We’ve got some smack talk in Germany would you believe.
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The Vuelta a España reaches its crescendo these next couple of days, and will sign off on what has been an entertaining race with as many eccentric moments as you could wish for amidst the Spanish summer heat.
The end of Grand Tour season sneaks up on you, not that this year’s racing is done just yet, far from it. In fact, the Belgians are just ratcheting things up in time for the World Championships, in the way only the Belgians truly can.
Crash test durries 🚬
Our favourite moment of the Vuelta a España this week (so far) was the roadside fan who jumped in to help UAE Team Emirates’ Ivo Oliveira back to his feet after a crash, with a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth, much to the delight of the SBS commentary team.
“Nice to see the bloke who helped him up has a durrie hanging out the side of his mouth,” Matthew Keenan noticed, following Simon Gerrans’ miming.
Obviously cigarettes are wrong and bad, but I am pretty sure there is scientific research out there that shows southern Europeans are impervious to their negative health effects so everything’s fine. And let’s take a moment to appreciate Señor Durrie, sporting matching t-shirt and shorts as well as a man bag, and displaying an unheralded level of multi-tasking.
Durrie is also a fantastic word, which must have held back Australian public health efforts to rid the people of such a scourge, but we digress, there is someone else who maybe doesn’t want that smoke either. And that’s Hugo Hofstetter.
“You win Matthew but you take [sic] me off the wheel of Bryan [Coquard] and broke my shoes…” NSN’s Hofstetter posted to Instagram, rather ominously, following Brennan’s fourth stage win on stage 16.
“He rode into me and destroyed my shoe with his wheel,” Hofstetter elaborated to Eurosport. “I unclipped because I was afraid of crashing, and after that it was over for me.”
Enough hoffing and puffing from Hugo, we think. We’ll leave the final word to Brennan, who followed up his stage 16 win with a fifth on stage 17, and is puffing out his own chest and calling his shot, publicly asking Visma-Lease a Bike to go to the Tour de France next year.
“The Tour starts in the UK next year. I’d really love to be on the starting line,” Brennan said after stage 16. “We could certainly replicate what we’re doing here to take the yellow jersey on the first day!”
Will Brennan achieve what Olav Kooij never could in gaining a sprinter’s spot in Jonas Vingegaard’s Tour de France squad? Five (and counting) Vuelta stage wins is possibly the best way to make your argument, so we’ll have to see.
Remco-llaboration for the Belgian nation? 🇧🇪
Yes, two terrible Remco puns in one week. Guilty as charged.
But we can’t help it when it’s sitting right there, staring us in the face, just as the perennial Belgian quandary is of who should be the leader at the elite men’s Road World Championships.
Belgium will take both Remco Evenepoel and Wout van Aert to Montréal as co-leaders and two of the biggest favourites for the rainbow jersey, but how can two riders win one jersey?
Don’t worry, they have a plan: work together. Hmm…
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