Everyone rides the Tour
July 16, 2017 § 11 Comments
It’s Turdy France time and everyone rides the Tour, as each group ride, for three short weeks, assumes the position of fake Turdy France stage. The Donut Ride was no exception, and it had been crowned the Fake Queen Donut Stage of the Fake South Bay Turdy France.
As with any fake Tour contender, I thought it meet to plan my strategy by picking the brain of ex-pro Phil Gaimon who, though he never actually rode the Tour, has read a lot of cool magazine articles about it. I’d heard that he was holding a book signing for his book “Ask a Pro,” and was also doing a sign-up for his yuge October Phil’s Fondue ride, so I sneaked into the book signing without an invitation.
“Hey, Phil!” I said as he was hunched over his stack of books, dutifully ginning out signatures like a pre-cryonics Ted Williams, while his manager hungrily eyed the sales receipts and swiped credit cards for the fondue registration.
“Yes?” he said.
“It’s me, Wanky! Yer ol’ pal. I had some questions I wanted to ask a pro.”
He pretended not to know who I was, which is what slightly famous people often do to cover up the fact that I’m actually more famous than they are. “Would you like to buy a book?” he asked.
“Nah,” I said.
“A grand fondue registration, perhaps?”
“Nope.”
He sighed. “How can I help you?”
“So you’re a pro, right? And you wrote a book called ‘Ask A Pro,’ right? Well, then. The Fake Queen Donut Stage of the South Bay Turdy France is tomorrow and I need some pro tips on how to ride it. So I thought I would ask a pro.”
Suddenly he got very busy but another guy who wasn’t a pro, and who didn’t really look like a pro, but who seemed more interested in me than the pro, chimed in. “Winning a fake queen stage? That’s easy,” he said.
“Really?”
“Sure. Don’t lose too much time. That’s the secret to stage racing.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes, and one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“You know the guy in your group who always wins? Every group has one.”
“Sure. That’s Alx Bns.”
“Well, he’ll win the fake queen stage, too.”
I thought about this depressing little gem for a few seconds and how I’d been ripped off paying for it until I realized I hadn’t actually paid for it. I tapped on Phil’s shoulder. “Say, can you write up a quick training and diet plan for me while I’m here? I brought a few terabytes of power data I’d like you to analyze if you don’t mind. Since you’re already here, I mean.”
A few moments later Phil introduced me to a gentleman named Bouncer, kind of a weird name, who insisted on talking to me outside the event venue, onto the sidewalk, with my neck in a headlock. He didn’t know anything about winning queen stages, so I went home.
The next morning I got up to prepare for the queen stage. Preparation is key and I now had my mantra, courtesy of a guy standing next to pro Phil Gaimon. My mantra? DON’T LOSE TOO MUCH TIME.
I carefully went over each item of my Wanky Donut Gear. It is a high-tech bunch of stuff, loaded with lots of carbon that is 100% carbon plus everything is cutting edge and carbon. Speaking of cutting edge and carbon, Ms. WM and I got into it before I left because she was using my $500 carbon steel Japanese paring knife to scrape rust off the tea kettle.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I screamed.
“Itsa nasty gunkin’ so I’m cleanin it.”
“That’s my five hundred dollar paring knife!”
“Itsa cuttin good but not so good onna scrapin.”
“Of course it isn’t! It’s not a fucking scraper! You just ruined the blade!”
She was unimpressed and continued to scrape. In a sad panic I assembled the legendary Wanky Donut Gear. Below is an awesome fake Tour tech gallery that you can drool over. It is full carbon, all of it.
I rolled out of Chez Wanky, blood pressure still a tad high due to the ruined paring knife, and got to the sign-in area for the queen stage, which is the remodeled Riviera Village Sckubrats. A long time ago they named this part of Redondo Beach the “Riviera” because of the famed beaches and culture and high class of the French Riviera. I’m pretty sure they never actually saw the real Riviera before they bestowed the name, or they would never have called this run-down rat’s nest of beach huts and fake surfers the “Riviera,” but that’s another story.
