Tour de France and Goats

[fyo]

I'm not a big cycling fan -- at least not in terms of watching it -- but I've been paying a bit of attention to a Tour de France ticker today when this little gem flashed across the screen:

A herd of goats are making it tough for the riders. Deciding to spontaneously block the road, the goats effectively stopped the peleton. Due to the fog, the riders were unable to react. Fortunately, it doesn't look like riders or goats suffered any serious harm.

WTF?!

I have these images now of a whole bunch of bikers crashing into a herd of goats. Pretty funny... Probably not nearly as interesting in reality, though...

[fyo]

Trying to find more info, I checked the official Tour de France "live updates". Pretty funny, although less dramatic:

Lambs in the ranks: Several sheep have just come onto the road as the peloton was passing. There are animals in the ranks now.

Goats Sorry: Ah, it could have been goats who came up the road just as the peloton was passing. It was a mini mutton stampede and no one was hurt by the charge of the woolly ones.

(Well, it wasn't a mutton stampede if they were goats...)

[fyo]

On a non-goat-related note (quite a lot of comments from someone claiming not to like cycling), they apparently have quite a few riders equipped with a slew of monitoring devices, the data from which is streamed live. You get revs, power output, heart rate, velocity... Pretty funny to see riders going at well over 50mph while producing 0 watts and 0 revs. Downhill, you think?

[Sunstroke]

^^^ Too funny...and they probably weren't too woolly either, if they were actually goats.

I ran into a cow once on my bike back home in N AZ once, as I was coming over a rise on a small mountain path (Thumbutte, for those who know N AZ). I had almost come to a complete stop, so I didn't hit him hard, but the path was really narrow, and it was either hit the cow or go off a steep rock outcropping...and the cow actually looked like the softer impact between my options.

Both cow and myself were unharmed...

[MyGodWearsAHoodie]

(Well, it wasn't a mutton stampede if they were goats...)

While not useds as frequently as chevon older goats are sometimes called mutton depending on the region.

^^^ Too funny...and they probably weren't too woolly either, if they were actually goats.

Goats give wool as well as sheep.  In fact very popular types of wool, known as cashmere and mohair come from goats.