Yay, Midge!

It's always a thrill to hear my name mentioned on Eurosport, and yesterday was nearly as good - while watching coverage of the Vuelta a Valencia, which finished a week ago, but which we have only just got around to watching, Carlton Kirby was fumbling for the correct Spanish expression for Grupetto compacto, or "the groups are all back together now" meaning that the chasing peloton have caught the breakaways.

He was making things up, frankly, as neither he nor Matt knew the phrase, but then it was Midge to the Rescue!

"We've had a tweet," said Carlton, "with thanks to Midge Tremayne, the phrase is agrupado [errr, I didn't actually catch it, I was too busy squealing "Midge! Midge!" to a baffled LLB] so thank you Midge, @ParisWheels"

I was thrilled by proxy!

So why were we watching a week-old race?

Well, there isn't much on tv at the moment, and LLB hadn't realised that Sky were in this one, so he hadn't bothered to record it. When he found out that they were, he had to scrabble around to find any repeats or catch-up covereage, and in the end we only managed to see stages 4 and 5, but they were strangely satisfying: real, proper racing, despite being a shitsmall race, and even the shitsmall teams were having a go and working hard.

The surprise of the race, of course - apart from Midge getting a name check, that is - was that Wout Poels won just about all the jerseys!

Despite the race being very much in the bag for Team Sky, the last day was a thrilling race: the last 55k were filled with our commentators telling us that the on-screen km ticker was wrong, until with 15k to go they were finally told that the race had been shortened from 10 loops of the final circuit to 6.

Then Stijn Vandenbergh - now and forever known as Vandenbag - making a lone break for the finish line, picked up a large plastic bag which wrapped itself around the back end of his bike (luckily, not on the chain side) and  rustled and squeaked all the way to his brave solo across the finish line, with the sprinter teams panting down the back of the plastic bag but not quite able to get there in time.

Bizarrely, neither Etixx, Stijn's team, who won the stage, nor Sky, who won the race, have photos of the last day.  It's not on Steephill - it's such a shitsmall race that no-one covered it, it seems!

But I for one am happy to have seen it, not least for the plastic bag incident, but mostly for hearing Midge getting a name check.

Yay, Midge!