It's been a quiet couple of weeks on the home and personal work front. While I've struggled unenthusiastically with synopses and query letters to agents, la bienheureuse has really been overworked. A couple of inactive weekends were thus something of a welcome change.
The hot spell was thankfully broken briefly by a three day cooler period in the middle of last week, but over the weekend the heat and sunshine returned, bringing with them the inevitable forest fires, threatening Marseille and Corsican villages. Two volunteer firemen are among the suspected arsonists.
This week, fires and pyromaniacs were pushed off the front pages by Monsieur le Président's little turn. Never in the history of human health has so much newsprint and TV coverage been generated by one little fainting fit. You'd have thought a man in his fifties, who happens also to be in charge of a country, would have more common sense than to go jogging at lunchtime in the middle of a heatwave. But then, moderation is not a word in Sarko's vocabulary.
Other, somewhat fitter men overworking in the heat of the day were also in the news over the weekend. The three week circus that is the Tour de France reached its climax on Saturday and Sunday. After the first two weeks that had commentators grumbling about the lack of excitement, the final week exploded into action as soon as the race reached the Alps, and the general mood at the end was a mix of self-congratulation and anticipation of the next one. At last we a Tour without positive drug tests. Yet...
The Contador/Armstrong rivalry didn't do any harm either, and there's much excitement about the potential battle next year.
There are still plenty of sceptical voices about. A sports scientist (who also happens to have been Festina's sporting director, so he would know), writing in Libération, calculated that during the ascent towards Verbier last week Contador's VO2 (oxygen consumption) was 99.5 ml/min/kg, a figure the writer classified as humanly impossible. Or to put it in more understandable numbers, he covered 8.5km with an average slope of 7.5% in just under 21 minutes - average speed, more than 24 km/h. Greg Lemond, writing in Le Monde (where else?), said as far as he was aware, no athlete in any sport had ever achieved such a feat. The writer in Libération also calculated the power production of Contador and the Schlecks in the three big climbs towards Grand Bornand at 440 watts. He said it was established that doping could produce 410 watts, 430 watts was 'miraculous', and 450 watts 'mutant'...
