To Al Trautwig: Floyd was raised Mennonite, NOT Amish, Idiot! RANT!
 

For the last two days, Al Trautwig has gone on and on about how unbelievable Floyd Landis has done in cycling, considering his Amish upbringing. Floyd was raised Mennonite, not Amish. Yesterday, Trautwig went on a long description of what the Amish believe, how the Amish live, etc., a lot of which does not apply to Mennonites. I am actually neither, but I am sick of hearing Trautwig go on and on about about stuff he is ignorant about (particularly cycling). If he is going to pretend to know something about cycling, he ought to at least read enough to get a rudimentary understanding of it and its participants. SORRY FOR THE RANT.

My personal, two-step cure-all for sufferers of Trautwigitis:

1...turn TV volume all the way down

2...turn on radio and listen to tunes til he goes away

Repeat above steps daily until final credits have rolled in Paris.

Aren't Mennonites basically Amish-Light? Why let it bother you?

Because Trautwig sucks big cahones.

al trautwig is like... the worst dude

pol pot
al trautwig
rollerbladers

I now fast forward through the Al/Bob crap. I don't stop until I see Phil and Paul joining them in the booth. Tivo is your friend, my dear... ;)

Koffee

Mmm, Amstel Light. I guess you could say this, but I would prefer to compare it more to the Greek Orthodox Church splitting from the Catholic Church. Some still consider the Amish a part of the Mennonites. But I doubut Al is using that distinction.

As far as Al (and Bob), what I would do if it bothered me so much is change the channel to another TdF broadcast.

Since when does Al write his own copy? Who's the research team on OLN preparing the information for the talking heads?

Al can only be blamed for not realizing he was reading junk on the teleprompter.

what other TdF broadcast?

exactly

Al got me when he was talking about how "nothing was happening in the first week of the TDF." Nothing? How about Boonen drawing a blank...Thor winning the prolouge, CSC and T-Mobile getting decimated 24 hours prior to the tour and all the shake-up that goes along with it, not to mention field sprints galore! The guy is clueless. Now that I'm back home and have the tivo recording for me, I will be following Koffee's suggestion. Also, only watch the "non-enhanced" version. That has Phil and Paul doing most of the commentary.

live show is fine,
I just tune out troutwhig in the evenings but do listen to alot of
what Bobke says, the man is a wealth of information if you
can get past the hype and mannerisms.

And of course this is the same Al who in stage 8 said Sylvain Calzati was bucking the 99.9% odds of winning with a solo break. So I guess beating 99.9% odds isn't of note either. Of course the odds are not nearly that bad. After all that is 1000 to 1. Meaning it would work only 1 time out of a 1000. If you figured 20 stages per tour (there are actually less after subtracting out the TTs) and that there were 5 breaks per stage that would mean we see it work once every 10 years. But haven't we seen it work twice already this tour? But of course nothing has happened.

But I'm pretty sure Al was not the source of their Friday misinformation. More to come on that.

EDIT:

I forgot to point out that it really seems strange to me that they would make this kind of comment, because it really says 'nothing is going to happen, no need to watch our coverage'. If you are going to slant things slant them to say 'something special is going to happen'. If they left in Al's inaccurate assesment but followed up Bob or Phil saying something to the effect that this time seems different then you would be saying something special might happen. (Actually eventually they did, but it was 15 minutes or more later, far to late if someone has already decided nothing is going to happen and started doing other stuff planning to come back in time for the sprint finish).

On Univision.

"McEwen. Boonen. McEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewen! McEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewen!"

Traut does the best that he can with what he has. Got to be amazed by anybody who can look like the bigger idiot when paired up with Bob Roll. Think about it.

OK on (or is it back) to Friday. I'm pretty sure Al is innocent, e.g. no way he knows enough to make this Lance worshiping mistake(?).

On Friday they are pointing out how wide open this years tour is and they say you have to go back to 87 to find one so wide open.

WHAT HAPPENED TO 99?

99 was as wide open as you could get AND it has a lot in common with this year. 99 was only the second time (first was 56 I think) with no previous winner in the tour. Both had only a couple who had ever been on the podium of the TDF before. And in both cases a large part of the reason was Drug exclusions. 87 on the other hand did have at least one previous winner. Figneon and also Roche who was having a pretty good year. (When he won the TDF he became and still is the second person ever to win the Triple Crown or Golden Triple, e.g. Worlds, Giro and Tour).

