Emma James struck me as a person who really loves her sport. Of the 78 finishers of the Grande Boucle, she was the only one whose first thought after the race was to go out for a nice ride.
I think that she liked my tour of Paris, though she might have had good reason to be nervous, for example, when I took a right turn into a one way street the wrong way. Anyway, you can read her account on the Cycling News website. By the way, you can find out all about the mathematicians on the Eiffel Tower here.
Cynthia is also featured on the cover of the September issue of the French edition of Playboy Magazine, which also contains more as well as less coverage of her between its covers.
On the left, in the cutoff shorts and bleached blond hair, is Cynthia boyfriend Jean-Louis Vigneron who took the picture of Emma James and me. I had been worried that he had ruined that picture with his rapid fire technique, but I was wrong, thankfully.
In this picture, one can make out Cynthia's tan line on her face, though you might have to look at the high resolution photo to see it more clearly. Her hair is also drawn back so that the roundness of her head is quite evident. The Playboy photographers were very careful to comb her hair with bangs as well as put (computer enhanced?) shadows on the side of her face in order to narrow it down.
Well, I thought that if Cynthia can get into magazines, then maybe I should have a go at it too, given that my cycling credentials alone wouldn't get me anywhere either. I don't have Cynthia's bruises and road rash -- she was "dancing" with these badges of courage, having returned to her Lido job five days after completing the race -- but you can make out my unevenly mended collarbone from a 1981 crash. The cycling tan is fairly good: it so surprised doctors at the Stanford Hospital that they called the head of the dermatology department to check it out.
To be honest, that picture was taken before I went to see the the Grande Boucle and was inspired by the Belgian movie Le Velo de Ghislain Lambert in which the eponymous character displays his impressive tan in the first few minutes of the movie and, looking at himself in the mirror, says: "T'es affute, toi, mon salopard. Pas un pet de graisse !" which means: "You are one fit son of a bitch. Not one once of fat!"
To make this picture even weirder, I am being observed by a quizzical
Linux.