Giro Tweets of the Week: Journos, mares and crocs

Ach, where do we begin? Well, let’s start at the individual time trial on Saturday. There seemed to be two stories running concurrently – both had to do with British cyclists, both had a connection with David Walsh. We’re just going to wade into this …

Movistarlet Alex Dowsett (a former Skyrider) set an early best time and it was never beaten, even though everyone thought Bradley Wiggins would win the stage.

David Harmon (@spokesmen) has taken a break from Eurosport commentating and unfortunately the new guy hasn’t quite found his groove. I counted that he said the name Bradley Wiggins 150,000 times in the three hours of televised TT on Saturday – always both names. [Don’t exaggerrate – it was only 120,000 – Ed.] If the camera was on someone else, that didn’t stop him talking about Bradley Wiggins. The cameras seemed to dote on Bradley Wiggins as well. Especially when Bradley Wiggins reached up the leg of his skinsuit to produce, as if by magic, an energy gel …

Time trials are pretty tame affairs at the best of times – except when My Beloved is riding them and then … the haunches, the haunches! OR when Taylor Phinney and Tony Martin are going all out for TT World Championships. But other than that, it’s a bit snoozeville.

However the giant bags of biscuits were popular among the twitterati!

(Just in case you haven’t seen the bags of giant biscuits near the finish line at each of the stages, here they are – just behind Cav.)

One slightly out of the ordinary thing that happened during the TT was Bradley Wiggins’ flat tyre – so he threw his new state-of-the-art Pinarello into the hedge. But we didn’t see the crowd kicking!

Kids’ll say the darndest things!

Then there came the write-up in the paper by David Walsh on Alex Dowsett’s TT victory. His connection with Bradley Wiggins is that he is embedded with Sky this year. Perhaps it’s just the nature of Twitter being quite black and white but his tweets on the Saturday seemed to be firmly in the Bradley Wiggins camp. (Some would call them fawning. I couldn’t possibly comment.)

ANYWAY, in his write-up it seemed to a lot of people that he was implying that Dowsett’s ill-advised comments about Lance Armstrong somehow was something a bit more sinister than a young kid saying daft things. This implication did not go over well, especially with a certain David Millar. He laid down three things he’s learned from the first week of the Giro – check number three.

This is the two paragraph bit that caused such consternation.

Then came Walsh’s explanation. Shame he wasn’t able to catch up with Dowsett before he put that in print and clarify tweet 2/6.

Having a ‘mare

However as much as Walsh would hope otherwise, ol’ Bradley Wiggins was having a ‘mare of a Giro. And to be honest, these are some of the funniest tweets of the week.

Bradley Wiggins seemed to have lost his descending mojo – Fran Millar is head of press for Sky and also David Millar’s sister. David came to the front of the peloton on Sunday and started drilling it once word had come that Bradley Wiggins was yo-yoing off the back. Did Fran really not realise that the whole point of this display of strength was because Sky *wasn’t* in this group? The pack was trying to pick off the weakling.

A Cat 1 Gruppetto

But let us move on to the Gruppetto – it’s a bumper crop this week. Gold, Jerry, GOLD!

One has to wonder what is going on in that BMC bus.

Uncanny!

Sting’s little brother, Marcel Kittel, had a birthday! That quiff!!

It’s raining again. Or rather, it hasn’t stopped.

So Adam Hansen isn’t just a great rider who won an epic stage the other day. He also goes around to other team buses with a ring of keys hooked to his belt and some pens in his breast pocket and fixes their internet! “Have you tried turning it on and off?”