Today the Tour de France has been an individual time trial, where riders pedal as fast as they can over a designated route. It must be quite hard to race against yourself. I haven’t yet seen who was the fastest and how that affects the general classification. I hope it means fewer crashes. I read that the team of the Tour de France leader, Jonas Vingegaard, are considering pressing charges after a spectator caused a massive crash during the Sunday’s stage. They know who it was among the spectators who stuck his hand out to take a photo and brought one rider down, precipitating a huge crash that stopped the day’s stage before it really got going. The ambulances were blocking the road and so many were in use that until everything was cleared there would be no team ambulances available in the event of further crashes. No action is being taken until the team make a decision.
Even before we almost all had phones capable of taking clever pictures and causing havoc, spectators were being a nuisance taking photos. Heres an account from 1999:
“When Giuseppe Guerini broke clear of the peloton and climbed towards a career-best victory on the prestigious stage to the Alpe in July 1999, he didn’t expect to be brought down by a bespectacled 19-year-old wielding an Instamatic camera. But the Italian rider hadn’t reckoned with Eric, surname unknown, standing motionless in the middle of the most famous climb in cycling, waiting to click his shutter. The pair collided, Guerini fell, then got to his feet, received a push from the hapless Eric, yet carried on to win the stage.”
Nothing new under the sun.
Here’s an account of two enterprising brothers who have made model boats, replicas of boats from the Ross scientific expedition of 1839-43 where HMS Erebus and HMS Terror discovered the Ross ice shelf. They plan to track the boats as they go around Antarctica. It’s not the first time they have tried this but this time they hope it will be more successful. What clever young boys. I suppose it helps having a father who is an ecological specialist.
I’ve been trying to organise an expedition of my own, much less ambitious than that one. When we did the great Diggle Chippy Hike recently, for the first time in ages, I posted pictures of our return journey along the canal towpath. A friend saw them and declared an interest in doing that section of the walk. At the time tomorrow looked like a likely day weatherwise. Since the the forecast has gone hp and down and we have had a considerable amount of rain. However, at the moment tomorrow’s forecast looks reasonably favourable. We’ll check in the morning and maybe, equipped with insurance-policy raincoats, we can give it a try. We shall see.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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