"Andy Schleck drunk?"
Lots of horrible comments on the forums this morning, concerning a Twitter comment from some unknown Frenchman, who said that he met a bloke in Munich who was wearing a Leopard-Trek jacket and was staggeringly drunk.
The (anonymous) blog Inner Ring report it here, if you want to read their version.
You'll note that their version is clearly marked as "their translation" and we all know how details get lost in the translation, and they are basing it on a Twitter entry - and we all know how they are honest, and accurate, right?
Honestly, it doesn't seem like much of a story.
My opinion? I don't think Andy would be walking around in his old Leopard-Trek clothing. I think it is much more likely that one of the thousands of fans who bought the old kit two years ago is walking around wearing it, getting drunk, and maybe even boasting that he IS the real Andy Schleck.
And even if it were Andy (unlikely), then why exactly is he not allowed to get drunk, in a hotel/airport, when he is neither racing nor at a training camp? After the year he's had.... who would blame him?
Update at lunchtime: (I don't normally get time to check my computer at lunchtime, but today..)
This makes me spit: Wort.lu had the nerve to print this:
Let me get this straight - someone told one of their reporters that someone had made a comment on Twitter, they took a screen shot of it, and they call it a "report"?
They think it's worth including it, as a story in their newspaper: an unsubstantiated social network comment from some unknown French bloke, who is "said" or possibly "reported" to be a French politician - my, that just makes him so trustworthy, doesn't it?
There is no confirmation that it was Our Andy, there is no indication that the Frenchman in question even knows anything about cycling - would he actually recognise the real Andy Schleck if he saw him? The Inner Ring story, mentioned above, quotes this muck-stirrer as describing Andy as having just lost a race in Italy.
If he were a cycling fan, he would know the name of the race.
And cyclist don't actually "lose" races. They just don't win them. This may seem like splitting hairs, but it's not: if you have two people in a sport against each other, then one can win and one can lose. But not in a sport with multiple participants, otherwise you would say that Jensie has lost just about every race he's ever been in. And that would hardly be a fair reflection on his career, is it?
You could say that if two riders were neck and neck, then whoever came second would have "lost out" to the winner. But you wouldn't say he lost the race. Especially if, as in this case, there was no expectation whatsoever for Andy to win it, he was just there to get some race miles in his legs.
Andy himself said, of the Tour, er, what was that quote? That in previous years he had not won, ie he had done his best but wasn't quite good enough: but in that year, he had lost it. Meaning that it was within his power to win, but he had not done so - due to the Prologue, as I remember.
My point is that any cycling fan would not use that phrase - "he just lost a race" - which lends weight to my suggestion that this French bloke may not actually know what Andy Schleck looks like, enough to recognise him in person, especially if the person was staggering drunk at the time.
And I think it is pretty disgraceful for a Lux newspaper to report it as fact, having not even bothered to contact Andy or his family for a comment: we don't even know for sure if Andy was anywhere near Munich that night - oh, won't it be funny if he turns out to have been elsewhere? - and why does a Lux newspaper want to be so mean to a Lux person? I can imagine some other continental newspapers being happy to print bad stories about him, but his own country?
That's pretty low, don't you think? What do they hope to achieve by it?
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