The classics started last weekend and weren’t we excited? So we have some Boonen and the Pharmers! Cows in socks! A begowned Cancellara! And this week’s ‘naked rider‘ in the form of …?
Om-pa-loop-a
As this is David Millar‘s final year before retirement, Fizik are designing a new pair of shoes for every race he rides. All the shoes will then be auctioned off for charity at the end of the year. Here are the shoes from Omloop. Kinda cool!
UK Cycling Expert was pretty much on the money with his/her prediction for Saturday’s race.
There were a lot of predictions at the start of the weekend, actually. One was for That Boy Phinney to do some wild things. Well, he sure as hell rode like a gladiator, attacking on some of those nasty climbs to put his teammate Greg Van Avermaet into a good position for the podium.
And speaking of GVA, it was pointed out that, whereas Heinrich Haussler is famous for never wearing gloves, GVA was wearing just one glove during Omloop. Why, we all wondered. Why?
There are superstitions …
There’s no superstition about a rider who helps the peloton chase after a break that has one of his teammates in it – there’s just incredulity. Not sure if there was retribution in the Belkin hotel after Saturday’s race but there was some prediction of bish bash Boom.
This, to me, is the sweetest picture of the weekend. Terpstra Jr is wearing one of his dad’s gold jerseys from Dubai.
Last week’s beefcake Zdenek Stybar didn’t sound like he was up for any bare-chested ironing after the race on Saturday.
One more and I’ll be a star!
And here are the Millar shoes for KBK.
Remember last year? This pic of Lars Bak epitomised much of last spring. Great pic – he looks like an Arctic explorer!
Why, I ask myself, WHY can’t I have this job for Trek Factory? WHY??!!!!
Boonen is back!
Naked rider of the week!
Also known as ‘show us your wounds!’ That Boy Phinney had a nasty spill in KBK on Sunday. Luckily, he wasn’t badly hurt – well, I say not badly, hell, if I had that kind of shark-bite scrape across my ribs, I would be howling in pain and demanding sympathy for three years! Luckily, Taylor is much tougher – T•U•F•F•E•R – than me and he even had the good humour to give us a hospital selfie.
Waxing poetic
WARNING: This is the part of the column in which I perv over Fabian Cancellara. Skip down if you don’t want to see it.
There’s a new cycling mag (looks Flemish to me!) and it has our Fabs on the cover. In an unbelievably lovely gesture, one of my fellow Cancellara fanatics bought one for me – I’m laying in wait for the postman!
Google translating the PR blurb about the mag, it seems there will be an exhibition in the next few months called ‘The Treasury of Fabian’, with some personal objects from the Sacred Haunches collection. Be still my beating heart.
Oh but it gets better. Holy Mary, the Sacred Haunches in a towelling robe!!! Or as Midge says, ‘begowned’. (Thank God, he wasn’t wearing flip-flops. That would have been a deal breaker.)
Let’s hope the Cancellaran-Parental Unit fed their boy up – we need that power for the classics!
The Gruppetto
Who is this masked Samurai?
Full beards = bad. I was appalled by Luca Paolini‘s ‘mountain savage’ look and so we were rewarded with a picture of his ‘dad’. That would be a bad dad.
Speaking of beards, looks like Frank Schleck is hoping to disguise himself as someone whom people recognise in the peloton. (ooooh, cruel, so cruel, Kitty!)
So, now that Mick Jagger has landed in the peloton from his ‘Airports of the World’ tour, we only now have to account for Dan Martin. There’s a theory going around …
The ever elegant Mr Basso.
This is one classy cow.
The Last Word
