‘Innocent’ Rasmussen rails at team
July 26th, 2007
Michael Rasmussen today denied reports that he lied about his whereabouts in the run-up to this year’s Tour de France, as his Rabobank team resumed the race - albeit without their sacked team leader.
The Danish rider, kicked out of the race he was leading after yesterday’s 16th stage, declared that team manager Theo de Rooy’s decision was the work ‘of a desperate man’. Rabobank claimed that Rasmussen told them he was training in Mexico in June while he was actually in Italy, and therefore decided to axe him.
“I’m shattered. I’m on the verge of tears,” said Rasmussen today, before reiterating that he was in Mexico in June when the journalist and former rider Davide Cassani claims to have met him during a training ride in Italy. “I wasn’t in Italy. Not at all. This is the story about a man, who thinks that he recognised me. There is not a hint of evidence,” he said.
“My career is ruined,” he added. “I have no idea what I should do or where I will go. This is an enormous blow for me, and also for all the guys from the Rabo team. They’re devastated.”
Rasmussen also launched a scathing attack on De Rooy’s handling of the affair. “He didn’t say anything to anyone,” said Rasmussen. “Not even the sporting directors were informed. It’s the work of a desperate man. He is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
Despite calls for the Tour to be cancelled, the race director Christian Prudhomme insists the race will go on and that Rasmussen’s exit “is the best thing that can happen to the Tour”. The France Soir newspaper ran a mock obituary for the Tour on its front page today, stating that it had died yesterday “at age 104, after a long illness”. Liberation newspaper’s editorial read: “The Tour must be stopped. This procession of cyclists has been transformed into a caravan of ridicule.”
Today’s stage 17 began without a rider in the yellow jersey, which will be awarded to the leader at the end of today’s race. Spain’s Alberto Contador is now at the head of overall standings.
Fancy a Chindian?
July 26th, 2007
It is the episode of Goodness Gracious Me that everyone remembers. A group of drunk Indians decide to go for an “English” at the end of an evening’s drinking in Mumbai. One demands “the blandest thing on the menu”, the women cluck over the waiter’s “lovely pasty skin” and the head of the table orders 24 plates of chips, ignoring well-meaning advice that “you might have ordered too much”. The sketch endures not just because it puts the post-pub curry crowd bang to rights, but also because of its utter preposterousness: what Indian in their right mind would choose an overcooked carvery over a feast of brightly coloured, piquant delights?
Yet despite Indians nursing a well-deserved feeling of culinary superiority, you would be wrong to assume that this self-satisfaction means that in India everyone just eats Indian. Likewise Chinese in China, Thai in Thailand and just about everywhere else the world over. From Bangkok to Brest, Beijing to Barcelona, gastronomic globalisation - led depressingly by McDonald’s, with its 26,500 branches in 119 countries - has meant that few culinary cultures are hermetically sealed.
In India, people often go for a Chinese. Or rather, an Indianised version of Chinese that some call Chindian. Dishes tend to be flavoured with spices not normally found in Chinese cuisine, such as cumin, coriander and turmeric. Given India’s large vegetarian population, paneer, cauliflower and potato are also far more prevalent, along with garlic, ginger and chillis. Popular Chindian dishes include Manchurian chicken, which has a sweet and salty brown sauce, various Sichuan recipes and Hakka noodles. Narrow and flat, almost square in shape, Hakka noodles are made with durum wheat, with or without eggs. They are stir-fried with vegetables and mixed with a hot, vinegar-based sauce, and sold from dhabas (roadside stalls). The name comes from the Hakka people, the tribe of Chinese who first moved to Calcutta in the late 1700s. There is still a large Chinatown in Calcutta today.
“Indo-Chinese is very popular with middle- and upper-class Indians,” says Tishani Doshi, a writer and dancer based in Madras. Much to her amusement, Doshi recently had her first Indian meal in Britain and was surprised not to have encountered a single dish she had ever eaten in India. “It’s probably how a Chinese person would feel eating at a Chinese restaurant in India,” she says. “I couldn’t believe how heavy the ‘Indian’ food was in London, and it reminded me of the feeling I often get when I go for a Chinese back home: completely stuffed and slightly bloated. I can’t imagine that Chinese people regularly eat anything that heavy.”
