Mis-spent youth

I watched the Commonwealth Games cycling road-race on Saturday night. It was quite nostalgic: the South African team was made up of some of the lads who used to thrash me in the high school league. While everyone else was reading Camus and self-harming, I was struggling along in the gutter behind these bastards. I remember how frightening some of them used to be. He was rumoured to ride his mountainbike in the sand dunes for strength training. And he had a spell riding with Lance Legstrong at US Postal.
We mustn't forget that this is the only race where South Africans and Australians can seem so fast, since there are no Italians, Spanish, French, Belgians (or Americans, for that matter) to worry about. God Save the Queen indeed.