Lance Armstrong is one of the most extraordinary athletes of our generation. He's winning the the Tour - and French egos are apparently so bruised, they've resorted to spitting on him.

Could be, but how would you know it came from French Tour watchers? There are tens of thousands of Germans, Dutch, Brits, Spanish, Italians etc... watching the tour each year as well as France is the most frequented EU country in the summer. Armstrong got a real scare from rowdy Basques "fans" recently, by the way.

Save your dumb indignation at Greek soccer fans who burned US flags the day after 9/11.

As far as i'm concerned the worst of them are the basq, they get so wasted they can't even behave as human beings.
They spend the day screaming and singing like soccer supporters, wearing Atletic de Bilbao and Real Sociedad t-shirts, and hitting other riders in the head, i swear.
Lance Armstrong said he almost got killed. In Euskaltel, the basq team, the nationalist goverment is brainwashing the cyclist saying that if you are basq and you don't run with them to promote an independent basq country you are a "verrater" to your nation. Ha, ha, ha!!! Those nationalist are always so funny!!!

The french have always been very reluctant to accept other countries success, specially when they come from USA and Spain.
Last year the Tour made a list with the best champions in history.
As everyone knows there are 5 runners with 5 championships Eddy Merx, Anquetil, Armstrong, Indurain and someone else. Well don't tell me why Indurain was on the 8th position, after runners with 3 or 4 Tours, are they menthally ok? Please be serious..
And no talky talky about the way they treat spanish tennis players in Roland Garros, whisthling them, always being rude, playing in the less popular courts when everybody knows spaniards are the best players, well, i will never end.
I love to see USA players winning tournaments in France, see the froggy faces, looks like they drunk vinegar for breakfast, ha, ha, ha.

The french have always been very reluctant to accept other countries success, specially when they come from USA and Spain.

Examples? The US don't play rugby (nor do Spaniards), and they don't play football (not much on an international scale as we do in Europe). So why would the French complain about since the US is no match anyway? Connors, McEnroe etc... were always very popular in France.

As everyone knows there are 5 runners with 5 championships Eddy Merx, Anquetil, Armstrong, Indurain and someone else.

Bernard Hinault, 5 times champion.
I don't know where you get your ideas... Indurain was well respected in France, just as Merckx was. Read the French headlines about Armstrong and then make a judgement before ranting nonsense.

An Australian rider has been complaining about German spectators, by the way.

... and 2 Germans are behind Armstrong at the overall.

Oh, sure. That's why he won the same tours as Hinault and Anquetil and he's in the 8th position of the historical list.

And the way they behave with Serena Williams on that Roland Garros final, so polite, so nice.
Don't make me speak about that final between Cooretja and Gugga Kuerten, ok? He didn't want even to make a speech at the end of the game. Imagine how weird was the situation that french public supported the brazillian against french players as they knew he was the only one able to break spanish hegemony!!!

Oh, sure. That's why he won the same tours as Hinault and Anquetil and he's in the 8th position of the historical list.

What do you mean by "historical list"? Issued by who? Anyway, it's probably as insignificant as the US football team being 7th in FIFA world rankings (or France and Spain sharing second spot, for that matter)

And the way they behave with Serena Williams on that Roland Garros final, so polite, so nice.

She said nasty things about France once in the US media, she should have known. She was at the Cannes festival this year, having a good time. All is forgiven.

Issued by the Tour of France organization. It's an official list of the most important runners. People in Spain were kinda angry that year. Not so much for this, also cos the organization signed an agreement with Batasuna, the political arm of ETA, to promote basq lenguage along the race in order to avoid terrorist acts.

But this is not the ponit, i just explained it to clear the spanish feeling about the Tour lastly.

Serena Williams didn't say "nasty things about the French" - she said, "We [the French] don't want to play in the war; we want to make clothes." That is not a nasty thing. She also said it in a French accent, which happens to be a very funny accent. Nothing nasty there.

By BY GERSH KUNTZMAN and BILL SANDERSON

July 22, 2004 -- Asinine German cycling fans harassed five-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong during yesterday’s grueling ride though the French Alps — two of the “idiots” spat on him, and another spectator chased him while wearing a “F - - - Bush” T-shirt. By the end of the day, of course, the spit on Armstrong was exchanged for a bath of champagne, thanks to the Texan's time-trial victory.