This story is about not losing too much time and so one by one I quizzed my competitors about how they intended to strategify the stage. Each rider had a unique approach that centered on “don’t get dropped,” so I adopted that as my strategy, too. Only one rider, Englishman Alx Bns, had a different strategy, which was “drop everyone.” This bothered me a bit, but not nearly as much at the start as it did at the bottom of the Switchbacks, where he executed the strategy with the efficiency of Brexit. Okay, it was way more efficient than that, but equally ruthless.
Standouts included wet-behind-the-ears but stupid-strong-behind-the-legs Matthieu Brousseau, who despite his French-sounding name kicked almost everyone’s ass except Dan Cobley’s. My strategy of not losing too much time by not getting dropped (or gapped out as I prefer to call it), didn’t succeed too well. Towards the end I was passed by a fellow in a t-shirt and flip-flops who wasn’t even breathing hard. Thank dog it was my rest week.
But the really sad news is this. You remember Phil telling me about how the guy who was going to win was the guy who always wins? Dang it, that’s the guy who won.
PRE-RACE INTERVIEWS AT THE SIGN-IN FOR THE FAKE QUEEN DONUT STAGE
POST-RACE INTERVIEWS ATOP MT. SWITCHBACKS
END
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Turdy France notes
July 7, 2015 § 12 Comments
As much as I try to ignore the annual pro-wrestling championships for skinny people, the Tour invariably impinges on my serenity. Here are the impingements so far:
- Cav is a d-bag. Sitting up in the sprint because he couldn’t win, letting Cancellara get third, and thereby depriving TEIMMATE Tony Martin of yellow? There is apparently a very large “I” in Teim, or rather a very large “Cavendish” in “douchebag.”
- Since the Tour no longer has 300-mile stages and it’s “short” enough for most riders to complete, and complete pretty tightly bunched, the challenging, cobbled, wind-swept, hardass opening stages are fantastic. Nice work, whoever continues to push for such stages.
- Tony Martin no longer has to drag his dick to the microphone and answer the German journalists’ questions about why he didn’t win stage one, why he didn’t win stage two, why he didn’t win stage three, why he didn’t win stage four and why in the world is he NOT in yellow?
- Enough with Astana and Boom’s doping. They all cheat, it’s pro wrestling for skinny people. Can we sweep all that under the rug for another few years until someone important dies? Thank you.
- Froome hasn’t fallen off his bicycle yet. Amaze-balls.
- In addition to boycotting the Tour, we’d appreciate it if Oleg Dickov would just boycott cycling and go back to making usurious payday loans to poor people. Oh, wait, he never stopped …
- There are three Americans in the Tour: Van Garderen, Talansky, and Farrar. Way to build the grass roots, USA Cycling! Perhaps they could work with Alto Velo to sue some more small pro teams and encourage promising riders and sponsors to quit the sport?
- Pro bike racing is more dangerous in terms of injuries per race than any motor sport. It’s no fun watching the yellow jersey swap shoulders because of crashes (Cancellara), or watching the whole event turned on its head because contenders crash out (Froome, Contador in 2014). It’s also no fun watching people get hurt.
- Trying to reach a cyclist on the West Coast on July late mornings is like trying to get a SoCal handyman when there is a good swell.
- It will be interesting to see how much, if any, Tour Fever has spread to Germany. It’s taken years for the cycling public to recover from Ullrich/Zabel Telekom.
END
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The age of disbelief
July 15, 2013 § 19 Comments
It doesn’t matter whether you think any individual rider in the Turdy Farce is doping. Nor does it matter whether the riders are doping. Nothing will ever resuscitate this so-called sporting event.
A friend invited me to a Turdy-watching party today. Ostensibly we gathered to see who would prevail on Mt. Ventoux. Ostensibly we gathered to watch a bike race. Ostensibly we gathered to enjoy a performance of extraordinary physical strength and endurance under incomprehensible stress and strain.
