Bradley Wiggins, Thanks to chick-lit, I know what he’s been through

Photo by Marylene Evrard

Phil: Congratualtions to Bradley Wiggins on winning the Tour de France. And congratulations on the Tour for its excellent timing.

I’m not much into sport. Years of being the last person to be picked for any team at school has left me with mental scars and a conviction that anyone who plays football in defense is only there because no one wanted them on the team. Thus, if the news is full of a Great Sporting Event, I’m looking the other way.

Not this time though. OK, so I watched about 20 minutes of the entire coverage, about long enough for Bradley and his sideburns to cover the distance from London to Birmingham, I didn’t switch off every time the subject popped up on the TV or radio.

All this was thanks to my recent very reading of Cat by Freya North. While I suppose I should have been paying attention to the lurve story, I was just as interested in the details of le Tour that provide the backdrop. I know that some the riders in a team are there to support the stars. When the sports pundits talk about team members helping each other, I understand a little what this means. Having ploughed through a big fat book I even have some concept of the length of time the whole thing takes – after all, the main news channels in the UK weren’t interested in some stupid Froggy cycle race until a Brit looked like he was going to be doing well. Then they became as big a fans as the eponymous Cat and her fellow characters in the book, even if the real life journos we probably surprised the riders weren’t all in strippy T-shirts and selling onions along the route.

So – chick-lit has enriched my life. That can’t be right can it ?