[Paul Sherwen and Phil Liggett on Sunday morning as they narrated an aerial view of a French chateau southwest of Paris:]
Paul (informatively): You might not know this but in a very secluded part of the garden there’s a very old tree, a sequoia which was planted around about 1860.
Phil (surprised): The sequoia is not , not a tree of, indigenous to France, it’s Africa, isn’t it, the sequoia tree?
Paul (reassuringly): I believe it is.
Me: Sequoia. Sequoiadendron. Metasequoia.
Technorati Tags: cycling, tour de france, versus
That is pitiful.
What else is there left to talk about? I know i can’t bicycle up Berkeley’s hills without caffeine and sugar, so I’m not surprised it takes something stronger to do the Tour. Maybe, with DNA splicing and dicing, we’ll do the doping before the little cyclists are even born!
Hey — I’ll bet you could too do Grizzly Peak without caffeine and sugar. As long as you got some when you came back down.
What’s left to say? I’m working on that!
You’re right, though — the next frontier is in genetics; even before you get to the point of creating athletes with certain characteristics — which will be an incredible bore, when you think about it, because the beauty of sports as with so much other human endeavor is individual variation — you could easily foresee creation of designer blood supplements based on a user’s genetic makeup.
Anyway. Some Tour. Same time, same channel next year.