For months, TV commentator Carlton Kirby has claimed that the Australian rider once stole his boiled egg at a breakfast buffet. Did he?
Jonny Long (illustration)
There are many hard jobs around professional cycling. There are the athletes riding for days upon days, of course, but there are also the soigneurs away from home 200 days a year, the tireless bus drivers, the press officers fielding infinite inane questions. But there’s one job that seems especially intellectually taxing – being a commentator.
For hours every day, these stalwarts of the spoken word fill the silence with facts, cultural nuggets, and (usually) sharp-eyed analysis of what’s going on in the bike race, picking out riders in a sea of dozens from a tiny screen in a cramped commentary box. When you’re filling dead air for that long, I think it’s excusable that some moments of that commentary repeat themselves; that lines turn into catchphrases (Matt Keenan’s ‘Tornado Tadej’; Paul Sherwen’s ‘suitcase of courage’).
There’s one commentator-go-to that has particularly piqued our interest lately, though, and in it we have a unique opportunity: to get to the bottom of where it came from, and solve a little mystery in the process. Maybe even exonerate an innocent man, falsely accused of a crime most fowl. Simply put, it’s the single most intriguing egg-related thing that’s happened in pro cycling since that one time Astana decided to be funny (2023).
Astana Qazaqstan simply cannot stop with the pranks
What if I told you there was an egg in this man’s pocket? Ah, what then?!
The players
To begin, we should probably outline some key components in this whodunnit.
The allegation: At multiple points during the commentary of this year’s Tour of the Alps and Tour de France – when Australian rider Michael Storer is on the screen or animating a breakaway, which he tends to be quite a lot – the British cycling commentator Carlton Kirby has claimed that Storer once stole his boiled egg.
Carlton Kirby: Long-standing commentator for TNT Sports (the artist formerly known as Eurosport). Here he is in action, doing a thing I simply could never do:
Final lap stage 2 @TourOfTheAlps pic.twitter.com/owXQwrqZ5u
— Carlton Kirby (@carltonkirby) April 22, 2025
Michael Storer: Polite pro cyclist from Perth, Australia, currently riding for Tudor Pro Cycling. Two-time stage winner at the 2021 Vuelta a España, and also KOM jersey winner that year. Has finished 10th at the Giro d’Italia on two occasions, including the 2025 edition. Winner this year of a stage of Paris-Nice, and also a stage (and the overall) of the Austrian/Italian race, Tour of the Alps.
A boiled egg: The unfertilised byproduct of a chicken, laid and transported to a hotel breakfast buffet at said Tour of the Alps (April 2025), where Carlton Kirby popped it in an egg boiler thingy, went about his business for however long it takes him to boil an egg to his satisfaction, and returned to find it missing.
The only other person in the breakfast buffet at the time (allegedly): one Michael Storer.
Is this face the picture of athletic concentration, or a hardboiled thief?
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