Private Dancer

It's been busy.  The London Olympics finally arrived, 7 long years after I stood in Manchester Velodrome reception with work colleagues watching on the TV as London was announced the winner of the affair.  It felt like a long time away, perhaps one of those things which would never actually become real.  Yet here we are, and somehow I am in the same job, the same house, but everything else has changed.

One of the things changed today, in fact, with the taking in of a new two wheeled friend into the household.  The Road Bike Arrived.  It's a Kinesis Racelight, it's red and black, and as a girl, that's pretty much all I need to know about it.  OK, so I show an interest in the modifications.  It has, for example, a compact chainset.  I don't really know what that is but am assured by several people I trust that, for me, it is appropriate.  It has also had narrower handlebars put on.  Again, I am assured that, for me, this is required.  It's news to me that handlebar width relates to shoulder width.  Who would have thought it?  So, we're a three bike household these days.  Two of them seem to be in several pieces right now, and the dining room is beginning to look a little ... well ... unfeminine if I'm honest.  Nobody said I was a girly girl, right?

Drum roll.  I have been to London for the second time this week.  I was given a ticket to the Track cycling at the London Velodrome.  UCI, the world's governing body for cycling had a few discretionary tickets available, and somehow I was deemed worthy, and even got a choice of when to go.  It was a quick no brainer decision for me.  The women's Team Pursuit.  Not only an event I felt we'd be in a good position to win gold in but also, for me, the one I feel most connection to because I genuinely like all three of the riders.  The emotional relevance was overwhelming and the choice was easy.  And in a moment of crazy joy, I got a call in my bedroom at 8:25 on the Saturday morning.  If I could be down in reception by 8:30 I could get tickets to the morning session.  Could I be packed, and vacate the room in 5 minutes.  Of course I could, for a once in a lifetime opportunity, count me in.

So, I cruise gently towards the final day at work, and the weekends and days between are booking up which somehow brings the final date closer and closer and closer.  Gulp.  It'll be fine.

Today I bring you Tina Turner, because the athletes are real people with real depth and yet somehow those I don't know seem so remote to me, so faceless, so unidimensional, and yet somehow it's normal for the public to feel they know each person intimately.  Private Dancers, and for the women you wonder if, like Vicky Pendleton appears to to my mind what they really dream about is marriage and children, and that's their true yearning ....

"I want to make a million dollars
I wanna live out by the sea
Have a husband and some children
Yeah, I guess I want a family
All the men come in these places
And the men are all the same
You don't look at their faces
And you don't ask their names"