Tomorrow will be seven days since I did my hip – on my exercise bike of all things. Over the past seven days the pain has come and gone but Monday I spent most of the day producing copper bottom proof that I have an allergy to codeine! That is a day I do not want to repeat in a while.
So the hip is getting slightly better each day. The prognoses is that it is nothing too serious just got to get the inflammation down and things should back to normal. The only good thing to have come out of this is that I have been able to sit back and enjoy the Tour de France. This has been tinged by my frustration with the commentary teams of both ITV and Eurosport. They both seem incapable of accepting that Chris Froome is head and shoulders above any other rider on the tour this year. Now I understand the reasons for this – if the race is sewn up then less people are going to watch but really come on lets have acknowledgement of what is happening.
The ITV pair are perhaps the worst “…A real solid performance from Froome…” their closing comment on Froome. A real solid performance would be if he had limited his losses to a few seconds. Instead, Froome took several seconds off the number two rider, and drugs cheat, Alberto Contador. This was an outstanding performance and it really should be acknowledged as such.
I can understand the frustration of Froome over all the drugs allegations but I also suspect that there is also something much more basic going on. Sky have the money and support to blow every other team out of the water and this will only get worse the more successful they are. You only have to look at the sponsorship package to realise that this team has serious money and serious money means that you can seriously prepare for the Tour de France. Something I suspect other teams just can’t match and so their may just be jealousy of their success coupled with the fact because they don’t have any history of drug taking – like many of the other teams – they can take the moral high ground which isn’t going win friends and influence people.
The media have now gone over board with their pursuit of Froome and drugs taking. Again, this is understandable but as David Walsh (the link explains everything) it would have been nice if they had been as keen to investigate Lance Armstrong. He has followed Sky from the inside and he doesn’t believe that there is any drugs cheating going on. Of course he is a News Corp employee but I doubt he would say these things if he thought there was something wrong.
For me, I think Sky are clean – they really would loose everything very quickly if they weren’t – given the last couple of years that News Corp (or is that 21st Century Fox?) have had with scandals I’m pretty sure they have made sure if any drugs cheating were proven they would pull the plug big style and without News Corp Sky are nothing.
So perhaps the commentators should accept that Froome has taken everything anyone has been able to throw at him. He is the King of the Mountains, he leads that competition as well, and it doesn’t matter how much you try and pretend that Contador has a chance in a head to head climbing up Alpe d’Huez there is no evidence to support this. Of course things can go wrong but providing they don’t we should try and enjoy a phenomenal feat of human endurance.
Now if only was able to get back on my exercise bike I’d be there riding along – in my dreams!
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