Friday, July 20, 2012

You suck Wiggo

First off, I apologize to everyone who comes here for fishing related things. This is a totally unrelated rant.

I am here to say thanks for nothing, Bradley Wiggins. You have made all the time I have spent watching the Tour this year a total waste of time. It has been extremely uneventful, uninteresting, and non-dramatic. 

For those of you who don't watch the tour you may not understand it, so let me break it down for you. It's a 3-week long bike race with one race every day (except 2 rest days). The other thing you should know is the tour is about 10 different competitions all in one race. There's a sprinters competition, a hill climbers competition, a newbies competition, a team competition, and an overall best time competition among others, but let's leave all that alone for now. In all there are twenty or so individual stages that are typically comprised of about half flat stages in which everyone rides in a group for like four hours where absolutely nothing happens until the end where the sprinters race the last 0.5% of the race. A couple stages are individual time trials where each rider has to ride the course by himself, and those are moderately interesting days. The rest of the stages are mountain stages where the riders have to climb up and down, up and down, for 130 miles. These are the interesting stages. The stages where people break off on their own and take tons of time relative to the other riders. Or the stages where the top contenders suck wind and blow their chances. Or maybe the stages where the top two guys go mano y mano up every climb, battling one another, throwing in attacks left and right and leaving everyone else in their obviously superior dust.

This year, however, has been a bit different. The first six or so stages were pretty uneventful flat stages that were as boring as they normally are. Then the race hit some hills and Bradley Wiggins from team Sky took the lead by a few seconds. Cool! Then there's an individual time trial where he builds on his lead. Not bad. And that's basically the end of the race.

All the rest of the hilly mountain stages have consisted of everyone riding in a big group, except for a few nobodies who are way behind in the aggregate time who go out to win that one day's stage for a bit of glory. The only thing that has happened in the overall classification were a couple of attacks by guys in the top 10 that were immediately and uneventfully beaten down by Wiggins and team. Boring. No one really even tried to go early and go hard to make some big and much needed time gains. The only interesting thing that has happened is last years winner shit the bed.

Then on one of the last stages where something could actually happen, Wiggins and teammate Froome (second overall) dropped everyone else in the race on a big climb, save for one guy who had gone out early in a breakaway full of nobodies. The leader was only a minute ahead with a few kilometers of climbing to go and Froome could have shot out on his own and eaten that guy for breakfast for a stage win while Wiggins rides in easy to remain top overall. What do team Sky do? Play it conservative and ride to the line together. Lame. Boring. I'm done with this tour. Pack it in, it's over, nothing else to see here. You suck Wiggo. Thanks for like two mildly interesting stages.


P. S.  One of my friends tells me that this year was cool because going in it was anyone's race. It could have been Nibali, or Evans, or Wiggins, or Van Den Broeck, or Schleck, or one of many other people. Except in hindsight it obviously wasn't. Wiggins takes over on stage 7 before any of the real racing even begins and holds it for the rest of the race. He doesn't bother to take much more time the rest of the race except for in the time trial. He didn't even let his second place teammate go get a dramatic stage win when he had the rest of the race in the bag. You're wrong, Brady, this year sucked.


P. P. S.  I lay equal blame on all the contenders who had no game this year, but that doesn't make for as interesting a rant.


P. P. P. S.  I need to go fishing.

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