Thursday, January 31, 2008

How to lose a bike race

The Tour of Qatar is a multi-stage bike race held in Qatar, a small country bordering Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.

Tom Boonen is a strapping young Belgian lad who wins a good deal of the bike races he enters, especially those that end in a sprint finish.

On yesterday's fourth stage of the Tour of Qatar, Tom Boonen lost the sprint to Italian Alberto Loddo. The video of the finish, however, shows that Boonen (in yellow jersey with blue shorts) stopped pedaling short of the finish line, which allowed Loddo to win. Even a schlub racer like myself knows to keep pedaling until after you cross the line.

Here's the video....the first minute shows the finish several times, but the best view comes at around 51 seconds. (The owner of this video disabled the "embed" feature, so I can only provide the link instead of being able to put up the YouTube player on this site. Jerks.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0r7lqz0OXw

1 comment:

Gary Burkholder said...

Or there are jerks who block YouTube for the corporate network, so that I have to waste my bandwidth at home to view these videos. Sheesh...