Tom Simpson was stitched up!

Bonus wrote:

by some pesky French riders!

According to one of my christmas present books, he asked some French riders how to ask where the toilet was in a hotel in Pau. They told him to say "Avez-vous un chiotte, s'il vous plais"

which comes out as "Do you have a sh*t-house please?"

;-)

Unfortunately many riders from outside Europe were stitched up often by their own teams. Robinson was stitched up by being told to ease off by manager in MilanSanRemo when close to winning, Russell Mockridge (&JohnBrealey&Austrians) was stitched up in his TdF team by being excluded from tem prizee share-out. Ramsbottam was stitched up by his manager deMuer to wait for Anglade and miss an overall top-10 place. Robert Millar seems to have been stitched up when certain of Vuelta win. Shay Elliott was stitched up in many ways by close friend Stablinski. Columbian riders appear to be regularly stitched up in terms of their wages and also effectively being conned out of a TdF win by the steroid/EPO generation of European riders.

"Avez-vous une chiotte,s'il-vous plaît" has no English equivalent, especially not "shit-house". Frenchmen have much less moral and psychological complexions regarding their bodily fluids than most Commonwealth inhabitants. There are many words used commonly to describe washrooms in French that can seem vulgar when translated literally to Englishmen who squirm when having to say "toilet" in public. That does not make them inappropriate. "Chiotte" would sound a little like the typical country fellow coming to town for the first time, but there are way funnier tricks the French teammates of Simpson would've done if they really wanted to play a trick on him. It's about the equivalent of having somebody ask where the toilet is to a host who'd be expecting the use of the word "lavatory". Not all that funny, really. Not that embarassing either. I've seen a literary Nobel prize winner use the word on a very brainy French TV show, once. Heck, that may well be how those French riders always refered to the WC.

This was brought to you from the frontlines of the clash between French and English culture, eastern Canada.

For goodness sake . . . .

Do posters on here have NO sense of humour?

/shakes head/