Tour de Macedon

Melbourne threw a big party for Cadel Evans, the Australian who won this year's Tour de France - the first Australian to do so. (Many were the Aussies who sat up into the wee hours watching the Tour on TV.) My sister and I went down to Melbourne to witness what we thought would be a boisterous crowd and maybe even ticker-tape. Ticker-tape there was not, but a big crowd there was. And yet, boisterous? Nothing of the sort. TV reports have spliced together the few moments when the crowd - provided by the City of Melbourne and BUPA with yellow flags and these rather creepy Cadel masks - cheered (at the MC's urging), but it was otherwise a strangely muted event. Is it because cycling's a solitary sport and its fans, too? Or because Cadel's a quiet understated kind of guy, whose reaction to all the fuss was "to say I'm overwhelmed would be the understatement of at least this month"? Or because he actually lives in Switzerland and said he was just making a stop on his way from Europe to America? (Snaps are from the Mount Macedon Trading Post.)