Slime.

We watched the European championship road race today on the box, the last day of the games; it was a long drawn out affair (230 km/145 miles) making it worthy of its status as an international championship, but also making a seriously boring spectacle to all but the ardent enthusiast. It was a day of punctures, proof that torrential rain does increase their frequency whatever some pundits might say; three quarters of the way through, the commentators were predicting that there would be a total of over a hundred wheel changes and that the organisers would run out of spares - though, post race, there seems to be no information about their accuracy

Chris Boardman was complaining that professional cyclists will not use proprietary products to seal their tyres and prevent flats. It is well known that cyclists used to go to almost any lengths to reduce the weight of their machines, drilling holes in every possible part of the structure until they whistled at any air speed over 15 kph; it is now possible to have an undrilled  racing bike weighing 4 kilos while the regulations demand that such a bike must be at least 6.8, they have to mount ballast weights to their bikes to make up the difference. The sealing kit in the Blip cost me less than the price of a tyre, is sufficient to treat all of the numerous wheels in my collection and would have prevented most of today's problems, two of which took the reigning world champion, Peter Sagan, out of the race.

I once made a similar observation on a long distance cycling forum; cyclists riding from London to Edinburgh and back really do not want to be wasting time and effort fixing punctures; the typical responses were “I'd rather stick with something I know” from someone who probably rides a carbon fibre bike, and “It makes a tyre difficult to pump up by the roadside” when the whole point is that the stuff avoids you having to do that.

Back to the riders in the race; after they'd finished and cleaned themselves up, they got on a plane to the Netherlands where they were due to ride a 180 km race the next day. To think that footballers object to playing two games a week.