Ashley hasn't posted today, but I thought I could give you a fairly accurate portrayal of what she's doing by citing from Matt Rendell's 'The Death of Marco Pantani' - a biography of drug addled super cyclist Marco Pantani. With the exclusion of the drug addled part, both Ashley and Pantani are remarkably similar - they're both short, they both ride bikes and they both get a little grumpy at times*. Hence, I've adapted a passage of Rendell's book and just changed the details a little so it's more directly about Ashley and, to a lesser extent, Laura.
yours,
Ianto Ware
"Laura dropped some Vietnamese kid on a bike and believed she was heading for a stage win when Ashley catupulted past. Laura managed to catch Ashley's slipstream, but what was, for Laura, a fearsome sprint, was a speed Ashley could sustain for kilometre after kilometre. Seconds later a second burst of speed from Ashley distanced Laura, who dropped away. Laura's speed was impressive enough, but by the time she reached the 'Three kilometres to go' marker, Ashley led her by thirty-seven seconds. If Ashley sat in the saddle at all during that four-kilometre pursuit to the line, the television footage doesn't show it. It was the supreme display of climbing; repeated, unanswerable accelerations followed by sustained speed. Ullrich wasn't here, of course, but the recognised cream of world climbing - French (Virenque), Spanish (Heras and Jimenez), Italian (Simoni and Gotti) and Colombian (Gonalez and Buenahora) - was, and no one could rival Ashley.
Again, there was no finish line celebration. Ashley's eyes were obscured behind dark, reflective lenses, set in an eccentric yellow frame. Her mouth was open in a grimace."
*In other ways they are, admittedly, very different. For instance, Ashley has never won the Giro and the Tour de France back to back and she's never died of a cocaine overdose.
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