New York Post.

So not only many Germans are worse anti-semitics but they're bad sports too. Just blame the French anyway, eh Kempaski?

Serena Williams didn't say "nasty things about the French" - she said, "We [the French] don't want to play in the war; we want to make clothes."

She said it in this stupid stereotyped French accent, lots of people saw it as arrogant. All right, it wasn't nasty. Like I've said, all's fogiven.

Spit all you want boys, the American is in the YELLOW for good.

The way he is crushing the European "girlie-men", me thinks he may be back to be spit on again and grab #7. :)

The picture in Washigton Post shows Lance overtaking Basso. On the pavement you can see written "Lance GO HOME".

Out of a million fans (estimate) I guess there will always be idiots.

Have any of you guys ever seen a stage in person?

I used to live in the same town as Greg LeMonde in Nevada. One day I was out riding my bike, at a pretty good pace (it was, after all about 17 years ago when I was young and had some legs...) and he came up behind me, out of nowhere. He asked how I was doing, and then blasted away. It was amazing how fast he was riding.

Stupid b*stards were running in front of the riders with flags and banners. I think it was one of the T-Mobile riders who knocked one of these idiots out of the way. If Lance can stay upright for two more days it is going to be sweet. "American Cyclist Bestrides Europe" is a headline the world needs to see.

Speaking of bruising, I think that is what the French Rugby team did to our US Eagles with their victory at Rentschler Field in Hartford, Connecticut on July 3rd. Les Bleus took their third string squad and still managed to outplay the allegedly improving American team (who has several players in the Zurich Premiership in England). Pave the US Rugby Federation is more like it!!

Zoomerx does bring up a good point about the Greeks. Greece is undoubtedly the most anti-American country in Europe. The Greek Government along with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch have long been jealous of how much more developed the Western European nations have been. This has led to some nasty foreign policy which included close links with Serbian extreme nationalists, Kurdish marxist terrorists, and other shady groupings. Let's not forget that it took Greece well over 2 decades to apprehend any members of the marxist terror group that murdered over 20 western diplomats. Pave Greece.. perhaps Turkey can put its Kurdish Marxist Seperatist minority there.

US Postal trains in the north of Cathalonia, in a region called Empurdán, a very pretty place.
One day in a restaurant in my summer house village Lance Armstrong and Roberto Heras and the rest of his team came to have lunch. The reactions when they saw some of them were speaking in english was not really pleasant, was during Irak war.
The worst of all is that just 2 or three persons noticed one of those mans was Lance Armstrong.
So as you can realize ignorance and antiamericanism go always together!!!!

It's also true most of them were farmers...

Sorry to speak about thing a bit more important! USA'a mistake! & they don't speak about Chile in 1973!!!

The United States invaded a distant country to share the blessings of democracy. But after being welcomed as liberators, U.S. troops encountered a bloody insurrection. Sound familiar? Don’t think Iraq—think the Philippines and Mexico decades ago. U.S. President George W. Bush and his advisors have embarked on a historic mission to change the world. Too bad they ignored the lessons of history.

On October 18, 2003, U.S. President George W. Bush landed in Manila as part of a six-nation Asian tour. The presidential airplane, Air Force One, was shepherded into Philippine airspace by F-15 fighter jets due to security concerns over a possible terrorist attack. Bush's speech to the Philippine Congress was delayed by what one reporter described as “undulating throngs of protestors that lined his motorcade route past shantytowns and rows of shacks.” Outside the Philippine House of Representatives, several thousand more demonstrators greeted Bush, and several Philippine legislators staged a walkout during his 20-minute address.

This article is an
excerpt from the
The Folly of Empire
by John Judis.
Order the book
from Amazon now.



In that speech, Bush credited the United States for transforming the Philippines into a democracy. “America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people,” said Bush. “Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.” He drew an analogy between the United States' attempt to create democracy in the Philippines and its effort to create a democratic Middle East through the invasion and occupation of Iraq. “Democracy always has skeptics,” the president said. “Some say the culture of the Middle East will not sustain the institutions of democracy. The same doubts were once expressed about the culture of Asia. These doubts were proven wrong nearly six decades ago, when the Republic of the Philippines became the first democratic nation in Asia.”

