Good evening,
The day ends with patchy fog and an overnight low of sixty-seven degrees.
Hours earlier, and thousands of miles east, the day began with a surprise for Andy Schleck: Alberto Contador didn’t wait for yellow-jersey wearing Schleck, as many might have expected, when Schleck experienced mechanical problems on Stage 15 of the Tour de France. Now Contador’s the one in yellow.
Schleck expected Contador to hold back, since he, Schleck, had mechanical problems:
At the finish, Contador cruised in 39 seconds ahead of Schleck, enough to dispose the Luxembourg rider of the prized yellow shirt by a mere 8 seconds.
But as Contador pulled the yellow jersey over his shoulders on the victory podium, the debate simmered.
After the finish, Schleck was visibly unhappy. “I told Alberto, ‘how can you do that?’” he said. “Okay that’s racing. But I would not want to win like that. The thing is that he waited for me when I crashed in Spa and I really appreciated that. But then why attack me here?”
The answer, of course, is that Contador wants to win the Tour de France, and he’ll not let the custom of not exploiting a leader’s mechanical problem stand in the way. So what does Contador offer, after exploiting the then-leader’s mechanical failure?
He gives Schleck a YouTube apology; in exchange, Contador keeps his lead.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdOJLuePexs
How’s that for a trade?
Why Schleck might have expected the coldly ambitious Contador to behave differently at the TdF I’ll not know. Schelck’s problem wasn’t just a mechanical failure; it was expecting more from Contador.
Leopards don’t change their spots.
I posted last night about the sighting of a Chinese UFO. I need not have looked so far afield. Over at Walworth County Today, there’s an interesting blog post about a UFO sighting over Delavan Lake. I’d like to think that if the sighting were of a UFO, meaning an extraterrestrial spacecraft, that it shows that voyagers from faraway had the good sense to visit America instead of, or after, China.
All those many miles traveled to reach this planet would deserve something more than a one-party state as a destination.