This Saturday marks the ninth anniversary of The Poo Incident. I hadn’t thought about it for a long time, but Tom Dumoulin himself brought it up in his theater show where I recently attended, and then I looked back at the images. May 23, 2017, the queen stage: suddenly the man in the pink jersey throws his bike into the grass on the verge. Sweater off, helmet off (illogical, in itself, a helmet does not have to be taken off while pooping), pants down.
The consternation, I still feel it. Poor Tom. Dumoulin lost time, but not so much that he could not win the Giro in the final time trial to Milan and write national sporting history. This means that, thank goodness, The Poo Incident instead of a sporting drama became a story that mainly causes scornful chuckles.
Like everything that has to do with poop and pee. Here in the Netherlands we are pleased with Thymen Arensman’s good performance, but in Belgium they are captivated The Plasbidon. There seem to be riders who urinate in water bottles during the current Giro, because the side of the road is always full of people. And urinating in public areas is not allowed, under penalty of a fine.
So a smart solution is to let your pee flow into a water bottle. But the thing about those water bottles: they are thrown away, and that is only allowed in places where there is public, under penalty of a fine if you don’t do so. Because when there is an audience, things do not disappear into nature but are picked up as souvenirs, especially by children.
I know many people who take a water bottle to school, for example, with their lunch in it. Ever scored in a race. How nice is that. If there has been thirst quencher in it, the dishwasher is willing. In principle the same applies to a water bottle full of urine, but discovering after picking up what that lukewarm stuff actually is, or sniffing at it after washing the dishes, well, you get the picture.
The Belgian Sporza has now got to the bottom of bidonplasgate. Some riders did not want to say who did it, others immediately pointed to Victor Campenaerts, who himself played the murdered innocence. Yet the Belgian is seen as the ‘inventor’ of the water bottle, I read.
Making a sanitary stop while the course is in full swing is no small feat
Seems strong, I immediately thought, and upon further inspection, veterans in the peloton immediately named Peter Sagan as the first bottle-wetter ever. But of course there were also riders who did that before Sagan, there is no other way. If you need to get rid of something and you have one of those things with you, then it’s a no-brainer.
At least in team leader cars. Making sanitary stops while the race is in full speed is no easy feat, so you can bet that people regularly urinate into water bottles in the cars. I can’t count how many times I have heard mechanics snicker that the water bottles had to be kept separate from the water bottles that are handed to the riders from the car. Caravan humor, we’ll call it.
In any case, the Giro organization is not keen on water bottles. They have been banned since this week, “out of respect for the image of cycling.” All that remains is to pee in your pants. Fortunately, this can be done with the helmet still on.
