Tour Tweets of the Week: The Hurt Locker, #WAGWAR and Fathers & Daughters

Funny, cruel, odd, personal … you get it all on Twitter. Each week, we’ll have a rundown of some of our favourite tweets. Here are the tweets for the week ending 15th July 2012.

I hurt myself today

No matter who you may be, cycling hurts. It is no respecter of jerseys …

Even the hardest of the hardmen was feeling it this week.

You said what about my man???

So, as we all recall, during a stage last week looked like Chris Froome might well have gone off-piste and dropped his own team leader, who just happened to be the yellow jersey, who just happened to be Bradley Wiggins. The explanation was a combination of mixing up ‘Slow Slow’ with ‘Go Go’ or no radios or doin’ a rope-a-dope manoeuvre to fake out Nibali and Evans. All it really served to do is turn the Twitterstream into a red-hot river of fire with the accusations, excuses and explanations flowing fast and furious. So much so, it looked like there might be a bit of a cat fight … or #wagwar … In the Mod corner, Cath Wiggins, in the Froomedog corner, Michelle Cound. It begins with this RT of a Cath Wiggins shout-out after that infamous stage.

That’s when the twitterati plowed in and Mrs Wiggins was on the defensive.

Even Peta Todd got involved! And with most fights between girls, the boys got involved – purely in a spectator sport sort of way.

Then the climbdown:

But with a sense of humour, as Michelle’s tweet regarding Wiggins’ slight burn brought on by idiot spectators who were running with flares.

Mistaken identity

Oh, it’s so funny when mainstream newspapers try to act like they know anything about cycling. For the second time this year, David Millar was mis-identified as Robert Millar. Because obviously the subs on the backbench know nothing about the sport.

And although we don’t have the visual evidence, apparently news reporters are getting Fabian Cancellara and Jens Voigt mixed up. This is what The Jensie had to say about that!

But then if the Velits twins wanted to play with sportswriters’ minds, that might be fun!

Anyone with a long memory would know that this was a reference to one of Tyler Hamilton’s doping defenses – he claimed something along the lines of, he had a twin who hadn’t developed and was inside him and all of a sudden started producing a different kind of blood, just like that, after oh, 30-some years! It’s a medical miracle! Or it wasn’t, as we later found out.

Tour de Pologne

While much of the peloton were racing around France, trying to fend off the Velvet Samurai and tacky attacks, there was another stage race going on in Poland. One of the big names who was racing was a certain Tom Boonen. This picture was bobbing about in the Twitterstream this week and it was just too bizarre to leave out. I will, however, refrain from making jokes about magnificent boonens …

Mr Boonen also tweeted a picture of Niki Terpstra, all mummified after a crash earlier in the week.

But a Tweets of the Week favourite, Ted King, was also at the Tour of Poland (which just goes to show that the #KingfortheTour campaign failed pretty miserably) and for his sins he gets fed mayonnaise for breakfast.

Fathers and daughters

But life is not all about racing, as we can see by the new arrivals this week and a poignant tribute to a loved one gone.

This congratulatory tweet from Frank made me laugh – ‘Frank, it’s Fabian. I’ve got a daughter!’ ‘That’s wonderful, Fabian! What’s her name?’ ‘Her name? Um, well, it’s … oh, is that the doorbell? yeah, yeah, that’s the doorbell, gotta go! Love to Andy…’

And Greg Henderson had some good news!

Saturday’s stage, however, brought us the other end of the spectrum. Saxo-Tinkoff’s Michael Morkov broke away from the breakaway and tried to take a stage win on the fifth anniversary of his father’s death. Everyone who was watching was cheering him on. Although he didn’t win the stage, he did win the combativity prize and the hearts of everyone watching.