Last year when Lance Armstrong was winning the Tour de France a bunch of worthless, incompetant lazy “sports writers” decided it was in the world’s best interest that they proclaim that Lance Armstrong was “not an athelte”. They got effective verbally pummelled for their wimpy delcarations. Still others tried it thinking they negative publicity was a good thing. Wrong.
Well, I guess they’re back! But now the new trend is not that Lance is “not an athlete” but that cycling is not a sport!
Oddly enough in the same article, this wimpy beer-bellied wannabee declares that golf is a sport. I saw no sign of intentional irony in his article. So I assume he is quite serious.
His “reasons”:
The Tour de france being held in France. This is where I first thought he was joking. but he’s not.
"There is no strategy. Oh wait, go faster than the other guy. "
Yeah, and how about all that strategy in Golf? “Get the ball in the hole!”. Good chance this loser would declare NASCAR to be a sport in a heartbeat. The strategy there? Oh wait: “Go faster than the other guy”.
Gaaah, forget it. This guys just a troll with a sports column. Why do assholes like get hired? I swear they could shoot every sports columnist in the world and replace them with college students and trained monkeys. The writing style would be improved and the reporting more sensible and accurate.
Did you read that he included bowling in his list? I like to bowl but will readily admit that probably like most other folks I’m better at it after large quantities of nachos and beer.
I don’t think that cycling is a sport. Then again, I don’t think that Nascar is a sport either. Neither is golf, bowling, pool, sailing, or Magic: The Gathering. This is, of course, just my opinion.
BTW, I’ve seen all of the above being covered by ESPN.
Well, it seemed obvious to me the guy wasn’t writing a serious column. Not only does he put down cycling, but he snipes at soccer, the French, OLN, Europeans, and especially himself. But this one line
If track and field events count as sports, then you can’t really say that cycling isn’t.
And there is plenty of strategy in cycling, as my cycling enthusiast friend would point out. Much of it is based on the fact that the person in the lead of a given cycling group does more work than those behind him. This is the basis for having TEAMS in cycling; they try to do all the work for the leader until such time that their leader can fly away in a break-away. Break-aways are always great fun, because there are usually guys from several teams who are just trying to win a particular stage, while there might also be a team leader from another team vying for the overall rankings. Teams with no one in the break-away usually lead the peloton to catch up, especially if the team leader in the break-away is a threat to other teams’ leaders. However, if these teams are expending their men trying to catch up, some groups who are just taking it easy in the peloton may then try to break-away again once the main break-away is caught up to, and the rest of the field may not have the energy to try to catch them. Or maybe no one will make the effort to chase them because there isn’t an overall tour threat in the break-away.
That being said, Lance usually just blows by people in the mountain stages, as the effect of breaking someone’s wind is less noticeable when climbing (lower speeds). Of course, he doesn’t win every mountain stage, but the team makes sure that no overall tour threat breaks away too far ahead. Other teams who might be vying to put their leader in the Best Sprinter or Best Climber jerseys also add to the random strategizing that goes on.
Well, I’m certainly not going to argue that cycling is NOT a sport (or, for that matter, that Lance Armstrong is not an athlete). Is it a sport that I want to watch? No. Am I going to weep if cycling’s profile doesn’t rise in the United States? No.
For the record, when I was a sports editor, I ran Tour de France stories. Not only was Armstrong’s prowess newsworthy, but anything that allowed me a focus on something BESIDES baseball during the summer months was welcome. And I interviewed Dylan Casey, a U.S. Postal Service rider who lived in my paper’s coverage area.