Kerry's Report 4 seems to be lost in transit, will track down and post asap -
Training all done. Now a case of getting down to Portugal for the track familiarisation and then the racing which begins Tuesday the 26th. The program for me is; Tuesday 750m time trial, Wednesday 3000m pursuit heats and final, Thursday 10km scratch heats and final, Friday and Saturday is the sprints and last day is the 20km Points race heats and final. There is also the team sprints held throughout the week as well.
I'm really only interested in the “endurance” events, the pursuit, scratch and points races, with the other two on the program to keep me out of the Pub.
At one stage we were considering driving down to Portugal through Europe but that has been canned and we are taking the two hour flight. The drive would have been impossible anyway as the Communist surrender monkeys who are sometimes known to themselves as the French, are all on strike and there is no petrol to be bought at the pumps, hence you can't drive through France.
The idle French workers are all upset because the government has pointed out that the country is going broke, because everyone is on strike and do stuff all anyway if they did decide to check out what their workplace looks like from the inside. Not taking this provocative insult lying down, the workers decided their best option was to go on strike. Even the idle French farmers are out, some refusing to jump in their flash new tractors and go down to the bank to cash their European subsidy cheques for not planting maize or not planting grain.
The nation as a whole can now turn their attention to far more pressing things like working out ways to disqualify any foreign cyclist who dares finish ahead of the first Frenchman at the Tour. By my count that will probably be most of them. The only positive thing I can say about the French is that they helped clear some much needed wharf space in the Auckland harbour basin circa 1985.
I have been outside riding on the roads in Holland and it is slightly un-nerving. For a start the motorist seem “extremely reluctant” to kill you. Coming from New Zealand, the law that cars give way to bikes crossing the road on bike paths is disconcerting, as is their courtesy and willingness to share the road. Not that you really need to ride on the roads as hot mix bike paths are everywhere and are far smoother to ride than anything in NZ. A quarter of the sixteen million Dutch claim to ride their bikes every day so I guess that's a lot of votes.
The law here is that if a car bowls a cyclist its the cars fault unless proven otherwise. You can't have it always though, if a cyclist bowls a pedestrian its the cyclist fault unless proven otherwise, this makes a lot of sense.
Anyway am looking forward to the warmer weather and the delights of the home of Port.
All good here.
