Sunday, April 28, 2024

New to VV: Toby Watson presents Tobe’s Blog

-

HomeOtherEditorialNew to VV: Toby Watson presents Tobe's Blog
Toby.

We’re very pleased to announce that Garmin Transitions physiotherapist Toby Watson will be contributing articles to his new VeloVeritas blog.

Right now Toby is with the team on the Tour de France, and you can read about what it’s like to be working with a top team on the biggest race in the world, and the sense of drama and fun that are essential parts of the experience, on Toby’s regular updates.

For example, this from the recent entry:

“We rotate the people who help out at the hotel, and these past few days have been my shift. We collect all the bags in the morning, get to the hotel as quickly as possible, set them all up in the rooms (including massage tables for those who use them), and then grab lunch.

If you’re lucky, the hotel has a pool (ours did), and so the majority of the afternoon was spent flitting from watching what was happening in the race, and heading back to the pool to play Arrowman.”

We hope you enjoy this new section of the site.

Toby is Australian, and currently lives in Girona with his fiancee Amanda. If he has any time, he enjoys reading and running, and occasionally skiing too, when he can.

You can keep up with Toby on Twitter too, and his own blog site is here.

Martin Williamson
Martin Williamson
Martin is our Editor and web site Designer/Manager. He concentrates on photography. He's been involved in cycle racing for over four decades and raced for much of that time, having a varied career which included time trials, road and track racing - and triathlons. Martin has been the Scottish 25 Mile TT and 100 Mile TT Champion, the British Points Race League Champion on the track, and he won a few time trials in his day, particularly hilly ones like the Tour de Trossachs and the Meldons MTT.

Related Articles

Raymond Poulidor

Sadly, on 13th November at the age of 83 – he was born on April 15th 1936 – Raymond Poulidor, Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur left us. Rest in peace, Monsieur Raymond Poulidor – second in le Tour but winner in the hearts of the French public.

Armand de las Cuevas

It hasn’t been a good week for the sport of cycling’s past champions; but not just men who won races, colourful men with personality. First we lost six day star Andreas Kappes to a bee sting, of all things. And we heard today that Armand de las Cuevas had taken his own life on the Island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean, which was his home in recent years.

Steve Beech remembers Grant Thomas

Steve Beech sent us in his memories of his friend Grant Thomas and his ‘Golden Era’, the 70’s. Whilst he’s perhaps best remembered for winning the British Championship, his greatest triumphs came in The Netherlands – on road and track.

Andreas Kappes

It’s with much sadness that we report the death of former Six Day and road star, Germany’s Andreas Kappes at just 52 years of age. He was stung by a bee whilst on cycling team management duties and died from ‘allergic shock’ on 31st July. Kappes was one of the all-time great Six Day men, rated 18th in the last edition of the Six Day results ‘bible’ – ‘Statistieken.’

At Random

Le Tour de France 2012 – Stage 18: Blagnac – Brive-la-Gaillarde, 215 km.

It’s a new hotel chain today, Premiere Classe – we had a bit of a battle to get in. To keep the costs down, they only man these places in the morning and early evening – during the day you have to punch codes in to gain access. We started with credit card information, then the reservation number – no dice. Eventually we stuck Martin’s name in – et voila!

Relativity of Time: TdF 2010 Stage 5 (bunchie)

Relativity of Time. I have a great mate who has a theory on the relative speed of time passing. He believes that time should be measured experientially, rather than chronologically (similar to Dunbar in Catch-22, who believes if he does nothing for long enough, time will drag out to the point that he will effectively live forever).

Le Tour de France 2013 – Stage 3: Ajaccio > Calvi, 145km. Gerrans from Sagan

Hood junior had already clued me in on the stage winner by text (there's about 400 metres of road, just outside the beach airport where you can receive a text); Simon Gerrans (GreenEdge & Australia) the former Aussie champion is a cool guy - when he won Milan-Sanremo I tried to ring him for a quote but went to ansaphone.

The VV View: It’s Not About the Drugs – Lance Armstrong on Oprah

I didn't stay up, I must confess; but I was trawling YouTube as the clips were still being posted. The man, Lance Armstrong on Oprah, he "fessed up" - my jaw dropped, I never thought I'd see the day.