Thursday, December 10, 2009

Wiggin' Out: Sex (Pistols), Lies and Twitter

I have been watching the road-racing pro-tour news with much interest over the past several days as some major shake-ups have recently occured and still seem to be evolving.  Most of these changes surround Bradley Wiggins, who finished in 4th place at this year's Tour de France.

Wiggo is an interesting character who got his first start in professional road racing on a team meant to promote vegetarianism and Linda McCartney brand Foods.  Hence the name, the Linda McCartney Racing Team whose jerseys were apparently inspired by boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.



Unfortunately, this project went belly-up after about a year with massive financial losses.  Wiggins then went on to race for a number of French squads before ending up last year with Garmin-Slipstream, where he truly established himself as general classifications contender.  After his break-out performance at this year's Tour, he has been a marked man, with a number of teams attempting to lure him out of the remaining year on his Garmin contract.

Amidst the swirling rumors of his early departure for the newly formed British Sky Team, Wiggo has still found the time to do a little trash talking, or so Cyclingnews.com would have us believe:


In an article published Monday, CyclingNews reported that Wiggins was "talking tough" regarding the 2010 Tour de France and quoted him as saying,

"I've looked at some of the Tour stages.  A lot of people think it won't be a great Tour for me but that first week if anything is advantageous to me....those cobbled stages could have big gaps to the guys like Andy, Contador and the guy from America."

Later on in the article, he had a few additional words regarding "the guy from America",


"It will make for an interesting race and I still think I'm a better ride than Lance and a few of the other guys."

Almost immediately after CyclingNews released this story, the Twitter lines started to buzz from the Wiggo camp in the UK.


Apparently Wiggo didn't think a Tweeted disclaimer was quite good enough to appease the awakened giant, thus prompting an email to il padrino of the peloton himself to which LA responded, publicly no less, on Twitter, just to let everyone know that Wiggo had come begging for his forgiveness.

What would possess Wiggo to make such brash comments?  Who knows for sure, but if we backtrack Wiggo's tweets, we can see what music he was listning to shortly prior to when the poop hit the fan.

Public Image Limited, or PiL, was the experimental punk brainchild of Jon Lydon after the Sex Pistol's demise in 1978.  This could certainly explain Wiggo's seemingly anarcharistic actions.  He got ramped up on a little classic punk and went all Johnny Rotten on us.

It then occured to me that Wiggo and Rotten bear a remarkable resemblence to one another and the source of Wiggins' inspiration now seems all the more clear.


Despite LA's reported forgiveness of Wiggo's brashness, Bradley still may have been scared to the point of performing a childish act in his pants, however, because not long after the incident, he reported on Twitter that he needed some new underwear.

Or perhaps this was code for something else, since he remarked that he was actually changing to a different brand of underwear all together, and that he didn't want regrets 20 years down the line.  Sure enough, CyclingNews is reporting this morning that Wiggins has switched teams and will be joining the British squad Team Sky next year.

New underpants indeed.

Back at Team RadioShack headquarters, LA was demonstrating the change in the appearance of their underoos as well.

Not quite what I would consider epic, but apparently The Shack is all about brand recognition, evidenced by the integration of the logo graphics into the paintjob on the team's new Trek Madone 6-series and even onto the Bontrager Wheels.


I wonder if Wiggo will try to integrate a little Johnny onto his new Pinarello?


Pedal on!

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