Back from vacation, instead of hitting on some of the many things that happened while I was away, I'll provide a study on excuses from my favorite bike blog, Bike Snob NYC, quoting Cadel Evans:
"With everything that's gone on in the last three months - I had tendonitis, a huge crash in the Tour de France, defending the yellow (jersey) with only one leg and breaking my anterior cruciate ligament - I was on crutches for three or four days after the Tour," he said.
Indeed, the dog days of summer have driven Cadel Evans, the John Coltrane of excuses, to finally take his excuse-making into the "sheets of sound" phase. It's one thing to blame injuries, but to flat out claim you only had one leg in the Tour de France (yes, I know he's being metaphorical, but I prefer to read it literally) is a statement bold and surreal enough to qualify as art. As time goes on, I hope Cadel adds to his exquisitely-wrought excuse canon. Perhaps he can also say he didn't have a bike, and that he was blind. Maybe he could also tell a tale of how a Succubus came to him in the night and stole his spirit, and how he was forced to waste an entire rest day journeying to the Carpathian mountains in order to retreive it.
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