The power of coincidence.

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I posted a video yesterday of Jan Ullrich opening up a can of whoop ass in the 2004 Tour de France. Later that night at home, as I was making dinner and throwing crackers at the little ones, my wife was going through the mail box offerings.

She got a post card from our man Stevil of All Hail the Black Market. Completely unexpected. And, totally relevant. How’s that for a coincidence?

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It’s a photograph of Jan Ullrich in the 2004 Tour. Kicking ass. Look at that face? You think you know pain? Try carrying the weight of second place around on your shoulders for a few years (TDF 2nd in 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003). Then put the hopes and dreams of all Germany up there too.

How’s that feel? Fucking hurts, don’t it?

About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

16 Replies to “The power of coincidence.”

  2. Maybe if he spent a little less time at the raves and pounding strudel in the off season and actually trained a bit, he could have turned some of those “twos” into “ones”.

  3. I know that pain. Give it to me. I will push it down into a box. Then when I open the box in Aug….. Just stay out of the way.

    I will

    Snake

  5. Sure proof that Stevil is Hell sent. Love that guy (in the “I wanna stir in the cheese sauce in his hamburger helper” sorta way)

  12. ah, the germans..
    permit me a short story. A few years back about mid way (three days, maybe 40km) through the ‘west coast trail’ the group i’m with are hanging about the beach campfire after a long days hike and a meal of dyhydrated this and dried up that and ultralight something else, all happy, thinging we’re hard men for doing an ultra isolated, self supported, challenging week long hike in tough conditions. So, as we bask in the glory of our awesomeness around the fire, a couple of Lufthansa pilots roll into camp (well after dark) and ask if they can share the fire. We make them welcome, and so they both plunk down these fucking huge monster packs, and proceed to pull out a couple bags of potatoes, a pkg of tin-foil and a couple six packs and start making dinner.

    It’s not enough that they each carried in about twice the weight that we did, but they did our 3 days in two, and intended to finish the whole weeks hike in 3 or 4 days.

    when asked about the ridiculous packs and killer schedule the response was;
    “ah, you know us Germans. We like it the HARD way..”

    I miss Jan.

  13. “Or 60%, as it were? Sorry, I’m a drug user as well.”

    gourdhead— ah, but yours are clearly not performance-enhancing. :)

  14. before he’d even come to halt after a TT they stuck a mike in his face: He couldn’t even talk: they cut back to him some minutes later and he was still sat there spitting and dry heaving – not pretty but was great to show the pain of the TT. cant remember the year or the stage

  15. long live the german nightmare! Jan was awesome. Nothing defines Le Tour more Jan and Rudy Project sunglasses. Drugs or not that guy made the show. You put Jan in Bianchi time trial suit on a start ramp in the pouring rain and you have one the most heart pounding moments in cycling history…??…???…………..