Robert Förster: "If my body is my fortune, then today I am broke"...

I think that Robert Forster has become my favourite cyclist. With all of the doping scandals and bad press that plague the sport now it is very easy to become completely jaded and just presume that everyone is on dope (which I believe to be true). But Robert seems (from what I have read) like a really normal dude who is racing clean. He has an on-line diary on www.radsportnews.com but unfortunately it is all in German. Luckily because he is very funny and never short of a story or two there are often quotes and excerpts of his entries on www.cyclingnews.com

Three of the most recent stories are about the Vuelta (Tour Of Spain) which is currently taking place.

On the meal after Stage 06...

Don't be surprised if the rest of the peloton does everything it can to stay away from the Gerolsteiner riders in Friday's stage of the Vuelta a España, says Robert Forster.

It's not that they're worried about crashes, have personality conflicts with them, or anything like that; it all comes down to what the Gerolsteiner guys ate for dinner last night.

On Thursday night, totally out of the blue, Rene Haselbacher started eating garlic, and the others joined in. "There was sort of a paste, we put it on everything, on noodles, on meat, absolutely everything," Forster told www.radsport-news.de. "The theory was, if we all ate it, we wouldn't smell it ourselves... We emptied the bowl. Well, garlic is good for your health, isn't it?"

On the Vuelta: Stage 05...

Needless to say, the mountain stage was not at all to the liking of Gerolsteiner sprinter Robert Forster. On the second climb he found a small group with "...the usual suspects, my homeboys like Backstedt and Renshaw." He even found an advantage in riding so far back. "The good thing when you ride alone off the back is that you never have a problem getting something to drink. In the field it's always a big thing until you've made your way through all the autos. You have to look at it positively!"

With 8 km left, he worried about making it to the finish within the time limit. "So I went to work: I rode up as if in a delirium," and made it with minutes to spare. His summary of the day: "If my body is my fortune, then today I am broke!"

On the amount of water needed for a stage in the Vuelta...

It's a good thing that Robert Forster's team sponsor is in the bottled water business: the Gerolsteiner rider and his teammates needed it in Monday's Vuelta stage. "It was total chaos back by the team cars, because thousands of riders were constantly getting water," he wrote in his Vuelta diary on Radsportnews.com. "I asked one of our helpers: we nine Gerolsteiner riders used 280 bottles today! The most of them were to drink, of course, but some of them we poured over our heads But you'd better not do it like the British rider Wegelius did: He took a bottle from another team, and poured half of it out over his head before he noticed that it was coca-cola... We all laughed like crazy!"

The average temperature in Spain that day was 39,5 degrees, at times underway it was well over 40. "It was so hot already at the start that we didn't want to get out of the air-conditioned bus."

And when 'Frosi' got to the hotel after the stage, he knew it couldn't be good news when someone asked him, "Have you heard the news?" Turns out that his and his roommate Marcel Strauss' suitcases got left behind in the last hotel...