With the out-of-town company now having left town I will scribble a few thoughts from the last few days.

 

1) I've haven't ridden since last Tuesday and have packed on a few lbs.  My next ride will not be pleasant.

2) Even though a certain reader has some apparent distaste for Valverde, I wish he hadn't crashed a few days ago.  His crash does probably help my Fantasy team at <a href="http://www.velogames.com">Velogames</a> by hurting a lot of other teams.

3) My Fantasy team is lumbering along right now as a mid-level team.  I'm tied for 1082 out of 1925 teams.  I think I will move up some when the race heads to the mountains.  Saturday's TT should help too. 

4) Boonen appears to be off his game.  He seems to be learning the excuse game quite well.  Here are some of the excuses I recall...  The final km's are not fast enough...  The sprints are starting from behind...  I had a flat for the last 5km's.  More on that flat tire in a future posting.  Now that I criticize him, he has probably won Stage 5 today.

 

Off-topic thoughts:

Tuesday, I went to the racetrack for a little while.  The place was packed.  I hadn’t been to the track since I was a youngin’.  We didn’t stay for all the races but it was an interesting way to kill an hour and a half.  I didn’t actually bet but my trained eye can obviously spot equine talent.  I picked the winner of the first two races.  Before betting on the third race, my brother asked my opinion.  Horse #1 looked good to me.  Apparently I don’t work well under pressure.  Horse #1 finished in 5^th… out of 5 horses. 

 

There is a certain depressing, creepiness to the track.  Several of the jockeys seemed very old.  Jockeying is a dangerous game and seeing these old-looking guys bounce around a track like Fairmount is kind of sad.  Maybe Fairmount has a better reputation than I imagine, but it seems some of these guys are hanging on to some semblance of a career just to pay the bills.  That happens in any career I suppose but it always seems sadder to me in sports.

 

As sad as the old jockeys may have been they were not as creepy as the track workers.  Some seemed normal but others had that always enticing inked up, drug/alchohol induced blank stare and zombike-like walk of a carnival worker.

 

And speaking of creepy, I heard today that Sophia Loren is going to pose nude in the 2007 version of the exclusive Pirelli calendar.  I’m willing to concede that she had a certain level of sexiness in her prime but Sophia Loren never did get me excited.  Probably because she is two generations older than me.  Therein lies my concern about this news.  Do we really need a 72 yr old woman posing nude?  I think not.