It’s the mid September and after a few weeks that actually felt like summer the weather today has a distinctly autumnal feel to it and the leaves on the trees are beginning to turn. The Paralympics finished last Sunday with another spectacular closing ceremony that had something to say as well as being entertaining. We had the victory parade/celebration of our (British) Olympian and Paralympian athletes on Monday. Our magical summer has drawn to a close.
Andy Murray managed to extend it by a day, missing the victory parade in the process, and Bradley Wiggins is currently on his own personal week-long victory parade round the country ( also known as the Tour of Britain cycle race), but everything is getting back to grey boring normal. On Tuesday when I got the train up to London, for the first time in about six weeks, there were no Games-makers in their purple and pink uniforms, just slightly stressed looking people in their normal uniforms of grey business suits.
I have thoroughly enjoyed all of it and have decided to put my thoughts on it all down in a series of blog posts. I’m not sure how many there will be but I’ll start with where it began for me, in Paris on the Champs-Elysées on Sunday July the 22nd.
With all the current admissions and accusations of doping during the 1990’s and early years of this century, I am slightly saddened that one of my favourite riders, and one of the few universally acknowledged to have ridden clean during those years, has decided to retire. After fifteen years in the pro peleton (all spent with the Cofidis team) David Moncoutié will retire on Sunday at the end of this years Vuelta.
Moncoutié Confirms Retirement.
In his early years many pundits thought that he was a potential Tour de France winner and although he won a couple of stages that potential was never fulfilled, largely, in my opinion, because he was a clean rider in the Lance Armstrong/Jan Ulrich era. The latter part of his career in many ways has been more succesful than the early part. He has won the climbers jersey and stages in The Vuelta for the past four years as well as other smaller races. This could be seen as a sign that cycling is actually getting cleaner. I hoped that he could take the Polka-dot jersey in this years Tour de France, but a crash on Stage 12 forced him out of the race.
He says that he has no ambition to stay in cycling, but will carry on riding his bike. That was the thing I liked most about him, he always seemed to enjoy the riding as much if not more than the winning.
Random thoughts, ramblings and rants
A Scotsman in Suburbia 