So if the Indians eat Chinese, what about the Chinese? Given China’s size and population (1.3 billion people at the last count), tastes obviously vary hugely from province to province. Alex Lee is an American-born Chinese who lives in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province in southern China. He says that the most popular restaurants are American chains such as KFC and McDonald’s - but with a twist. “They have changed the menus,” he says, “to accommodate Chinese tastes. You will have things like a seared Xinjiang spiced chicken sandwich from McDonald’s or a fried chicken burrito а la Peking duck style, with scallions and hoisin.”
Wine consultant Fongyee Walker lives in Beijing and says China is so vast that, especially for the less well-off, “foreign” simply means food from another province. “Here in Beijing, the poorer city residents will eat such ‘foreign food’ as Sichuan snack food,” she says, adding that food snobs in the city like to complain that the Sichuan influence has wrecked the food in northern China. “Also popular are the low-level Xinjiang snacks - such as sticky dried fruit cake and lamb kebabs and nang bread - which come from the far west but are so popular they’re almost part of the local scene.”
But, she says, pizza is widely eaten in China, adding that even her staunchly traditional ayi (maid) occasionally dines at Pizza Hut. “The pizza isn’t what you would call a real Italian style - they definitely prefer the deep-pan approach,” she says. Walker recently met a woman who moved to Beijing from Italy 20 years ago and runs an Italian cheese factory called Ji Kang Food in the outskirts of the city.
Italian cuisine also goes down well in Japan. A survey in Japan-guide.com found that the majority of respondents’ (33%) favourite restaurant meal was Italian, compared with just 21% saying sushi. And the genre breakdown at a restaurant review website such as Asku, which covers eateries all over the country, shows just how the Italians, along with the Chinese, are dominating the culinary scene. In Tokyo 2,681 Chinese restaurants are listed, alongside 2,169 Italian, plus some 491 classed as “spaghetti/pizza” restaurants.
Pizza, it would seem, is loved almost the world over. But what do the Italians themselves eat when they venture away from their own cuisine? The stereotype is that they are conservative where food is concerned and that anyone above the age of about 30 views foreign food - which may mean dishes from a neighbouring town or just anything not cooked by their mamma - with the deepest possible suspicion.
Rome-based food writer Maureen B Fant says that while this is of course a sweeping generalisation, it remains largely true. “I grew up in New York, and we used to say I feel like Lebanese, or I feel like Chinese, or let’s see what that Persian place is like,” she says. “You don’t get that here. The few ‘ethnic’ places still tend to be either greatly diluted for Italian tastes, or holes in the wall that cater for new immigrants.” However, exotic ingredients are creeping into the more creative kitchens, she says, “And there definitely are more exotic places than there used to be. But if we’re talking about mainstream trattorias and restaurants, when you want a change from the local fare, you’re still (for now) more likely to think Sicily or Sardinia than Asia.”
This sort of culinary exclusivity is often associated with France, but according to recent research, the favourite dish of the French is not coq au vin, escargots or even steak-frites, but couscous. A survey commissioned by the French weekly magazine VSD asked 960 people to arrange a series of dishes in order of preference. Though the list was overwhelmingly composed of traditional French dishes, such as bœuf bourgignon, bouillabaisse and beef tartare, couscous came out top.
Not only that, but the dish has become a symbol of modern, multicultural France - indeed a conservative politician once described the wave of North African immigration as “conquest by couscous”. Nigh on every town in France has at least one couscous restaurant, where immigrants and locals join to eat cheap bowls of the stuff.
Missing from all this culinary cross-pollination is British food. But there are some brave souls who are determined to take some of our national dishes international. And one of the most ambitious must be Manju Malhi, who grew up in London and, from next month, will be presenting a cookery series on British food, such as shepherd’s pie and bangers and mash, for India’s largest commercial television channel. “Curry has become so popular in Britain, I thought I’d swap it around,” she said recently. “I cannot name one English restaurant in Delhi and I wondered, why so? People here think that English food is bland with meat and nothing else. I am trying to show them that there is good cooking in the UK as well.”.
The Englishman who is leading the Tour de France*
July 26th, 2007
It is a chilly July morning in the Pyrenees and a lone cyclist is pedalling laboriously up a snow-topped mountain followed by a woman driving a white Ford Transit.
Londoner Luke Bream, 33, sporting a pink and white jersey, is attacking a punishing mountain leg of the world’s most famous cycle race, the Tour de France. It is clearly hard going.
“I’m looking at a horrendous mountain right in front of me and Luke is going up it,” reports his team leader from her van. “This is really tough. It’s also chilly.”
