Tag Archives: 2020

Reasons to be cheerful in Melbourne…Take 2

Dear Rouleurs,

MMT has been floating around on cloud nine since last Saturday. Two near miraculous events occurred. The first, back to back premierships for MMT’s favourite AFL team, the rampaging Richmond Tigers. The second Jai Hindley took and briefly held the Maglia Rosa in the 2020 Giro d’Italia.

MMT will focus Giro result first. Eventually, Hindley finished second overall. Geoghegan-Hart from Team INEOS took 40 seconds off Hindley on the final stage’s time trial to cliche the title. The result was the best ever result for an Australian, surpassing Cadel Evan‘s third back in 2013. All the more remarkable, as it was the a 24-year-old’s third Grand Tour start and he had been riding as a domestique for team-mate Wilco Kelderman, in the midst of a pandemic. So to honour Jai Hindley, here’s a picture of the man himself, dressed up in Pink.

Here’s the man of the moment…Jai Hindley.

Before MMT moves on he should also point to the astonishing performances of two other Australians at the Giro, Rohan Dennis (INEOS Grenadiers) and Ben O’Connor (NTT Pro Cycling). Rohan Dennis practically towed Tao Geoghegan-Hart through the mountain stages of the last week and set up the Brit’s Giro victory. Ben O’Connor an unheralded West Australian, won the mountain stage 17. A big chapeau!! to both rouleurs.

Now the other reason, Richmond’s win in the 2020 Grand Final, was all the more surprising given the Geelong Cat’s 3 goal advantage in the second quarter. MMT had gave up that point and turned the telly off. MMT has been repremanded a number of times by team management (aka his wife) for loud and ‘blue’ language that might wake the team’s junior members.

Opps this photo may have been ‘acquired’ from somewhere else 😉

So near 3/4 quarter time, MMT looks at the AFL app on this mobile phone and discovers, much to his disbelief, that the Tigers are now 2 points up…WTF…you beauty. Of course, the man of the moment was Dustin Martin, who kicked 4 goals on his way to a 3rd Norm Smith medal. In years to come the pundits will talk about how good this guy is. And to think the Tiges very nearly traded him to the Giants back in 2016. MMT thinks the Tiges dodged a bullet. Martin may be the million dollar man at Richmond, but few would argue that he’s not worth it.

Anyhooo…MMTis getting all misty eyed about the Tiges and its good time to sign off. One more thing….MMT has completed 9,000km in year for the first time…woo hoo 😉

Until next time, keep safe, ride safe and go Tiges,

MMT

Reasons to be cheerful in Melbourne…at last

Dear Rouleurs,

Whilst winter has been utterly dreary with no trips to the MCG and in last 2 months serious restrictions on movement, both due to stage 4 lock down, Team MMT’s mood has significantly improved. October has brought warmer weather and daylight savings has kicked in producing pleasant evenings to boot. But its two major events that have occurred this week that that has put a literal spring in MMT’s step.

The first occurred on Friday night, with MMT’s beloved Tigers went toe to toe with a hostile Port Adelaide on their home ground in front of a full house of Port supporters and …won…unf#%kbelievable. Even if the Cats roll the Tiges next Saturday, that game and the mental strength it took to win will be long remembered by Tiges fans everwhere. So here is it the MMT appropriated AFL graphic of the path to the Finals.

Its been a very weird year…period but this result is bewildering. Both Grand Finalists have:

=>been playing away from home for over 100 days in their respective hubs.

=>lost their initial Qualifying Final.

=>beaten the hometown team on their own ground in front of their supporters.

That is very odd, even in a year when lots of bad and odd things have been occurring. Which brings MMT to the other wonderful event of this week, today’s easing of Stage 4 Restrictions, in particular the one that was starting to drive MMT a bit nuts, the 5km radius restriction. MMT wrote about this a while back and has done some where upwards of 500km in his 5km radius.

So when this changed from this….

MMT’s Tour de 5km Radius. When daily exercise was set at 1 hour this meant tooling around Albert Park Lake. When this was lifted to 2 hours it meant he could ride to Williamstown. Alas MMT is yet to fugure out how to ride his beloved Trek Domane on water.

To this…

Hallelujah!!! MMT can ride to Mordialloc, Altona and Meadow Heights again with no daytime exercise time restrictions…woo hoo. I’m so looking forward to a cruise to Blackrock tomorrow.

Damn, normal road cycling has resumed in Melbourne for MMT. Unfortunately the same can not be said for cycling in European where COVID-19 is rampaging in devastating second wave. In seems unlikley that the Giro d’Italia 2020 will finish in Milan, and the classics have taken hit with both the Paris-Roubaix and Amstel Gold being cancelled. Let’s hope a vaccine is close to being released to the world’s population. This year has just been awful.

