We recently watched an Italian TV series, a detective series of course, set in Turin. Judging by that series, Turin is one of the rainiest places in Europe, possibly even rainier than Manchester. (It’s raining and wintery again here by the way.) Today’s stage of the Tour de France covers 231 kilometres from Piacenza to Turin. As ITV4’s daily summary of the Tour’s activity usually includes some good views of the places the Tour passes through I look forward to seeing Turin in the sunshine.
I’m assuming that the sunshine they’ve had so far is going to continue. My admiration for people who can cycle up steep hills in 30° sunshine is immense. In fact, I also admire their seemingly fearless descent of those steep hills, especially when it takes them around sharp bends.
Today’s stage, however, is pretty flat: a stage for sprinters, they say. Pundits are saying that this is Mark Cavendish’s chance to win a stage and so to beat the record of 34 stage wins by Eddy Merckx. That of course depends a lot on his having recovered his sparkling sprinter form. We shall see!
By way, here are some facts about Eddy Mercks, the most successful rider in the history of competitive cycling.
He won:
5 Tours de France
5 Giros d’Italia
1 Vuelta a España
All 5 Monuments (the five classic cycle races generally considered to be the oldest, hardest, longest and most prestigious one-day events in men's road cycling - Milan-San Remo, Tournof Flanders, Paris-Roubaiz, Liège - Bastogne - Liège, and the Giro di Lombardia). He is one of only three riders to have won all five and the only one to have won them all at least twice.
3 World Championships
and every major one-day race other than Paris-Tours.
Pretty impressive!
Like quite a lot of cyclists he seems to have come from a relatively ordinary background, son of a grocery store owner. Maybe it’s because it’s fairly easy to train yourself as a cyclist in the early stages. But I suppose that you need a sponsor if you want to reach the top, especially nowadays.
However, when you look at the peloton speeding along, it’s a mass of white faces you see. Cycling remains one of the whitest sports in the world. During the 2021 International Cycling Union (UCI) World Tour — which features the sport’s premier races, including the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France — less than 1% of the riders were Black.
Tennis is another sport with the same problem, maybe even more so as tennis coaching costs an arm and a leg. And there doesn’t seem to be a structure such as big football clubs have for training up young hopefuls. Here’s a link to an article about this.
I learnt a new word the other day: pretendian. Here’s a definition from the internet:
“Pretendian is a pejorative colloquialism used to call out a person who has falsely claimed Indigenous identity by professing to be a citizen of a Native American or Indigenous Canadian tribal nation, or to be descended from Native American or Indigenous Canadian ancestors. As a practice, being a pretendian is considered an extreme form of cultural appropriation, especially if that individual then asserts that they can represent, and speak for, communities from which they do not originate.”
I came across it in an article about a Canadian woman who has been sentenced to three years in prison after confessing to claiming that her daughters were Inuit and fraudulently accessing more than 150,000 Canadian dollars in benefits intended for Inuits. You would have thought that DNA testing would go some way towards preventing such fraud.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment