Steve Cummings does not ride in what you would call a traditional way in big cycle races. He spends far too much time at the back of the bunch if there is a stage in which he cannot contribute to the cause of Team Dimension Data.
It is joked the team like it that way. He’s either at the back or the front, where the cameras will pick him up and give the sponsors a little more coverage.
Before this Tour de France started, Cummings was angry at the British Cycling selectors who had not chosen him for the Olympics.
He had been marked down on “commitment”, which sounds incongruent with the sort of rider Cummings is.
“It’s just someone putting numbers in a box. This guy is good at this, this guy is good at that, but it’s just rubbish. It’s political. Everyone I’ve spoken to comes up and says ‘f**k I’m sorry you’re not in the team’. It’s a genuine disbelief so it’s not just me thinking that I’m hard done by. It is what it is.”
He answered British Cycling by winning his second Tour de France stage in two years on Friday, his fourth victory on the World Tour this year.
His non-selection seems dafter and dafter – his absence from the Olympics a travesty of the nonsense that clouds sports administrators’ thinking.
I first met Cummings in a Team Barloworld training camp in Tuscany in 2008.
He, I, Geraint Thomas, now with Team Sky, and Robbie Hunter had a few beers after a race in which Hunter finished second.
Cummings spoke of coming to South Africa for the Giro del Capo in a few months, and how he would eat a big steak every night.
We spoke of the Beijing Games that were coming up later that year. Hunter rode in Beijing, his third and final Olympics. He was due to go Rio as manager of the two-man South African team of Louis Meintjes and Daryl Impey, both of whom have shown good form at this Tour.
Hunter pulled out of the team this week after Cycling South Africa informed him they could and would not pay for his flights from Europe to Rio.
Nor could they afford to cover the entire cost of his flight from Europe to South Africa because Sascoc had only allocated R12 000 for that. It is a problem that has affected many athletes, and, yet, when it comes to boarding the plane for Rio, the administrators will turn left to business class and the athletes to economy, and none of them will feel the heat of shame on their cheeks.
Meintjes and Impey trust Hunter. He is South Africa’s most experienced and successful road rider, with wins in all three Grand Tours.
The South African cycling team will go to Rio handicapped, without the best they could send for the job. Cummings and Hunter might have a beer together one of these days to talk about how they and their Olympic team have been hard done by.
Bravo, Maud
Maud Griezmann has the date of birth of her brother, Antoine, tattooed on her arm.
For her, Sunday night’s Euro 2016 final was more than just a match in which her brother carried the hopes of a nation, but a celebration of life and a message to those who had wanted to end her life and stifle a country and a continent with fear.
A wonderful piece written by Sam Borden of the New York Times tells of how Maud was in the Bataclan in Paris shortly before 9pm on November 13 to watch the Eagles of Death Metal concert.
Her brother was playing at the Stade de France in an exhibition match against Germany. She put her phone away and did not see the reports of a suicide bombers detonating devices outside the stadium.
Some 40 minutes into the concert, he heard “a patter of loud pops … over the music”. “ ‘At first we thought it was a prank, a joke,’ Ms Griezmann said. ‘We thought it was part of the concert. But then we heard the screams'.” Maud Griezmann and her boyfriend survived the attacks. She fell to the floor.
“If you moved, you were shot. A person next to me moved, and they shot him. They just shot him, and I heard him land.”
She was the goalkeeper when she and Antoine played outside their house. She and her family went to the final last night. They went to celebrate France and life.
The Star