Letter From Australia:It's been an enormous week for news in sport Down Under. Early in the week, Australian Football League club Carlton, which is based in Melbourne, sacked its coach, Denis Pagan, who had coached the Blues and their nearby rival North Melbourne for a combined tally of 16 years.
No sooner had the dust settled after Pagan's sacking than another Melbourne AFL club, Essendon, sacked its coach, Kevin Sheedy, who had been at the helm of the Bombers for 27 years. Only Jock McHale, the coach of Collingwood for 40 years, from 1911 to '50, has been the head of an AFL team for longer than "Sheeds", as Australian football's most loveable looper is known.
On Friday, with sports fans reeling from the sight of two such familiar heads rolling off the executioner's block, Steve Bracks, the Victorian state Premier, topped it all when he announced he was stepping away from politics. A few hours later, his deputy, John Thwaites, did the same.
Bracks, who had been Premier for eight years, said he wanted to spend more time with his family; the media coverage of his 19-year-old son's recent drink-driving accident had been the impetus for his decision.
Thwaites, something of a golden boy in the Australian Labour Party's Victorian branch, said simply it was time to go. Both men are barely older than 50, with seemingly their best years in public life ahead. Their resignations were quite a story.
Politics is not quite sport, but in Melbourne the administrations of the AFL and the state parliament are never far removed. Hours after Bracks had resigned, the AFL announced that it would try to lure him into a role in its administration.
Bracks is a keen fan of the Geelong Football Club, which is on top of the AFL ladder. If he goes to the AFL, most Victorians, me included, would think it will be a good use of his administrative talents. Melbourne is a city in which power lies in the nexus between politics, business and Australian football. A union between Bracks and AFL headquarters would be a natural fit.
With pub conversations across the state animated by all the news, it was instructive to be in a Melbourne bar on Saturday night. We talked about Pagan and Sheeds, while everyone wished all the best for "Bracksy", as Bracks is known to everyone in Victoria, even my Conservative-voting mother.
The resignation of Thwaites was deemed strange. Conspiracy theories abounded. After a round-up of baseless theories and a detour on to Thwaites's strong vote among the gay population, we moved on to the conversation's main event, the Tour de France and, specifically, Cadel Evans' chance of winning it.
Even with so much happening in sport and quasi-sport, it was Evans who dominated the chat.
Men who, to my knowledge, had no more knowledge of cycling than they would have of knitting or aardvarks gave strong and considered opinions on time trials and pelotons. An air of sadness pervaded the bar when it was concluded Evans would narrowly fail to close the gap on the leader, Spain's Alberto Contador.
Evans is a likeable character. He was born in the outback town of Katherine, in Australia's Top End, and spent his first four years on an Aboriginal community where his father was the council foreman and his mother ran the local bank. At seven, he was kicked in the head by a horse and nearly died.
His first bike was made from parts stripped from old bikes that had been dumped at the local tip. He was a world mountain bike champion before, in 2001, he turned to road cycling.
His ambition before this year's Tour de France was to improve on last year's fifth-placed finish, a result that ranked him alongside 1980s icon Phil Anderson as the equal highest Australian in Le Tour. Evans overnight was expected to confirm a finish on the podium, a result that would exceed his hopes and expectations.
Yet for all that, as well as the performances of several other Australians in recent years, it's not enough to explain the burgeoning interest in Le Tour. Television coverage of the event in Australia begins late at night and continues well past midnight, but the next day it is sure to feature strongly in conversations around the water cooler in offices around the country. At weekends, many fans hold Tour parties.
Interest in Le Tour is one of the products of the extraordinary rise in cycling as a form of transport and exercise in Australia. The number of those who ride to work in the state capitals has risen exponentially in recent years. Every day at dawn, groups of 10 or 20 riders meet at nondescript corners to begin another sortie through urban streets.
Many of those groups of cyclists feature men in their 50s, whose bodies have become too heavy for their joints to support while running. These cycling converts, who are often professionals with plenty of spare cash, ride expensive bikes and wear the latest Lycra gear. Bike shops are booming across Melbourne and throughout Australia. In corporate circles, cycling has become the new golf.
The offshoot of the boom in cycling as a form of transport or exercise is the interest in cycling as a competitive sport. After decades in the doldrums, cycling club memberships are on the rise. Many converts to the sport follow the progress of Evans and his contemporaries with assiduous interest.
The irony in this burgeoning interest is that it comes at a time when cycling has spiralled into farce. I was in Dublin in 1998 when the Festina affair broke out before the early stages through Ireland of that year's Tour. Cyclists and their teams responded to the affair with anger and denial, and even disbelief that they were under scrutiny.
A decade later, thankfully, cyclists are backing efforts to rid Le Tour of drug users, while the decision by Rabobank to kick Michael Rasmussen out of the team has been applauded by everyone except Rasmussen. Certainly, it's been well received in Australia, where most sports fans are stupid enough to believe that all our sportsmen and women are free of drugs.
Of course, the topic of drugs was raised in our conversation on Saturday night, as doubtless it was in bars and lounge rooms around the country. The consensus seemed to be that Evans finishes every stage looking completely rooted, as if he could never pedal again. Some of his rivals seem to finish a bit fresher.
This, surely, means that Evans is not on drugs. It's just his bad luck that he rides in an event in which all competitors are tainted.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/YVIRIOZQ35EWRPZXR27KGMO6YU.png)