Tour of Poland and Inflatabubbles

Ah, I had been looking forward to the Tour of Poland ever since the end of le Tour - although we think of it as a shitsmall race, it's actually a proper UCI race, second only to the three major Tours, with 100 points for the overall winner. But somehow it has the feel of a shitsmall race, not least because most of the teams are a bit short of people to send - they've worn out one set at the Giro, worn out their A team at le Tour, and are holding on to the next rank for la Vuelta. So they often end up sending a bit of a Z-team to this tour.

This year, this was more apparent than usual as they are trying out a couple of new things, one of which was to reduce the number of riders to 6 per team. So the peloton was quite a bit smaller than usual - and was it coincidence that there were hardly any fallers? I don't think think there was a single major crash in the whole tour - not a bad thing, of course, and interesting in that I have suggested 6-man teams once or twice in the past, and this was a chance to see what that would look like.

Of course, my suggestion was to have a rolling selection of 6 riders from a team of 8 or 9, but I'm still prepared to take credit for the idea, ha ha!

Additionally, they have invented a strange new points system, aimed to give an incentive for breakaways, by offering points for the first guys to reach various lines along the way, and the ones with the most points each day were awarded bonification seconds off their GC times.

This gave a very strange slant to the results - the stage winners were obvious, but the GC winners were impossible to calculate until all the riders had finished, and they were unable to have the podium presentations until about 10 minutes after the race ended, as it took them that long to work out the timings. Not helped by the near-total lack of on-screen graphics, so we had no idea of time gaps, and no idea at all of how many kms there were to go.

So it was quite hard to follow the race each day, and impossible to work out who was leading the GC until an hour or so after the event, but it was - as always - thoroughly enjoyably full of giant inflatables all along the route.

They have the common or garden air bridges, of course, but they also have light-bulb shapes (which I call inflatabulbs).  I'd love to have one of my own... but I've been completely unable to find out how much it costs to have one, despite numerous google searches for "tour of poland inflatable advertising" and so on.

There are a few firms in the UK who do something similar, but not quite the same, and judging by their prices, they probably cost several hundred pounds each... not to mention the cost of transporting them, inflating them, anchoring, packing them down afterwards and so on.  Having said that, I don't even know if they are filled with helium, or just with normal air. If anyone knows, do please tell!

It's a tribute to the nice people of Poland that if they tried to use them in the UK in the same sort of way, they would be stolen: punctured: turned upside down: used as giant light sabres, sat on, used as bouncy castles... actually, I noticed a trend that must be a three-for-the-price-of-one deal, where you get an airbridge and a pair of inflatabulbs in the same livery. How much fun would that be? And no, I don't actually know what I would have on them... Eisen Andy, perhaps? Schleckland? Who knows....

LLB and I had another game to play during this race - Magnus Backstedt was commenting, along with Carlton Kirby, and we had noticed previously that Magnus has a particular way of saying the phrase "little bit", it comes out in his Swedish accent as "leedle bit". Every time he says it, we do a mini-mexican wave on the sofa.  And he says it quite a lot.

Alas, of course, no Andy in it: no sign of what he's going to be doing next, as Shack are one of the worst teams for not announcing who is riding until about ten minutes before the start of the race. OK, I appreciate that there are tactical reasons for not announcing your team too early, but I do think they should think of their fans from time to time: we do like to know what we are looking forward to!