I'm a little bit shocked by this ad for the Santos Tour Down Under (I couldn't get a good pic of my own from the bus window). It says, "Set le alarm, Frenchies."
I mean, I know the Aussies are proud of their sports records, but this is blatantly rude, n'est-ce pas? And it's located in the city hosting the Tour Down Under, right next to the epicentre of the festivities. You can safely assume that French cyclists competing in the Tour will see this poster. And how will it make them feel? Like Adelaide has rolled out the welcome mat for them? Or like Adelaide is about to spring some ill-thought practical joke on them and then be all, "In your face, foreigners! Go back where you came from!"? And the image of Adelaide that all the ads for the Tour portray is that the city is suffering from a huge chip on its shoulder. A bigger ad, which was plastered to the sides of trams, reiterated, "This time, the world watches us." Really??
Granted, I pay no attention to the world of cycling. But I've heard of the Tour de France. I've never heard of the Tour Down Under prior to moving to Adelaide. Perhaps I live under a rock, but that's still a pretty cocky thing to plaster on the sides of the one tram line running through a city with a population of one million people if you include all the sprawling suburbs for several miles around.
The tour was a couple weeks ago now, and in case you were wondering, no Aussies made it into the top 10. No Frenchies did, either. All that blustering for nothing.
It's not a great ad. I wouldn't say it's racist. Rather, it shows the Aussies have an inferiority complex. And besides all that, the world hasn't been watching the French lately--they've been watching Lance Armstrong.
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