Thor

I am going to try to resist the temptation to blog a lot about the Tour de France. I'm a sports fan. It's a status I denied for many years because my honey didn't so much like it. She's come around, which is sweet.

I tried hard during the Winter Olympics to not blog solely about them. It got me (and Honey )off on an unfortunate trajectory about Neve and Gliz. So, I'm going to make a rule for myself during the 21 days of the Tour. You ready? I can have the TdF in my blog five times total in the next three weeks. Here's #1.

I won't try to top Honey who wrote beautifully about the doping scandal yesterday. It's not just because she's my honey and found a really nice calf picture...I have to see that's as succinct and right a piece on drugs in sports as I've read in a while.

We just watched the prologue of the TdF on our Tifaux. Honey has persuaded me to not root for Floyd Landis or Dave Zabriskie because they've given two joint interviews--one in Outside the other in Bicycling--in which they said homophobic things. So we're rooting for a few other guys. I confess to having a weakness for the best Norwegian cyclist ever (tm). It's not that competitive a thing really, but he's good beyond Norway. He's big for a cyclist and races for the French Credit Agricole team. One (ok the main) reason I like him is that his name is Thor Hushovd. There are other things to like. He won the green sprinter's jersey last year in the TdF when no one expected him to. He doesn't head butt people like Robbie McEwan. (McEwan named his son Ewan--Do I need to say more? Ewan McEwan. Sigh.) I can hope that, because he's from Norway, he holds more worldy views than Landis and Zabriskie. I also like Agricole's kit. It's green and fairly understated. I love the colors of cycling but there are some ugly ass kits (that's uniforms in non sports geek speak) out there. There's T-Mobile's pink mess:



And Euskaltel-Eukadi's orange yuck:



And then today was a time trial, so they ride the alien bikes with the alien helmets. Here's a good example:



That's Levi Leipheimer. Odd looking itnit?

Thor's name appeals to me in part because of an interest in mythology I developed when I was but a child. As a bookish kid, I spent as much time as I could in the Maud Burrus Library in Decatur, Georgia where I grew up. Mrs. Burrus was the first director of that library, which opened in 1925.



Even though Decatur is in the Atlanta area, there were lots of things that made it seem like a small town. The Maud Burrus Library was one of them. I don't think I read every book in the kids' wing, but it seemed that way to me sometimes when I was looking for something new. Then, I moved into the adult section and never looked back. Among my favorites books in that library were the books on mythology. This early interest MAY have influenced my academic interests later in life.* : )

While the Norse gods didn't do as much for me as the Greek and Roman ones, I liked them enough to read whatever I could find on them. Thor wasn't as cool as Loki and I lacked the sophistication as a child to understand that flawed "people" were more interesting than purely "good" ones. But I was a kid who liked things to be fair. And Thor got treated unfairly by Loki. Of course that was Loki's thing.

So when I started watching cycling and found there was this semi-underdog cyclist named Thor, I couldn't resist pulling for him. (It's worth noting, I think, that Thor Hushovd is one of the top 15 or 20 cyclists in the whole world. He's not exactly Seabiscuit. But then Seabiscuit wasn't really that much of underdog ether. So maybe he is Seabiscuit. Oh, never mind. My point is that Boonen, Pettachi, and McEwan are better sprinters).

He wasn't supposed to win today.



He did. By .73 of a second over George Hincapie. Floyd and his homophobia had a flat tire and finished 8 or 9 second backs. So there. No Loki today. And I hope no drugs. It seems a little victory for fair. Mrs. Burrus would certainly agree that it's a good day when fair wins.

*I have a PhD in Folklore and Mythology