One of Tamil
cinema’s heroes cycled his way to the
polling booth in Chennai to cast his vote – and people were talking about that
!! .. funny, is not cycling a very easy thing !
.. .. .. in our school days, only elites had cycles and came to school
in their bicycles. In every area, there
would be shops hiring cycle [it was 30 paise per hour !] – cycle was a vehicle
for common man .. once a while in TV they would show the song from Pavamannippu
whence Sivaji Ganesan would pedal a bicycle.
A wrong cliché
those days – those who did well in Sports would not study well – rather if you
show inclination towards sports, elders would scold that it would affect
studies. .. .. it was another fact that
those days famed Cricketers Erapalli Prasanna, Srinivasan Venkatraghavan and
later Krishnamachari Srikkanth among many others were Engineering graduates
(long before the concept of Private Engineering colleges came !)
Do you remember your Maths teacher at School – I remember well, Mrs Bhagawathi at Samarao, Mr ST Padmanabhan, Mr Munuswamy, Mr V Chandrasekaran among others .. was Maths the most difficult subject ??
The École
polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is a public research university
located in Lausanne, Switzerland. It specializes in natural sciences and
engineering. It is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, with
three main missions: education, research and technology transfer. The QS World
University Rankings ranked EPFL as the 14th best university in the world across
all fields in 2021.
The women's individual
road race event at the 2020 Summer Olympics was held on 25 July 2021 on a course
starting at Musashinonomori Park and ending at the Fuji Speedway in Tokyo. 67
cyclists from 40 nations competed, with 48 completing the course. The road race was a mass-start, one-day road
race event. The women's road race was 137 kilometres (85 mi) long with a total
elevation gain of 2,692 metres (8,832 ft).
The race was won by Anna
Kiesenhofer of Austria. Kiesenhofer was part of the original breakaway after
having broken away at the very start of the race along with four other riders.
She proceeded to drop her breakaway companions, soloing off the front at the
Kagosaka Pass with 41 kilometres (25 mi) to go and holding off the late chase
from the peloton. She won by 1' 15" over the silver medalist, Annemiek van
Vleuten of Netherlands. Van Vleuten made a late attack with 2.1 kilometres (1.3
mi) to go, distancing the remnants of the peloton. She celebrated after
crossing the line, having mistakenly thought that all the breakaway riders have
been caught and that she had won gold. The bronze medal went to Elisa Longo
Borghini of Italy, after unsuccessfully attempting to bridge up to van
Vleuten's attack and holding off the peloton.
Anna
Kiesenhofer of Austria produced the performance of a lifetime to win the
women's cycling individual road race. The 30-year-old cyclist was in a race of
her own, going it alone for the final 40km before coming home first in a time
of 3:52:45.
By the final stretch of a
gruelling 137km race, Kiesenhofer was ahead by over two minutes, with the
chasing pack seemingly unaware she was out in front. Her face was filled with
emotion as she crossed the line, a minute and 15 seconds ahead of silver
medallist Van Vleuten, with Italy's Borghini a further 14 seconds back. Kiesenhofer
has had an unconventional journey to the top echelons of the cycling world,
having previously competed in triathlon and duathlon until injuries forced her
to stop running. She holds a Master's degree in Mathematics at the University
of Cambridge in England, and a PhD in applied mathematics at the Polytechnic
University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. However, her decision to
concentrate on cycling has now paid dividends as she took home one of the
ultimate prizes in sport at Tokyo 2020.
"I planned to attack
at kilometre zero and I was happy I could get in front. That is something I
could not take for granted because I am not good at riding in the peloton, said
Kiesenhofer. "I am happy that I was not too scared and I just went for it.
I attacked and with the group we worked more or less together - it was helpful
to have a group. I saw I was the strongest and I knew I had the climb before
the long descent.
The Austrian mathematician’s
gold at the final seconds was assisted by the
veteran Dutchwoman Annemiek van Vleuten mistakenly thinking and celebrating
she had won. The 30-year-old who holds a doctorate in applied maths from the
Polytechnic University of Catalonia having also studied at Vienna and Cambridge
Universities, held her nerve
Anna
Kiesenhofer hails from Austria and is a postdoctoral
fellow in mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL). Kiesenhofer studied mathematics at the
Technical University of Vienna, completing her Master's degree at University of
Cambridge. She earned her PhD at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia with
her thesis on Integrable systems on b-symplectic manifolds. Kiesenhofer is
currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de
Lausanne (EPFL) and is part of a group researching nonlinear partial
differential equations which arise in mathematical physics. Truly vera level.
Five Red Tulips (Cinq
tulipes rouges) is a 1949 French crime film directed by Jean Stelli and
starring René Dary, Suzanne Dehelly and Raymond Bussières. The film's sets were
designed by the art director Jacques Colombier. The plot was the murders of
five riders during the Tour de France.
26th July 2021.
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