All I can say is this: Thank Dog my friend is a wizard on the grill, his fiancee is a magician in the kitchen, the beer tub was well stocked, and the company was comprised of friends and riding mates, because the bike race never materialized.
How the Turdy was watched
What amazed me was the cynicism. I thought that it was only me who considered the whole thing an elaborate staging of athletic porn, but it wasn’t. The moment the Froomster began his wild 120 rpm acceleration the catcalls started. Nothing about his ride was exempt from criticism. His dorky pedaling style, reminiscent of a novice who’s still learning how to ride smoothly, his Cat 5 tendency to keep dropping his head, his constant reference to the radio commands in his earpiece, and his obliteration of the field were all equally derided.
The Tour was simply a backdrop for a get-together of friends who happen to cycle. Nothing about the race was respected, admired, or given any credibility at all. The bankrupt team of Phil and Paul, the sad sack attempts of Bob Roll to fire us up, and the racing itself were dismissed by virtually everyone there.
Good luck with that
How does an event that cannot capture the belief of the sport’s most ardent practitioners hope to survive? The answer, of course, is France. Despite the conviction that the best rider is a drug cheat, most of our crowd said they’d choose to go visit France and watch the Tour over any other bike race.
It makes sense. The riders can do whatever they want because it won’t diminish the fun of riding the cols, celebrating on the roadsides, and touring in France. In the same way, the Froomster’s fraud had zero effect on our ability to enjoy the food, drink, and camaraderie, and zero effect on the rides we’d done this weekend or the rides we’ll do the next.
This is the post-Armstrong age of sports spectating. We understand it’s all fake but gladly seize the chance to enjoy ourselves anyway. The giants of the road have been reduced to dwarves of the microphone and the lab.
You may find it all a bit sad and disappointing, but while you’re reflecting pass the sausage and open another beer for me, please.
Can I be your fucking wanker cunt?
July 10, 2012 § 18 Comments
It’s hard to come back from a pleasant vacation in Palm Springs after enjoying the 116-degree daytime temperatures only to find that I’ve been out-vulgared, and by a tweezly Brit bicycle rider, at that. As a kindergartner at Galveston’s Booker T. Washington Elementary School (since razed), I learned early the proper pronunciation and application of profanity. If you could have seen how proud I was when I finally mastered the high-speed phrase “cocksuckinmotherfuckinblueballedbitch,” you would have thought I was the cutest little six year-old you’d ever seen.
Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t rested on my laurels. I’ve worked hard and diligently these past decades to never slack off on nastyisms, crudification, and profanizing in every possible way. Need someone to say something foul and detestable in the presence of ladies? I’m your guy! Looking for an uncouth spewer of obscenity in a formal setting? Call me! Casting about for a dude who can overtrash the gutteriest filthmouth? That’s me. It’s always been me.
Until I happened to go off to Palm Springs for a vacation I didn’t even need only to find that the leader of the Turdy had given an interview laced with uglyisms and profanity of the worst sort.
The word “wanker”? I thought I fucking OWNED it.
The whole idea behind Brad Wiggins in this year’s Turdy France was that he would re-establish order in the peloton and earn back the loyal flock that had wandered a bit since Drugstrong’s heyday. He’d do drugs, but not enough to detect. He’d beat the snot out of everyone, but wouldn’t Simeoni-ize them. He’d get a stacked train of doped up stars to control the peloton, but wouldn’t let the 300-lb. sprunter dude win an Alpine stage.
We’d ignore that he’d never, ever shown himself to be a Turdy contender. We’d ignore that he trained in secret, in a place where the testers couldn’t arrive unannounced. We’d ignore that he was chalking it all up to hard work (“I’m on my bike. What are YOU on?”, etc.) Most of all, we’d let the bigtime fanboys like Bill Strickland, Joe Lindsey, and the other pitchers of softpoop get their pabulum machines cranked up so the “industry” could get back to what it does best: selling shit to fat people that they’ll mostly never use.
