Monday, July 25, 2011

A classic (not) of sports writing

Many thanks to Ry crozier, Annabel Crabb and Jonathan Holmes for the tweets and retweets that brought this piece to my attention.

Just in case someone at News Limited cares and fixes it I will quote here to immortalise what would sound good as parody coming from Roy and HG, but looks mightily out of place in the Oz.


CADEL Evans has produced the ride of his life to become the winner-elect of The Tour de France.

Evans grew wings as he ripped his way through the streets of Grenoble to rip the yellow jersey off the back of Andy Schleck to ride his way into the history books as the first Australian to win the Tour.
In an individual test of man and machine, Evans not only ground out a fabulous win, as he not only ate into the 57 seconds Andy Schleck enjoyed at the start of the day, he absolutely slaughtered the opposition for overall champion to record a time of 55min 40sec.


In a superb ride against the clock, the 34-year-old BMC rider destroyed Andy Schleck, who finished just three seconds ahead of older brother Frank, in a time of 58mins 11sec.


Evans will lead the survivors onto the Champs Elysees today by a whopping 1min 34 sec ahead of the field.



Just count them - "grew wings" and two uses of the verb "rip" in thesecond sentence.  The slightly excessive "slaughtered" and two "not only"'s in the third sentence.

Makes the writing here look good by comparison.

Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est

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