Alright, I admit it: I made a blunder yesterday, on par with the Boston Globe’s April Fool’s Day Debacle. It seems that Valsir is a subdivision of Fondital, which means that the change in co-sponsor of next year’s Lampre team will most likely not affect Igor Astarloa’s position on that sqaud, as I reported yesterday. It would be easy, VeloNews easy, for me to blame the fact that I don’t speak Italian for this little snafu, but “facente parte del gruppo Fondital” ought to be plain enough to any English speaker, let alone one with a minor in Classical Languages and Literature. This mistake was brought about by simple carelessness, my dear readers, and the culpa is entirely mea.
But I’m not the only one out there making silly mistakes. I’m sure we all remember that stage in this year’s Tour when Georg Totchnig forgot to zip up his jersey as he crossed the line. I’d imagine that there was such collective grinding of teeth back at Gerolsteiner’s corporate HQ that the company was forced to drop dental care from its health plan. So what was Totchnig’s punishment for abusing the millions of Euros the bottled water company has poured into the sport over the past half-decade? Why, Austrian Sportsman of the Year. Oh, and you’ll have to scroll down a bit. I’m really at a loss as to why VeloNews chose to lead with a story about how a scrawny climber doesn’t like time trials; in my book, that’s a headline on par with “Dog Bites Man.”
Then there was that whole Sony-Ericsson debacle. That was a mistake, and looked to have left a whole bunch of people completely out of work. Not so, it seems, as Giancarlo Ferretti has kinda donated the leftovers from the soon-to-be defunct Fassa-Bortolo team to the smaller Acqua e Sapone team. It’s a nice gesture, but it leaves me wondering what we will do with the current Acqua e Sapone staff. Perhaps wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes? (scroll to comments). Maybe we could put them to work trying to repair another famous boner, Mavic’s Z.A.P. and Mektronic shifting systems. Campagnolo’s been working on that for eight years now, and despite the fact that the parts are good enough to win Dwars door Vlaanderen, they are apparently not good enough to sell to shmoes like us yet. Now that sounds like a mistake if I’ve ever heard one.
great blog, thanks a lot for writing it.