Until next time, ride safe and Go Tiges

MMT

Reasons to be cheerful in June…here’s the 2020 UCI schedule

Dear Rouleurs

Let’s face it the last 3 months or so has been bloody awful without competitive cycling. Watching the fairly boring replays of the Paris-Nice 2020 on SBS, is no substitute for a fully fledged spring classics season. So it was with some excitement that MMT heard through his favourite podcasts that the UCI had published a revised 2020 event calendar.

It looks like this. MMT hasn’t figured out how to show the Women’s events yet, so accusations of sexism please.

RaceCountryDate
 Eschborn–Frankfurt Germany1 May – Delayed due to COVID-19
 Strade Bianche Italy1 August
 Tour de Pologne Poland5–9 August
 Milan–San Remo Italy8 August
 Critérium du Dauphiné France12–16 August
 EuroEyes Cyclassics Germany16 August – Delayed due to COVID-19
 Bretagne Classic Ouest–France France25 August
 Tour de France France29 August – 20 September
 Tirreno–Adriatico Italy7–14 September
 GP de Québec Canada11 September
 GP de Montréal Canada13 September
 BinckBank Tour Belgium  Netherlands29 September – 3 October
 La Flèche Wallonne Belgium30 September
 Giro d’Italia Italy3–25 October
 Liège–Bastogne–Liège Belgium4 October
 Amstel Gold Race Netherlands10 October
 Gent–Wevelgem Belgium11 October
 Dwars door Vlaanderen Belgium14 October
 Tour of Guangxi China15–20 October
 Tour of Flanders Belgium18 October
 Vuelta a España Spain20 October – 8 November
 Three Days of Bruges–De Panne Belgium21 October
 Paris–Roubaix France25 October
 Il Lombardia Italy31 October

Now a few aspects of this schedule are immediately obvious, such as the enormous overlap between one day races and grand tours. Spain has lost all of its races, except the La Vuelta. MMT reckons that cyclists being earmarked for the Tour Guangxi would be looking for danger money.

But what’s interesting about this compressed season is the impact that it may have on the grand tours. It seems to MMT that teams will be forced to choose which races to prioritise. For a team like Ineos, they may choose to skip many of the one day events. For a team like Quickstep, MMT guesses that it will write off the Giro. The French and Dutch based teams will have serious thinking to do. One wonders which of the tours, Mitchellton-Scott will prioritise?

Either way its going to be fascinating to see how this turns out. Speaking of fascinating – MMT has completed his bike log for the first in years on time and May was a great month. The last week or so meant the Zwift-Tacx Neo trainer was pushed aside for some time outdoors. Some days were actually delightful for cycling.

So until next time, stay safe, ride safe

MMT

Its the end of the world and I feel fine or Apologies to REM

Dear Rouleurs,

All over the world, a lot of people are having incredibly shit experiences with worst global event since World War 2. People are sick, dying, unemployed, suffering from extreme social distancing and wondering what happens next. MMT is no different. Europe’s death toll is slowly abating and has been overtaken by the USA. At least here in Australia and in our next door neighbour New Zealand we have been spared the worst.

In MMT’s small part of the world, he’s been deeply concerned, seemingly struck down by the common flu after his last ride on Good Friday. Stupidly, MMT rode in the wind and wet for nearly three hours and by Sunday afternoon was feeling pretty average. His youngest daughter has a much milder version of the same thing. Given the asbence of a few key symptoms its seems unlikely that either of us have COVID-19. Daughter No.2 has had a couple of trips to the ER with breathing difficulties attributed to Croup. However next week, once the worst of this is over, MMT plans on visiting his GP and having a chat.

So last blog MMT shamelessly stole a couple of graphs documenting the infection rate in Victoria and in Australia overall. The latest version of the graphs spell out how effective Australia has been contact tracing, isolating oversea visitors or returning Australians and controlling cluster outbreaks. If the Ruby Princess cruiseship debacle hadn’t occurred it could have been better.

This is Victoria’s:

This is Australia’s:

The curves in both graphs have experienced the required flattening. The cost of which is likley to paid for by generations of Australias, present and future.

So to tie back to were MMT started, MMT has been revisiting the music of his youth via a social media platform, that he refuses to name on principle. One of those albums was Document No.5, which contained the song and lyric, ‘Its the end of the world and I feel fine’. MMT is not sure about the ‘fine’ part yet.

Until next time, stay safe out there

MMT