par patron chouflard » 30 Nov 2006 21:04
Et encore:
After a mountain bike race at high altitude in California’s Mammoth Mountain I was in no condition to do anything other than go to sleep. The base camp at Mammoth is 10,000ft above sea level and the race went way higher than that above the tree line and into the snow (despite the fact that it was June). Anyway racing at high altitude does weird things to your body and mind and I was exhausted. Trouble is our two pro riders on the day Caroline Alexander and Gary Foord had had an amazing day, getting 2nd and 1st respectively in the Elite world cup race that followed our humble event. That was the equivalent of Nicole Cooke and Roger Hammond getting 1st and 2nd in a spring classic, on the road in the same day. Naturally the British camp was exulted and we hit the bars around town in celebration. Foord did the honourable thing and got pissed on about two pints and went home crying. Alexander, being a Barrow-In-Furness gal is made of much sterner stuff, and we drank heartily until about mid evening with things started to get wobbly. Inevitably I suggested driving back to our hotel down the mountain because instances of attack by bears in that area, is fairly common. “You’re drunk” she said “I’m walking,” and, wisely she did. I took umbrage, decided that bears wouldn’t find much meat on a world-class, female cross-country racer and would probably leave her alone so she was safe and I’d show her that I was perfectly capable of driving back down the mountain.
Now I’ve never driven a car after drinking before and was clearly in no condition to do so here. Also, in California, if you’re convicted they not only lock you up and throw away the key; they hang you, then lock you up and throw away the key. So, sitting behind the wheel in the car park a kind of skewed logic came over me and I figured that if I didn’t start the engine I wasn’t technically ‘driving’. And there’d be no lights on and stuff, a kind of ‘stealth mode.’ The hotel was about 2 miles away, all downhill, easily freewheelable.
So I eased off the handbrake and inched toward the road. Modern cars don’t like being freewheeled, engine off of course and this one reminded me of that fact at the bend out of the car park which it refused to go around without the aid of power assisted steering. Power assisted brakes might also have allowed me to prevent it rolling gently into the trees, but alas these too were non operational in ‘stealth’ mode. That’s my entire lifetime experience of drinking and driving, I’d gone about 20 feet and crashed at 5mph. The hire car company were very understanding.
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donc pas le meme lieu
