain, and that he had finished with the whole "Andy Schleck Abandons Race Again" theme from last year.

OK he would have come in last in the GC, and possibly last on the day.  And yes, I can see that would have been a little embarrassing for a top rider such as Our Andy. And yes, I wasn't there on the day, and don't know all the ins and outs.

But several of the Australian papers were saying that at the end, when RadioLeopard had won the team classification and were called up on stage for the presentation, "no-one knew where Schleck was" and they implied that there was a bit of a panic, with team-mates calling Andy on his mobile, and no-one knowing what was going on, until the RadioLeopard press officer confirmed that he had returned to the hotel.

Andy,  mate, what were you doing? You could at least have hung around at the finish to cheer on the others, sign a few autographs, do a few interviews, that sort of stuff.  Disappearing back to the hotel makes him look as though he was grumpy, or injured, or upset: that sort of thing.

And at this time, with last season being what it was, I think that the Schlecks need all the friends they can get.

Earlier in the week, Andy gave a very nice interview in English (Yay! Pets Andy) in which he says how hard it has been to come back from last season, in particular from the injury, but also from the problems with Mr Bruyneel, and with Frankie's test result.  

Snippets of gossip from the interview include the fact that he didn't watch much of last year's Tour - he said that once it was clear that he would not be on the team, he took his girlfriend off to Majorca to get away from it all.

He also said that having support from his family was very, very important, and said that he had a very good girlfriend that supported him, no matter what he did.

So, still seeing TinkerJill, then!

(And a good thing too!)

There was one audio interview with Jensie, but I couldn't get it to work properly - quotes in various reports seem to indicate that Jensie has Had A Word with Andy, and has told him to pull his socks up and get on with training and racing. I'll be interested to hear that interview, I'm hoping that once I'm back home on my own PC I'll be able to get it to work.

*little laptop puffs and wheezes with the effort of having to do all this work*

And it does indeed appear that the RadioLeopard kit has gone from red - Shack colours - to orange. Anyone out there know of a likely sponsor whose house colours are black, white and orange???