The whole idea, however, was NOT that Wiggo, or Wig Out, or Earwig, or Wiggster, would appropriate MY favorite pejorative and then make it even more awesome.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the word “wanker” was mine. It wasn’t yours. It wasn’t hers. It wasn’t theirs. And it sure as hell wasn’t Bradley Wiggins’s. Do a Google search for “wankmeister” and your hard drive will go limp with hits, so to speak.
Doesn’t matter now, though. No matter how hard I blog, and tweet, and holler in the future, Wiggy will forever own “fucking wanker” because he paired it with “cunt.” Put ’em together and you get “fucking wanker cunt,” which is just about the most awesome vulgarism ever, bigger than spermface, even, or clithead. It’s that big.
Going big, then going home
The power in a true obscenity is only released when it boggles the mind. As a child, I still remember the first time I heard “cocksuckingmotherfuckingblueballedbitch.” I was six. It was my first day in kindergarten at Booker T. Some kids were talking trash. My brain ground to a halt. “Cocksucking,” I thought. “Is that what I think it is?” Then I listened in amazement as they repeated it. “Motherfucking? Is that what it sounds like?”
A stunning concatenation of images that weren’t even images filled my head as everything went blank. Then, dimly, “Blueballed” rambled in through the haze. “Blue balls? What are those? Mine are white.” I realized that it might mean someone had whacked you so hard in the nuts that they turned blue, like getting a charley-horse. “Wow, that’s gotta hurt.” And then, finally, like a gentle ending at the coda of a great violin concerto, “bitch.” Such an ordinary word…except that everyone knows bitches are girls, and girls don’t have balls, so this is a bitch with blue balls!
That moment when your mind smashes against a powerful obscenity, something truly fitted to make your brain twist and writhe and grapple, that’s the moment you know you’ve hit pay dirt, and that’s what happened the second Wiggsy unleashed “fucking wanker cunt.”
Imagine! “Wanker,” an ordinary enough piece of slang that makes you think of some chubby dude with a hairy navel locking himself into a public restroom stall, combined with “cunt,” a somewhat rough word that, however, can be made slightly less so by adding a “-y” on the end, as in, “Can I have a scoop of chocolate, a scoop of cunty, and some sprinkles mixed in?” tied together with the ordinary enough “fucking” so that it all seems to hang together until…wait!!! Wanker is a man! Cunt is a woman! A woman wanking! A man cunting! Tied together with fucking!
“BRAIN LOSING POWER! GIVE ME MORE POWER MR. SCOTT!”
“I CAN’T CAP’N, SHE’S GIVING ALL SHE’S GOT, IF I ASK FOR MORE SHE’LL BLOW!”
“MORE POWER, MR. SCOTT! THAT’S AN ORDER!”
“SHE CAN’T TAKE ANY MORE, CAP’N! SHE CAN’T!”
And there I’d still be, stalled in permanent brainlock with Mr. Sulu, Lieutenant Uhura, Mr. Spock, and Captain Kirk on the profanity bridge, if my phone hadn’t rung and knocked me out of the infinite obscenity loop.
What this means for the Tour
In addition to p*wning the snot out of Cuddle Evans in the time trail, Wiggsy took the time to explain that he “can’t be doing with” us fucking wanker cunts because it “justifies their own bone idleness.” Now hold on just one danged minute! Did he really say that he can’t “do” us fucking wanker cunts because of our bone idleness?
If I thought Wiggly taking ownership of “fucking wanker cunt” was astounding, the minute he accused us Twitterers of bone idleness, well, that just ended the discussion. Me? Having an idle bone? If he’d send me his mobile number I’d show him “idle.” Idle like a warren of rabbits, pal.
This dude just went from bottom of the poopstack to the top of the heap in my book. He wants to be big dog of nasty language? Take it away, Bradley. This is a chapter in Turdy France history that you will truly get to write on your own. The rest of us will be trailing, helplessly but awed, in your wake. The Tour de Curse is yours by a mile.
And it couldn’t happen to a bigger wanker.