As many Philippine commentators remarked afterward, Bush's rendition of Philippine-American history bore little relation to fact. True, the U.S. Navy ousted Spain from the Philippines in the Spanish-American War of 1898. But instead of creating a Philippine democracy, the McKinley administration, its confidence inflated by victory in that “splendid little war,” annexed the country and installed a colonial administrator. The United States then waged a brutal war against the same Philippine independence movement it encouraged to fight against Spain. The war dragged on for 14 years. Before it ended, about 120,000 U.S. troops were deployed, more than 4,000 were killed, and more than 200,000 Filipino civilians and soldiers were killed. Resentment lingered a century later during Bush's visit.

As for the Philippines' democracy, the United States can take little credit for what exists and some blame for what doesn't. The electoral machinery the United States designed in 1946 provided a democratic veneer beneath which a handful of families, allied to U.S. investors—and addicted to kickbacks—controlled the Philippine land, economy, and society. The tenuous system broke down in 1973 when Philippine politician Ferdinand Marcos had himself declared president for life. Marcos was finally overthrown in 1986, but even today Philippine democracy remains more dream than reality. Three months before Bush's visit, a group of soldiers staged a mutiny that raised fears of a military coup. With Islamic radicals and communists roaming the countryside, the Philippines is perhaps the least stable of Asian nations. If the analogy between the United States' “liberation” of the Philippines and of Iraq holds true, it will not be to the credit of the Bush administration, but to the skeptics who charged that the White House undertook the invasion of Baghdad with its eyes wide shut.

Politicians often rewrite history to their own purposes, but, as Bush's remarks suggested, there was more than passing significance to his revisionist account of the Spanish-American War. It reflected not just a distorted view of a critical episode in U.S. foreign policy but the rejection of important, negative lessons that Americans later drew from their brief experiment in creating an overseas empire. The United States' decision to invade and occupy Iraq wasn't, of course, a direct result of this misreading of the past. If Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (the administration's leading neoconservative) had remembered the brutal war the United States fought in the Philippines or similar misadventures in Mexico, or the blighted history of Western imperialism in the Middle East, they still might have invaded Iraq. But they also might have had second, third, or even fourth thoughts about what Bush, unconsciously echoing the imperialists of a century ago, called a “historic opportunity to change the world.”

Divine Interventionism

Prior to the annexation of the Philippines, the United States stood firmly against countries acquiring overseas colonies, just as American colonists once opposed Britain's attempt to rule them. But by taking over parts of the Spanish empire, the United States became the kind of imperial power it once denounced. It was now vying with Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan for what future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt called “the domination of the world.”

Some Americans argued the country needed colonies to bolster its military power or to find markets for its capital. But proponents of imperialism, including Protestant missionaries, also viewed overseas expansion through the prism of the country's evangelical tradition. Through annexation, they insisted, the United States would transform other nations into communities that shared America's political and social values and also its religious beliefs. “Territory sometimes comes to us when we go to war in a holy cause,” U.S. President William McKinley said of the Philippines in October 1900, “and whenever it does the banner of liberty will float over it and bring, I trust, the blessings and benefits to all people.” This conviction was echoed by a prominent historian who would soon become president of Princeton University. In 1901, Woodrow Wilson wrote in defense of the annexation of the Philippines: “The East is to be opened and transformed, whether we will or no; the standards of the West are to be imposed upon it; nations and peoples which have stood still the centuries through are to be quickened and to be made part of the universal world of commerce and of ideas which has so steadily been a-making by the advance of European power from age to age.”

This just in:
"After Lance Armstrong's 6th record Tour de France victory yesterday, France2 TV (State television and keeper of the State Party Line©®™) presented a poll which ranked Lance as France's 3rd most hated sports personality. The main reason given? 'Because he is American'. Such is the across-the-board anti-Americanism that is currently eating away at France, a country now submerged by obsessional hatred of Jews and Americans. French house organs now admit that the hatred is not directed only against Bush as some of France's lesser intellects continue to affirm."

http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2004/07/americans-you-are-hated-here-les-ams.html

Even some French are waking up from their Bush-hating fever.

