sabotage

I yawn. My head aches. I’ve stayed up late two consecutive nights to watch Le Tour. Cadel strives to find the opportunity to sneak away, to gain lost minutes. It doesn’t happen, isn’t going to happen. He punctures three times. Thirty riders puncture near the summit of the Mur de Peguere near Foix. Tacks are found on the road.

It’s been done before. Tacks on the course, a precedent. In 1904 every other outrage occurs as well. Four masked men leap from a car and attack Maurice Garin and Lucien Pothier as they ride away from the field. Rider Chevallier spends 45 minutes in a car; others hop on trains. This is stage one.

On stage two Antoine Fauré leads close to his home town. Two hundred fanatical Fauré supporters prevent the field getting through. Paul Gerbi is knocked out. On stage three fans throw rocks at riders and barricade the road, nails and broken glass strewn on the course. Race officials intervene, fire shots in the air.

Fifth-placed Henri Cornet is declared winner after the first four place-getters are disqualified. Nothing is new at Le Tour. Who are the retrospective winners from 1999 to 2005 if Lance is scrubbed? Will we get down to a fifth place-getter, a rider who hasn’t doped?

I’m sabotaged every day as an ordinary old cyclist: cars cut me off deliberately, drive too close in order to intimidate, passengers fire obscenities like bullets at close range. I’ve been struck with a bread roll wielded like a baseball bat, lined up on a long straight on Ferntree Gully Road.

Bike lanes end in the middle of nowhere. Bureaucratic sabotage. The Victorian government budgets nothing for bike infrastructure this year. Political sabotage. The Bureau predict rain every weekend from now until eternity. Meteorological sabotage.

In the end there’s nothing for it but to throw a leg over the top bar and ride, ride fast, ride clever, ride everywhere.

Rock on.