Wankmeister predicts all future Turdy France stages, ever
July 5, 2012 § 11 Comments
I rarely envy the brilliance of others. I figure they worked hard to achieve it, and they were lucky enough to pick the right set of parents, and so they deserve all the glory it reaps.
Sometimes, though, someone says something that’s so profound and amazing that it changes forever the way I see the matter at hand. Take a minute and read this post by Captaintbag.
It’s elegant. It’s eloquent. And like Einstein’s theory of relativity, it reconciles a whole world of disturbing contradictions into a single, comprehensible, unified whole. Upon reading Captaintbag’s simple formula, my first reaction was that “all is now revealed.” My second was envy. My third, disciple-like, is devotion.
Stating the problem
Cycling at the amateur and professional levels has always been riven by two irreconcilable principles. The first is that cycling is sport that should therefore be played according to rules and penalties that apply to all. Sticky water bottle? $75 fine. Blood bags from Dr. Fuentes? Two-year excommunication to the golf course.
The second principle is that winners are deities.
When principles collide
These two principles lead to contradictory phenomena. Fairly applied rules means that cheating will not be rewarded. Deification of winners means that they will be deified, even if they cheat.
In the Newtonian scheme of things, sporting ethics were a constant. The quality of an athlete as a disreputable winner who cheated, or as an honorable loser who played fairly, or as a deified winner who played by the rules, could be determined by the application of immutable sporting ethics as codified by the rules, which themselves were tweaked over time to ensure that new types of play (freakish tt positions, EPO use) comported with the unchanging ethic.
Yet none of it worked. Heroes like Anquetil plainly said that doping was a necessity. Though punished for his refusal to take a dope test after smashing the hour record by having the record stripped, he remained a hero to many, even an honorable one for his refusal to lie about the demands of the sport.
The golden era of cycling, from about 1995 to 2005, was one of superhuman accomplishment driven at the point of a needle. Those most worthy of honor in that pantheon, giants like Hincapie for his record participations in Roubaix and the Tour, stand tarnished. Honorable heroes, yet tarnished cheats.
The Captaintbag theory of relativity solves all
Simply put, the Taintbag Theory of Turdy Tawdriness states that the Tour is a spectacle. Indeed, this is merely a modern restatement of Henri Desgrange’s founding principle, that the Tour is nothing if not an excess.
Sporting ethic has no role in the Tour other than as a pliable handmaiden to the brutish demands of spectacle. The Tour, as Taintbag’s formula expresses, is bloody athletes tangled in barbed wire, drug scandal, horrific crashes, noble sacrifices on cruel Alpine slopes, tragic deaths of children run over by the publicity caravan, voluptuous divas smothering sweat-drenched riders on a blow-up podium, car crashes, motorcycle crashes, snow, ice, rain, unbearable sun, cheating, lies, chicanery, backdoor deals, stage wins bartered and sold like used cars at a swap meet, and everything done on a global stage before thousands of reporters while broadcast to hundreds of millions and commentated by clowns named Sherwen, Liggett, and Roll, characters as outlandish as their outsized, drunken egos.
This, according to the Taintbag Theory of Turdy Tawdriness, is the Tour. It is not right or wrong, good or bad, hero or villain, fair play or foul. It is the violent and bloody and greedy and dollar-soaked and testosterone drenched hand-to-hand combat of crazy puppets, laughed at and cried over, loved and reviled, held tightly and discarded in disgust like just another condom whose duty is done.
Enjoy the taint. Decry the taint. Long live the taint!
Grudging admiration
July 4, 2012 § 4 Comments
Dear Wankmeister:
You were kind of off again on that Peraud dude. Looks like he just flat out sucks.
But sheesh, you were spot on with Humpty Ugly and your prediction that he’d win the field sprunt. Dog. He just ripped ’em all a new one.
You are such a stud, WM. What’s your call for tomorrow?
Frenchily,
B. Hinault
Dear Badger Dude:
There’s little question that Jean-Christophe Peraud has had some bad luck these past several stages, not least because of the terrible case of septicemia he had a couple of years ago following a bad crash. Tomorrow, however, is a perfect stage for him. Winner of Stage Five: Peraud by a zip code.
