Sports

Hi,
This is Marco again, taking over Niki’s blog.
And once again I’ll talk a bit about sports.

You see, I like sports, but for Niki it’s a way of life.
Every now and then it seems like she doesn’t even care what type of sports, as long as she gets to watch something on tv. Like, the many times she puts on golf.
It amuses me (but in a good way.)

So a few times she told me she is really looking forward to indulging herself into the more European sports. We’ve already discussed voetbal (soccer) and how she wants to watch that.
We’ve already agreed upon me taking her to a few games (I haven’t been to a game in like..20 years?)

As part of her preparation for the euro-sports, she tried to follow the Tour de France this year.
Of course this isn’t easy to do, since it’s not on the radar in the USA.
I gues interest took a nose dive when Armstrong retired (and being under drugs scrutiny doesn’t help).

But even if she had been able to closely follow it, this year was boring.
You see, I like cycling for three weeks a year. The Tour is fun to watch..if the competition is strong.
Now I never like the flat surface races, because they follow the same formula and the sprinters always win.
But the mountain stages can be awesome. This year? Meh..the same team dominated everything and nobody was strong enough to challenge their superiority and threaten the race leader.

So the best thing the past three weeks was explaining some of the ‘behind the scenes’ happenings to Niki,
like race orders and tactics and such.
Like how each team comes with a designated leader, the guy that goes for the general rankings position.
They usually build the rest of the team around his needs, give him helpers for the mountains, stuff like that.
Oh, and I got to tell that the yellow jersey winner (the leader in the rankings) gives the money he wins to be distributed amongst the team. That’s one way of making them cycle for your benefit. 🙂

So that was the fun part. Again, the race itself was boring this year.
Oh well…Now we can get ready for the Olympics. Zet ‘m op, Holland!

Artwork for the Tour de France, of course! The race is starting from Liege, Belgium this year, so their local mall used 450,000 sticky notes to create a collage of bicycle related art.

Laurent Dubrule/Reuters

Of course, it would not be Belgium without the MediaMarkt store in the background of the next photo… MediaMarkt is also somewhat visible in the picture above (you can see the red text at the bottom).

Laurent Dubrule/Reuters

Of course, I don’t really follow the Tour de France. This is mainly because the television coverage isn’t that great in the States. Only two of the dates are airing on NBC. The rest will be shown on the NBC Sports Network. I heard that channel is $20 a month extra!