I don't have the time to devote to these comments that I once did, but here is a good pointer for anyone interested in seeing that some of the French are waking from the agitprop induced vacation from reality that they have been so thouroughly enjoying. (viz. Zoomer)

Oops

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=3701

"In a ball-less country, the one-balled man named Lance is King"
Now speaking of another group of pathetic welfare soaked whores who, like the french, have not made a contribution to the world in centuries, and who spend their time biting the ankles of the US and tasting the flatulence of the US as it sails past both countries from every angle and perspective.
And now the mighty greeks beg for 400 US special forces, contract security for the Olympics to a US firm, then ask NATO (um, read the US) for it's AWACS to patrol it's skies. How pathetic the euro mind rot has become. And to think that france has now said it can and mmay, protect all of europe using it's nukes. Hey you tough little french pices of filth- how are you going to send up one of your broken missles to hit a bearded freak whose trying to blow up the {aris metro train? The amount of pathetic imbeciles in the "eu's" conintent is immeasurable. No wonder the best minds fled your sterile and impotent landscape a long time ago, leaving behind nothing but welafre whores soaking up hot air.
Victor B- your comments are great.
to the "mighty "eu"- get off your pathetic asses and head over to the Sudan and kick some arabs off their horses before they kill theri darker "brethren"- you god forsaken little pussies! Such loud mouths coming from the "eu", yet the entire continent posseses the potency of a water soaked butterfly.

How do you count to 6 in French?

L'équipe (biggest Sports daily in France) admits that the European media is not too fond of Armstrong, the Italian and German media only give Armstrong's victory a footnote. Spaniard Idurain (5 times winner) calls Armstrong the best Tour De France cyclist, but not the best overall, Eddie Merckx deserving the title. Most of the criticism revolves around the fact that Armstrong is rather cold and aloof but most importantly, that he only concentrates on the Tour De France as opposed to winners Idurain, Hinault or Merckx who had to endure a full season of racing competitions.

that he only concentrates on the Tour De France as opposed to winners Idurain, Hinault or Merckx who had to endure a full season of racing competitions.

Papers here have been quoting Armstrong as saying he will not concentrate on the Tour De France next year, but do some other races in Italy and Spain. He himself mentioned that Merckx did that while still winning Tour. But would you rather have won the Tour 3 times, and done well in other races, or win the Tour 6 times? I think I'd take the 6 Tour wins...

Oh, is he cold? Such an unforgivable act of personality!!!
He should be warm and nice with all those froggies that injure him and split him during the race!!! How can he be so ungratefull with a country that love him so much...

What Indurain says is true, he is the Best of Tour of France but he dedicates his efforts only to this race.
Merxx, Hinalult and Indurain had harder seasons with more races.
If you wanna see the hardest lap of all, see the Mountain lap of Angliru, in La vuelta a España.
Madre mía, riders must push wild mountain animals out of the road to keep running.

Victor, when are you arriving in the US? I see that Spain is again trying to help. Keep the faith, brother!

"NATO agreed Friday to send up to 2,000 Spanish and Italian troops to bolster security for Afghanistan's presidential elections...."

The article continues "..alliance said in a statement that for eight weeks before and after the Oct. 9 election, a Spanish battalion would be deployed as a quick-reaction force and ..."

Of course, we all remember that last month the US pressed NATO for a "force to be activated to counter the threats of election-related violence in Afghanistan."

We also remember that France argued against the NATO Response Force(NFR) being deployed [in Afghanistan] saying that it sould not be used "as a solution for troop shortages for routine operations."

A diplomat here in DC said that "formally removing the Italian battalion from the response force ..... makes everyone satisfied."

He continues " ...shows the NFR coming of age, and the French can say it hasn't been activated."

Well, Thanks to the Spanish (and Victor), and to the French, ummmmmm "my thanks have not been activated."

SHOOT!!!! Above, NFR should read NRF as in NATO Response Force! what a fool i am!