Word For The Day

I watched the Tour de France last night. As I do most nights. Andy Schleck from Luxembourg was wearing the Maillot Jaune. He's a great, gutsy young rider who has a bit of a rivalry with Alberto Contador from Spain. Ahead of Contador by 31 seconds going into the stage, Stage 15 - Pamiers to Bagnères-de-Luchon, Schleck used his teammates to set the pace up the worst mountain climb in the Pyrenees, to Port de Balès, to make the other riders crack. When all of his riders had exhausted themselves he took it upon himself to break Contador. It was a very gutsy move and I was quite excited to see it. Only problem was that his chain popped off and Contador sprinted away to the summit why Schleck had to get started again which could not have been easy. He blew away several riders on the remaining climb and probably burnt an amazing amount of energy in the process. Unfortunately for Shleck there was only one other rider with him for much of the descent and he was unable to offer any pacesetting. Contador, on the other hand, had a couple of great descenders in his group and he managed to finish 39 seconds ahead of Schleck.

Word for the day - "Schlecht". It's German for "bad". Andy appears to speak English well and it may well have more letters in it than any English word that came to mind.

Wordplay

The boy had a bit of homework the other day involving opposites. There was a list of words and he had to find the opposites. Most of them involved adding the suffix 'un'. E.g. Hinge - unhinge, related - unrelated, real - unreal.

He asked me what the opposite of 'succeed' was. Now, I don't believe in turning him into a robot so of course I couldn't say 'fail', so I told him it was "suck". If you don't succeed then you suck. Makes sense doesn't it? I just hope he doesn't tell his teacher.