Poor Andy, he must be sick to death of hearing about other riders' wonderful recoveries from broken pelvises!
Pelvisis?
Pelvi?
Anyway *shakes head* whatever the plural of pelvis is... first we had G in the Tour, falling off right at the beginning, fracturing his pelvis, and not only continuing to ride, but after a very quiet, hang-on-grimly-at-the-back week or so, he even started taking turns on the front of the peloton, and contributing to the team effort.
Then, today, we hear that Barbie Barbie - Heinrich Haussler - who broke his pelvis in the Tour de Suisse earlier this year, is not only back on his bike, but is about to participate in the Tour de Poitou-Charentes (chorus of "Where?") after making a better recovery than anticipated. And at one point, he was in a wheelchair!!
Whereas Our Andy was struggling to ride for, how long? Aaaaages. It must be very galling for him to read this reports.
Of course, none of us know exactly how bad each injury was - G's fracture must have been, with due respect to him, a small one, for him to continue riding. Likewise we don't have all the details of Barbie Barbie's injury.
However, this does not stop people criticising Our Andy for taking "too long" to recover. I have more or less decided that I am never going to read the cycling forums again, as they are just so spiteful and generally horrible. Not just to Andy, I hasten to add, the attacks swing around from rider to rider as time passes, but as an Andy-fan, I do feel that Andy has come in for a lot of what you might call "Anti-fan" attention.
That's not quite the right word for them, but I can't think of anything better right now: you know the sort I mean, the ones who are not exactly cycling fans, as all they can talk about is how doping is ruining the sport, how cycling is finished, how everyone is doping, how [insert name of rider] is rubbish.
Why, I have to ask, do they bother to follow the sport if it upsets them so much?
The answer, as with "why on earth do teenagers continue to log on to a web site where they get cyber-bullied?" seems to be that they are desperate for attention, and any attention is better than getting a life of their own.
*sigh*
Talking of desperate for attention, what about the unlovely Pat McQuaid, then? Anyone else been following this story, mouth open and staggered (despite being sitting down at the time) at the bare-faced effrontery of the man?
In case you haven't noticed, he's been the president of the UCI for years, and he is not a popular man in cycling circles any more - mostly, it seems to me, because he does not seem to be at all interested in the rights and safety of the cyclists. I don't know exactly what he IS interested in, other than keeping his position and swanning around as a VIP visitor.... presumably "money" is there somewhere in his agenda, and "showing everyone that I am in charge" as he seems to be unable to work with any other person or organisation, even when it is a situation that would benefit all the riders and the sport in general.
I'm thinking of one of the USA races from last year, was it, when he, as leader of the UCI, refused to supply the usual Doping Controls to a race, because the race organiser had said that the UCI system was not strict enough, and that they wanted to bring in a private company to do the testing. Not only did Mr McQuaid ban this outside company from attending the event, he then refused to send the UCI testers, meaning that the race went ahead with no doping control at all.
What he should have done was to either allow both systems to run side by side (if he really, truthfully doubted that the private company were up to the job) then to compare results afterwards, to see if one team or the other were "better" at detecting irregularities. Why would he not do this? The only sensible conclusion is that he was afraid that his own doping control would be found to be less effective.
*throws hands in air*
So now he's facing the utter humiliation of not being re-elected as president, and he is squirming around finding every loophole that he can, to try to get the re-election.
Firstly, when his own Federation (Ireland) shocked him rigid by voting against his nomination, (after he had tried to fiddle it, this is) he announced that his "other" federation, Switzerland, would nominate him.
That nomination is being legally challenged.
So he rounded up another couple of Federations - really obscure ones like Thailland and Morocco: like, "who?", not exactly major cycling nations - and persuaded them to put forward an amendment to the UCI's soul-sucking rules to say that any two federations could nominate someone.
Now this, really, is cheating.
But then - and this is the real "cheating" part - he got them to ask for this change to be applied retroactively (or do I mean retrospectively? Backdated, by any name) so that he could use it to sneak in to this year's election.
What a slimy little rat!
And not once, as far as I can tell, has he said "the reason I am going to these extraordinary lengths to remain UCI president, is that I am the best man for the job, and only I can lead cycling through this bad time and safely out the other side, to the overall benefit of cycling."
No, he just wants to stay in charge.
And the worst he can throw at his rival, Brian Cookson (who I have never met, never heard speak, but he runs British Cycling and has turned it around from a minor sport somewhere way below Darts to something that now gets news headlines in this country) is that Mr Cookson has not travelled around the cycling world and made lots of contacts with lots of federations in the way that Mr McQuaid has.
But Mr Cookson is head of British cycling - and as such, I'd be pretty cheesed off if he were off wasting time on whizzing around the world, sucking up to other federations and being offered fake memberships in much the same way that universities give fake degrees to famous people. (And no, I have never realised why someone should get an honorary degree when they have not studied that subject.) I would expect him to do sufficient research visits to learn whatever was needed, but I would expect him to stay in the UK and get on with his job.
Mr McQuaid appears to be a sad, desperate, man (for "man" read "egotistical maniac/tyrant"), and I hope that he disappears without trace. Whether Mr Cookson will do a great job of it, or a merely mediocre one (blimey, who will be looking after British Cycling if he does?), he can't be any worse.
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