After a few weeks without any new edition due to the Tour de France, the Tweets of the week are back! And this edition is particularly complete with the Tweets of the 3 weeks following the Tour. Among these we find some Tweets of riders who share with us how they experience their comeback at home after the Tour, but also the future new job of Jérémy Roy, the incredible speed of the Movistar Team, the big age question of Team Garmin-Cervélo at the Eneco Tour and many others!

The comeback after the Tour de France, different for each rider ...

When the Tour de France comes to an end, it's always difficult to get "back to earth", both for the riders and for the followers of the Tour. You no longer see a gendarme smiling at you when you wave at him after having taken the roundabout on the wrong side, there are no people standing on the side of the road encouraging you and you no longer hear bad words when people discover you don't hand out anything, simply because you're not part of the advertising caravan.

This after Tour blues was quite visible as well on Twitter in the messages published by the different riders who went home after a very interesting Tour.

Mark Renshaw (Team HTC-Highroad) saw his race bike leaving with the team bus and cars. During his "third rest day" of the Tour which he spent in Paris ... he thus decided to do like any other tourist and use a Velib to go to the Louvre museum!
The winner of the Tour, Cadel Evans (BMC Racing Team), had some difficulties to get through customs at the airport. Indeed, apparently the security employees don't know how useful chamois cream can be!
The Tour de France is a race which is well known even outside of the typical world of cycling and as such it attracts journalists who known strictly nothing about cycling. Apparently this is still the case after the Tour since Christian Vandevelde (Team Garmin-Cervélo) explains us that the journalist of his local newspaper asked him ... whether he never got lost in the Tour de France ... No comment!

Waking up ...

Several riders mention their wake up rituals in their "after-Tour" Tweets. Geraint Thomas (Team Sky) for example appreciates that he no longer gets told when he has to wake up, what he has to eat and which hills he must climb ...
Other riders particularly appreciate the person they wake up next to ... Manuel Quinziato (BMC Racing Team) sees his girlfriend instead of Michael Schär and the same goes for Tejay van Garderen (Team HTC-Highroad) who prefers his girlfriend over Danny Pate.

New activities

While these two riders appreciate being with their girlfriends, this seems to be less the case for Ben Swift ... or at least for her ideas of relaxation ... it tickles!
Meanwhile, Jérémy Roy looks back on the Tour de France 2011 and comes to an interesting conclusion ... yes Jérémy, but Cav' is a sprinter and as you said yourself the other day in the interview Jérémy Roy (FDJ), super combative rider of the Tour de France 2011: attacking is my way of riding, would you have won more stages if you'd stayed in the peloton?
Anyway, apparently Jérémy Roy doesn't need to worry about his future because someone already offered him a job ... the only problem: he doesn't want to give up riding! And who can blame him for that?

Philippe Gilbert's victories start to bother

The Belgian champion who didn't start any race without winning it starts to work on the nerves of some of the other riders. By winning in an almost mechanical way, he makes them start to talk about it ... After Gilbert's victory in the Classica San Sebastian, Ryder Hesjedal (Team Garmin-Cervélo) wished he would get that big contract he's apparently looking for so he could calm down a bit. Indeed, the Canadian rider thinks he looks stupid next to him. His team mate David Millar shares this quote with us on Twitter and we of course thank him for that!
The next day Charles Wegelius almost gets nostalgic because of this. Indeed, the rider of the UnitedHealthcare team did some counting and realised that Philippe Gilbert won 19 races this year. He added that he also won 19 races in one year but for that he had to go back to his time as a junior ...

Stop, please!

Davide Viganò (Team Leopard-Trek)'s problems are completely different ... During his training he sees some gooses which took the pedestrian crossing to cross the road. No other choice thus but ... stopping!

Ken ... what's in a name?

Apparently his team mate Stefan Denifl (Team Leopard-Trek) is a big fan of the The Body Shop products and Ken Sommer apparently has been teasing him with that. When Ken announces he has spent a day in the spa it's thus not really surprising that Denifl tells him he no longer has the right to tease him with that. Would Ken now have the looks to go next to Barbie?! Too bad that the rider who's nicknamed like that, Heinrich Haussler, is not part of the team from Luxembourg ...

When people start to know Alex Dowsett

At the BBC people probably thought they knew Alex Dowsett (Team Sky) quite well. Indeed, when he arrives 10 minutes early for an interview at the local BBC station, he discovers that they counted on him being 15 minutes late and he thus has 25 minutes to kill. Nothing more natural than spending them on Twitter, isn't it Alex?

We already realised ion the previous editions of the Tweets of the week that Alex is what Taylor Phinney calls a momma's boy forever. When he announces he goes looking for houses with his mother, Phinney cannot hold himself from saying that he doesn't believe Alex will ever quit his parents' house. Alex answers him by suggesting that he takes care of some other things more important for a rider wearing the leader's jersey of the Eneco Tour ...

Biggest audience ever ...

While the Tour de France seems to have registered new records in terms of audience this year, Scott Major, the doctor of the BMC Racing Team, shares with us a photo which shows that there's some people on the Tour de Pologne as well!

A big detour?

The Dutch rider Pim Ligthart (Vacansoleil-DCM Pro Cycling Team) participated in the Tour of Denmark and was wondering whether ... there was no shorter route than the 170 kilometers of the stage between Esbjerg and ... Esbjerg. We can at least say that it's a big detour!

Highspeed Team Movistar

On the Vuelta a Burgos, Movistar Team won the team time trial with an average speed of 70.303 km/h.

Two riders of the team write about that in their Tweets: David Arroyo who says that fortunately there weren't any radars on the race course while Beñat Intxausti thinks about the company which sponsors the team by talking about ADSL speed. Apparently Spain hasn't been equipped with optical fiber yet ... or at least Intxausti never had the chance to test it!

A human hotdog

On the cover of the fire blanket, Tomas Vaitkus (Astana) discovered how to prepare a human hotdog ...

The age complex in the Eneco Tour

During the Eneco Tour we see a mix of frustration and satisfaction in David Millar (Team Garmin-Cervélo)'s tweets when he announces that his team is the oldest of all.Until the time when he discovers that it might actually be the Saxo Bank-Sungard team ... from there, everything is allowed to win this title anyway ...

I love you ... not

What would the riders do without the mechanics who are continuously working on their bikes to make sure they are in the best possible state for participation in yet another cycling race? Nothing! But that's not enough for the riders to appreciate the sound of the compressor the mechanics use to pump the tyres in the morning ... Matt Brammeier (Team HTC-Highroad) mentions that and the reply from one of the soigneurs of the team doesn't take long time to arrive ...

The polka dot jersey for Mark Cavendish' assistant

Mark Cavendish (Team HTC-Highroad) shares with us that his assistant is a secret admirer of Samuel Sanchez (Euskaltel-Euskadi), the winner of the polka dot jersey in the Tour de France 2011 ... or was it the moustiques which attacked him?

When you're following yourself ...

... you know that you've switched from a rider's career to a directeur sportif's career. That's what happened to Michiel Elijzen this week in the Eneco Tour when he saw the rider's plate on his car with his own name written on it on the inside!
That's that, those were the Tweets of the week!

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Did you see any Tweets which could be part of the Tweets of the week? Please send them to tweetsoftheweek@thover.com and you might see them in the next edition of the Tweets of the week!

door Thomas Vergouwen
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this publication is published in: Tweets of the week | Tour de France 2011

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