Pork Chops & Cycling

Don't you love how a lot of my posts are about food with some sort of mildly athletic activity thrown in to offset the food? Well, today it's not even my athletic activity I'm going to talk about, but it is my food.

As I type this, the love of my life is bringing in bacon & apple stuffed barbecued pork chops. Ladies, this is why you marry a firefighter. They can cook.

Apple & Bacon Stuffed Pork Chops

I'm not gonna lie, these things were awesome. I'm not a huge pork chop fan because I haven't really found a great way to keep them... moist. Remind me to do a whole other blog on how much I hate that word. Anyways, these were fantastic. Mike sauteed bacon, butter and apples together, stuffed the mixture in pork chops and threw them on the grill. YUM.

The cycling part I'm going to talk about is yesterday's Tour de France stage. Those of you behind the times (seriously? it's a rest day... catch up!), stop reading now.

In cycling, it's pretty much a given that at some point, you will fall off your bike. Most of the time, they're not terrible falls (more blows to the pride, I suspect) than anything. The crashes in professional cycling are a little more dangerous. They tend to end in broken collar bones, concussions, etc. Just this year, pro cycling lost a rider to a high speed crash. Most of the time they're caused by nervous riders, bad weather conditions or just bad luck.

Yesterday's crash just makes me mad. It was caused by a French television car who was trying to pass the group of breakaway riders. The road narrowed a little bit and the car had two tires on the dirt shoulder. A tree leaned into the road and the driver veered to the right to avoid it, clipping cyclist Juan Antonio Flecha. Flecha then tumbled across the road (the impact ripped the front wheel of his bike off) and into Johnny Hoogerland. Hoogerland did some fantastic gymnastics - directly into a barbed wire fence. The impact literally ripped his shorts completely off and tore up his skin. Both were able to eventually get back on their bikes and finish the stage.

The action starts about 13 seconds into the clip:

 

Absolutely horrifying, if you ask me. Hacing just started cycling, stupid drivers are one of the things I fear the most - in a day in age with texting and talking on the phone, it seems like no one is focusing on driving any more. What makes this so bad to me is that the driver had other options. Hit the tree. Hit the brakes. Nope, he/she chose to hit the rider, who had absolutely no defense or warning. Needless to say, the cycling world is outraged today. The very minimum punishment (that has already been enacted) is to pull the driver from the race. I'd pull their license if it were me.

Thankfully, both Hoogerland and Fletcha seem to be doing as well as they could be under the circumstances. Both lost tons of time (and any change of placing in the Tour), but it sounds like both of them are going to return to the race tomorrow. Hoogerland said today that he has 30+ stitches and Fletcha is obviously very sore. Absolutely incredible spirit, in my humble opinion.