I don’t know why I get as excited about the road bike season as I do. As a rider, it was mountain bikes that I liked, not road bikes, and even there I only did one piddly little race before my knees started hurting. But the season’s started, at least as far as OLN TV’s coverage of it is concerned. And that’s a good thing.
The first race they broadcast was the prologue of the Paris-Nice race. Prologues are pretty pointless, if you ask me. I mean, these guys normally race for 200-300km, and here they are doing what, 5km? You know that every rider is going to have to go out and do a long training ride after the race.
I’m a little concerned about Lance Armstrong, though. I have a nagging feeling that he’s only starting the season because it was the only way he could get a new sponsor for his team-mates, and he’s just doing it out of loyalty to the rest of them. He made a few remarks at the press conference when he announced that he was going to ride the Tour de France this year that made me think he’s been slacking off, not preparing with his usual thoroughness. That leads me to wonder if he’s just going to do a couple of legs of the Tour and then drop out, having fulfilled his obilgations to his team and to the sponsor. Certainly his horrible placing in the prologue supports that theory, but then again this is only a prologue on a tune-up race. We’ll just have to wait and see.