The following day is worse, she says. “Now it’s scorching hot and this stage is through the rolling countryside. It’s all uphill and downhill and Luke tells me his legs feel absolutely dead.”
At least he is well in front of the 152 remaining riders (189 set off from London) in the three-week long Tour. In fact, he is 24 hours ahead as he has been along the entire route so far.
Mr Bream, however, will not be sporting any yellow jersey for winning this or any other stage of the prestigious race. Nor will his team coordinator, cook, medic, mechanic and mental coach - his mother Carolyn, 68 - be up for international accolades or sponsorship windfalls.
In a week when a blood-doping scandal involving the pre-race favourite Alexandr Vinokourov cast a shadow over the Tour, the British enthusiast is setting an inspirational example to amateur cyclists.
“He doesn’t have any sponsorship and we’re doing it on a shoestring,” Mrs Bream says, having stopped her van on the Col de la Pierre St Martin mountain pass in the Pyrenees to speak to the Guardian. “I reckon by the end of it we’ll have spent, oooh let’s see, 1,500, maybe a little more but 2,000 maximum.”
According to Mrs Bream, a former primary school teacher, each day - apart from rest days - her son sets off at 8am after a breakfast of bread rolls, jam, honey and coffee.
“At the beginning we were leaving earlier but we were starting before the race officials put arrows along the route and ended up going the wrong way,” she says. “Now we start half an hour before the arrow men. After 15km they overtake us with lots of hooting and waving and cheering and we don’t go astray.
“He takes short breaks to eat and I cook pasta and chicken in sauces in the back of the van. It’s usually around 4pm he wants hot food, which is difficult to find in France at that hour, so he eats McDonald’s if there’s one nearby.”
Sleeping quarters are fairly basic. “We sleep in the van; me over the front three seats and him in the back with the bike. Luckily there’s only one bike.”
Mrs Bream says that after conquering the mountain stages Luke is optimistic about finishing his personal Tour de France. “Having come so far he now thinks he can beat it, that it won’t be too bad.”
And amid the backdrop of accusations of cheating among official Tour de France riders, she assures the Guardian Luke is on nothing but his own adrenaline.
“Oh no, Luke doesn’t take drugs at the best of times, not even an aspirin if he has a headache. He does take some cod liver oil tablets, but apart from that he’s doing this largely on Coca Cola and jam butties.”
Many Britons have attempted one or more of the 20 stages of the 2007 Tour but the south London food wholesaler is believed to be the only one cycling the entire 2,200 mile London to Paris route.
If he succeeds in reaching the final stretch along the cobblestones of the Champs Elysйes this Sunday it will be a remarkable feat of physical and mental endurance. His determination and success, so far, is even more remarkable given that he only took up cycling a year ago.
A day behind, the official riders with their multimillion pound sponsorship deals are followed by a roadshow of team officials, mechanics, spare bikes and equipment. It is the sort of back-up Mr Bream can only dream of as he ploughs his solitary furrow up the mountain.
“We’ve got two spare tyres and five inner tubes,” Mrs Bream admits. “Luckily we’ve only had one puncture so far.”
“It’s a personal challenge. What he’s discovered is that it’s not about physical fitness but about being strong mentally.”
In an unsuccessful internet appeal for what he called “like-minded lunatics” to join him, Mr Bream wrote: “We will be camping/living in the van. It will be basic, cheap and cheerful adventure.” He added: “I have loads of enthusiasm, plenty of commitment but no great cycling experience. I currently cycle 60-80km per day to and from work but have only completed one long ride of 140 km before.”
Backstory
Britons have a chequered history in the world’s greatest cycling race. At just 23 Scotsman Robert Millar won a Pyrenean stage in 1983 and in 1984 became the only native English-speaker to win the King of the Mountains title, awarded to the best climber in the race. He finished fourth overall - the best ever performance by a Briton.
Chris Boardman who won an Olympic gold medal in 1992 and broke the world hour record three times, wore the yellow jersey six times, winning the prologue - the opening time-trial stage - of the 1994 Tour with the fastest time ever recorded. Other attempts between 1995 and 1998 often started well but produced little glory. After his retirement in 1999 he said he was not able to recover from the exertion of daily racing because of a low hormone profile.
The current top Briton David Millar was tainted by a doping scandal in 2004 and was banned for two years. He returned in 2006 and is currently 76th in the 2007 Tour.