A blast from Tour de France literature nostalgia for me yesterday, as Vladimir Karpets, number 161, riding for Katusha got involved in the early move on the Grand St Bernard.

Fans of Johnny Green's fabulous book Push Yourself Just A Little Bit More: Backstage at the Tour de France will recall Green taking an interest in Karpets because he has a funny name, and Green was not really interested in bike racing as such.

As well as an awesome and pun-tastic name, Karpets has a mullet to send women weak at the knees and a fetching earring. He is currently standing in 16th position with a deficit of 05' 56" on the yellow jersey.
His palmares can be found here

And his awesome retro-manliness may be admired below:

This concludes my Vladimir Karpets appreciation for today. 🙂

Anyone else watch out for random riders for spurious reasons?

I believe the mullet may have gone this year……

But still, let us revel in the overall coiffeur of the man;

He's already munched the tarmac today.

My picture was chosen for the Team Katusha official calendar, amazingly. But that is some magnificent beard detail.

Karpets is still reported as being with the yellow jersey's group on the ascent of the Roseland after his fall. 🙂

Gosh, glad we've got "spoiler" up there. 😉

"Its curtains for Karpets!" David Harmen/Duffield

Anyone else watch out for random riders for spurious reasons?

My girlfriend refers to (I think) Denis Menchov as "the wiggly man" because of his "ooh my bones have suddenly gone soft" climbing style.

Shavers Weekly (an occasional Edinburgh publication, devoted to all things Broughton Road/Leith Walk) has beaten you to the Vladimir Karpets appreciation I'm afraid, with a nice little storyboard devoted to him last year, involving drunken Shavers staff heckling him because of, er, his funny name.