He got a hunger knock and lost around five minutes.
Agree on the ‘89 Tour, the best ever.
He’s one of those cyclists I can only ever picture wearing the rainbow jersey.
World Amateur Champion aged 19. Never pro champion. Used to wear the Germany Champion’s jersey a lot.
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Bang on. Very similar, never realised that.
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Football and the entire media that covers it has a very big vested interest in nothing ever coming out about doping other than very isolated, occasional cases which can themselves be used to say it’s the exception rather than the rule. Football is almost like the banking system in how it’s too big to fail.
The other thing about football is it’s played with a ball. So even if people think there night be drugs involved they’ll say “but the drugs don’t give you a first touch”.
Cycling and athletics and swimming are power and endurance sports so will always be seen as being ripe for doping and that the doping will affect the results much more.
Cycling was already on the downslope by the time the '98 Tour happened, but it wasn’t alone among sports in that. A lot of the sports you’d used to see on Grandstand or Sportsnight were victim of the changing media environment, football just took over. I don’t think cycling would be in a massively different position either way if it had all remained swept under the rug or if some of it came out and the half hearted (usually very half hearted) attempts to clean it up.
Kimmage made a comment some years back that doping was almost an outdated concept, that things had moved on to legal stuff, that sport and society itself had become “medicalised”. He compared the difference between the illegal and the legal stuff to wine regions which bordered each other. How would you know the difference between a bottle from the border of one region and one from a couple of miles up the road which was in the other region.
Read it on the flight to the US a fortnight ago. Great read.
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They are.
The Tour is like a beautiful and sexy woman who is a crazy alcoholic. The romance of it always lures you back despite it being a lie.
The sum total of my “in the flesh” Tour de France viewing was conducted from the corner of the crossroads in the Phoenix Park where the road coming around from Garda headquarters meets the main road.
It still mildly pisses me off that I was in Paris the day of the Abdoujaparov crash on the Champs Elysees in 1991 but watched from a hotel room in the banlieues we had just gotten the keys to.
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1999…
P Flynn, Haughey and Terri Keane… Uncle Gaybo…
A proper country
Bewitched were something else. “Oh Jessie be strong”.
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And Solskjaer has WON IT
Meath Cork that year was as nothingy a football final as there’s been in 30 years.
Cork were very close to another double. Don’t remember a huge amount made of it but I was twisted in playa de linglas listening to it on a radio in the Irish pub tbf. Nowhere was showing it on telly.
Definitely Man Utd fans behind RITY.
1968 and 1999 shown.
No other British team’s triumphs shown.
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The Hill was a fabulous sight there on that reel for the football final though. Trevor Giles was a very admirable footballer. I’d say he never got embroiled in any of that off the ball filth.
Lance in '09 fucked it. He made a miraculous recovery towards the end having cracked on a climb and finished third overall. It was clear to even the blind what he was doing. That made the clean up necessary and it lost its lustre.
They are still clearly doping but now you don’t have the superman stages and the likes of Riis having to set alarms in the middle of the night to do pull ups so his blood doesn’t coagolate while he sleeps
I noticed that in particular for 2005. The most iconic sporting comeback of all time wasn’t even mentioned.
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That’s because they were more ICONIC. Liverpool 05 not shown?
The answer is in the post you quoted.