The rest of the results are harder to predict. On a historical note, the race ends in Saint-Quentin, the site of Johnny Cash’s legendary live prison performance in 1969. Expect “Orange Blossom Special” and “Jackson” to be blaring along the route, and June Carter Cash to serve as one of the podium girls.
Best of the rest:
Humpty Ugly: He’ll take it again. All of it. In a thundering, gorilla-like, Aryan blast to the line Greipel will put all challengers to the sword after sucking wheel and filing his nails for the entire 197-km route. His lead-out train will be perfect. All others will scramble for crumbs.
Tyler Farrar: Who?
Horseface: Crash out like he did in Stage 3 of the 2012 Giro, Stage 4 of the 2012 Turdy, Stage 4 of the 2010 Tour de Suisse, etc.
Gitcher Stage Four winner here
July 3, 2012 § 6 Comments
Okay, so I didn’t exactly nail it yesterday when I predicted that Jean-Christophe Peraud was gonna bring home the bacon.
On the other hand, it’s a Wednesday night before July the 4th, and instead of being out with friends, hooking up, and letting some studmuffin or hot chick or both lick coke off your nipples, you’re reading a stupid cycling blog. So don’t tell me I’m the loser.
Prediction for Turdy France Stage Four
Stage Four is a repetition of Stage Two, only more so. It’s long. It’s flat. It’s boring. It’s stupid. The only people who will enjoy this are the ones who are actually in France, drunk by 9:00 AM, lying prostrate in a ditch while a studmuffin or hot chick or both licks coke off their nipples. Everyone else who even pretends to care or be interested or, Dog forbid, set aside time to watch this Xanax stage is hopeless.
After carefully analyzing this featureless borefest, here’s my prediction. Take it to the fucking bank: Jean-Christophe Peraud will win the stage and pull on yellow.
Why Peraud? Not because, at age 34, he was the oldest Tour rookie last year by almost a hundred years. Not because he’s a mountain biker and therefore taps out after 45 minutes. Not because of his legendary septicemia that he got after that nasty crash.
No.
Peraud is going to spank the shit out of the competition tomorrow because he’s been training with a cryogenic suit. You know how they froze Ted Williams so they could cure him later, and how except for the fact that his frozen head kept falling on the floor and losing big chunks he was all set to be thawed someday and made good as new?
Well, that’s what the Ag2R Mondiale team has been doing.
“Fuck you, Wankmeister, you’re so full of shit.”
No…FUCK YOU. And after the fucking, read this link. Peraud will be minimally inflamed after the last hard stage finish at Baloney-on-Toast due to the cryotherapy suit. He’s going to rip the panties off the peloton and deliver a world-class fucking. You watch.
The best of the rest
Saggs: He has no hope of a third win. It’s impossible. Forget about it. Why? Because that little fucktard “running salute” he did 300 yards in front of the next dude whose brains were draining out his ear was too hideous. The gods of Anquetil won’t allow that shit for a stage that finishes in Rouen.
Fabs: Another day in yellow. Maybe he’ll buy some better hair pomade with the bonus. Who knows? @mmmaiko doesn’t care, as long as he maket twattle.
Horseface: He’s going to melt quicker than a pat of butter on a cougar’s belly. Then they’ll smear him all over the road.
Humpty Ugly: Humpty will, after injecting three quarts of testosterpoetinruggedmaxxx2 into his butt and thighs, crush the field sprint. No one will come close. His gigantism, wrapped out at 3900 watts, will power the Tour’s telecommunication satellites for the next week. Pay close attention to his left arm, though, as he suppresses that Dr. Strangelove “achtung” salute with his right hand.
Mullet: Crash. Lose 2-3 minutes waiting for a bike change. Get all nervous and upset and start doing butterfly strokes in the nearby ditch. Regret hiring a swimming coach for his doping program.
Check in tomorrow to see how right I am. Winning!
Cycling in the South Bay 