Two days to Le Tour!

Hi Schlecklanders! *waves enthusiastically*

Time has passed, broken hearts are healing, and it's time for men in lycra, moans about motos, and les vaches du Tour - not to mention bus-stop-spotting and Schleckland Pets.

More of all those in due course.

For now, it's two days to go: we have the team presentations tomorrow (not that I will be watching them as I will be working, but heyho, we all have a cross to bear), nothing much on Friday, and then on Saturday, at long last, the first stage.

We start at Mont-Saint-Michel → Utah Beach, which seemed like an awfully long first stage, with a big wet bit in the middle, until I realised that Utah Beach was not, in fact, a beach in Utah, USA, but was actually just across the peninsula from Mont-Saint-Michel. Phew. I wouldn't want to have been diverted into watching Triathlon - with all due respect to everyone who does it, I just can't come to terms with men riding bikes in swimsuits.

Yes, I know that a pair of lycra bibshorts are a very short step away from being a swimsuit, yes I know you can swim in bibshorts, and yes, I know that I am frequently heard referring to our tough guys "riding bikes at perilous speeds with no padding and while wearing what is basically a swimsuit" but it's not ACTUALLY a swimsuit, and somehow men riding bikes in swimsuits looks, well, slightly indecent.

OK, I admit it, I'm a little weird. *shrugs in gallic fashion*

So, leaving that aside, two days to le Tour! I shall make a big effort to come on here and comment every day, so I hope you'll drop in, read it, leave a comment, start a debate, ask questions, all the usual stuff, which I will respond to, encourage, answer, or ignore, depending on whether or not I know the answer. I'll also be on Twitter from time to time, depending on how busy I am: I'm @SchlecklanderCG there, so do come along and say hello.

In the meantime, a strange thing happened while LLB and I were watching some shitsmall race or other a couple of months back:

Apologies for the fuzzy camera-phone pic of tv,  but what do I see there? It's the Leopard logo!

And yes, sure enough, it turned out to be the Lux based Leopard Pro Cycling, a continental level (ie third tier) feeder team. Remember them being set up, when Leopard-Trek folded? We made all those jokes at the time about them taking a dozen boxes of Leopard kit and the big old team bus, and getting some more miles out of them. Well, it appears that's exactly what they did, and they are still going, so hooray for Leopard Pro Cycling!

In another shitsmall race, or it might have been the same one (hang on while I check the photo details - yes, it was the same race, they were taken at the same time) I also nearly had a bump of the heart, when I saw what appeared to be the old beloved Leopard kit: but it turned out to be One Pro Cycling, whose kit is spookily reminiscent of the old black-white-and-pale-blue kit. 

And would you believe it, they are a British team!  They are Pro Conti, and they have - be still my beating heart - the lovely Yanto Barker riding for them, and he is definitely a Pet. I thought he'd retired from pro cycling, that's why he was commentating a couple of years back, but apparently he's back on a Pro Conti team, much to my delight.

I did consider joining the fan club of One Pro Cycling: in the UK, money is so tight that they have to try to lure people into micro-sponsorship, by becoming a member of the fan club. It costs a hundred quid to join, and you get a nice pack, including an actual cycling jersey. That's no more than I donated to MTN Qhebeka last year... and it's quite a good cause, to support British cycling, although not quite as good as sponsoring bikes for Africa. But if I joined, I'd have to wear the jersey. Hmmm, me in lycra? I think not...

They do have a Junior membership pack for £20, for which you get a t-shirt and a bottle and a pack of rider cards. I was very tempted to take up that membership - there is a slight chance I might wear the tee, whereas there is no chance at all that I will ever wear the jersey, quite apart from the fact that I would probably have to ask for XXXXL in order to even go round me!