Wiggins, wisdom, and a can of worms

In my family there’s none of this ‘TV dinner’ malarkey; we sit at the dinner table and talk. It’s social. It’s primal. It’s how we bond.

The boys (7 and 4) tell me about their day at school – where nothing happened, apparently – and I take the chance to impart some fatherly wisdom. It’s a time honoured passing down of life’s hard earned lessons.

OK, not quite…it’s usually about cycling.

The subject came up recently, as we tucked into our fish finger sandwiches, and the boys ears pricked up at mention of Bradley Wiggins’ name on the radio.

“Bradley Wiggins is the fastest cyclist in the world isn’t he daddy?” said the 7 year old.

“Erm…yeah, kind of” I replied, keen to avoid opening a rather large and loose lidded can of worms. “Hey, did you know it’s the “Race to the Sun” at the moment?”

“What’s that daddy?” he asked, ears pricked.

“Well, every spring they race from Paris to Nice, the idea being that they leave Paris and the weather is all wet and wintry, and by the time they reach Nice it’s kind of warm and sunny, like spring time – so: the Race to the Sun.”

He nods, satisfied, dipping a fish finger into his ketchup with the look of a food critic submerging a hunk of lobster in thermidore sauce.

“And there’s the “Race of the Two Seas” – Tirreno-Adriatico – which crosses Italy from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic sea. And soon it’ll be the “Hell of the North” over the mud and the cobblestones.”

He looks at me again.

“It’s great isn’t it, I say, the way they have all these interesting names? That’s what so great about cycling…there’s “La Primavera”, and “La Doyenne”, and the “Race of the Falling Leaves”, and…”

“Daddy,” he interrupts me. “That’s enough.”

And he’s back to the fish finger thermidore.

They’re still talking about Wiggins on the radio.

I REALLY hope he doesn’t ask me what a TUE is.

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(Image: By Andrew Last – Bradley Wiggins Hour Record, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40853791)