Perhaps I misheard or they mispoke and meant 88, but that still had Figneon and Del Gado who had finished 2nd in 87. Again far from wide open.

So why forget 99? Is it that nothing is allowed that might indicate any of Armstrongs wins are 'tainted'. Actually tainted is an unfair word for 99, weak fields happen. Tainted because of a weak field is somehting I would reserve for years like 47 when Italy with the best 2 riders in the world was excluded for reasons haveing nothing to do with cycling. But it does remain that they seem to forget that the field was weak and wide open in 99 and this would seem to be because they will not mention anything that in any way detracts for the Legend of Lance. The really sad part is that it still was a very impressive win. In 99 he did not have a strong team. But of course mentioning that detracts from the Legent of U.S. Postal. I for one think a weak field that left an opening makes for a great story, one where Lance and a plucky U.S. postal team saw thier chnace and grabbed it with both hands and then grew to 'Legend'. But what do I know, I'm not a great copy writer like the ones OLN has.

al trautwig is one thing i don't miss about OLN. However, we get tour coverage on Canal evasion. The coverage itself is fine, but one of the announcers is a total idiot who knows nothing, and the first 15 minutes are spent chatting with this boring woman who works at The Maison de France. It just goes on and on.... agh! Get to the race already! I don't miss trautwig but I do miss phil and paul. However, at least we're getting coverage, and we had the giro too. SO we shouldn't complain!

Bob Roll got my respect last year when he opened a bottle of champagne with a sword on the first try. I've opened champange bottles and worked the manual at arms with a sword but Bob must have attended some way more awesome parties than me where you'd have to bring those two skills together.

I watched some of the Sunday afternoon CBS coverage. CBS, to their credit, had enlisted the help of Phil and Paul, but it was like Cycling 095 with crashes thrown in.

I usually watch the extended coverage in the evenings, and as much as it pains me to say this, Al is actually getting better. He's not perfect - I thought I heard him call Egoi Martinez from Disco 'Igor' Martinez but that could be my ears. And he certainly doesn't know cycling like Phil, Paul, and Bob, but he's getting better.

I do wish he'd stop making those Trautwig leaps of logic. Everything means something. Something happens - Hincapie going after the time bonus to get the yellow jersey for example - and Al immediately pounced on that as George's 'statement' of how he's going to stamp his authority all over the tour. Well, maybe, or maybe he just wanted to wear Yellow for a day. Not everything means something, Al.

But other than that, he's getting better.

Alright, look, most Mennonites out there look like anyone else, live like anyone else, and are pretty close to any other churchgoing people out there.

Some mennos DO live back-asswords and wear old fashioned clothes and farm and do all that crap, and it seems that Floyd came from that type of Mennonite background.

I’m from a Mennonite family, but my family lives like any other, and the fact that I’m Mennonite will make the same difference to me as being a Baptist or catholic or Lutheran or whatever any other god-believing religion would make a difference to anyone. It’s just a different brand of Christian, in the grand scheme of things. Floyds Menno family might live like farmers and practice a more extreme version of "the faith" or whatever, but my family came from Germany originally and lived like any other family all the way back (though like some other Mennonites they lived for awhile in Ukraine and then were more or less exiled for a host of reasons through the early to mid 1900s)

I really just get a little annoyed when people think Mennonite is synonymous with Amish, Amish light or anything else. Just do a little research or whatever before assuming that Mennonite means beards and barns :)

Thanks for listening and I hope some of that made sense (my dad, a theology PhD would have explained everything much better I’m sure)

Actually, so did Phil on one of the live shows.

But OTOH ... time to confess. I am sure that it is my age, or perhaps my mental illness, but I am [gasp!] actually beginning to like Bob Roll. No, I didn't say that. Tell me I didn't say that. :o

LOL, not quite, My grandparents are mennonite. The biggest difference is that they live within the "normal" community and can choose what to allow and not allow opposed to the Amish living away from everything and excommunicating people that don't follow their rules.


+1 Goldfish... It sounds like Floyd's family comes from a very strict Mennonite upbringing.


p.s: Al Trautwig is a tool and makes Bob Roll look amazing!

I miss Kirstin and her large...............................knowledge of cycling:rolleyes: