When he was without a team-mate at Saint-Amand-Montrond and Bagnères-de-Bigorre, he avoided mishaps; he narrowly avoided Contador's chute on the descent into Gap; at L'Alpe d'Huez, when his team car went missing and he suffered from hunger knock, he got food in the nick of time.
Yet he experiences mishap after mishap as he battles to master his new skills.
But he experiences mishap after mishap while struggling to master his new skills.
When he competed in rodeos, he feared any mishap might land him in a hospital where doctors would discover the women's panties under his cowboy chaps.
He was once a physicist, but, after an unfortunate mishap, he found himself reintegrated as a radioactive being, equipped to peer into the future, nip to Mars for the afternoon, and divide into multiples of himself for nuclear-powered group sex.
He retrieved this mishap with a birdie on the 14th but when he suffered another bogey on the 15th his round seemed in danger of unravelling.
"The gate commissar, on inspection of the gate, said the gate was fine, the start commissar said he felt the release gate was fine, so the chief commissar ruled that there wasn't a mishap," he explained.
Sometimes, through a missed rail connection or other mishap, he was barely in time for the Sunday morning service at Stiffkey, and sometimes he would fail to arrive at all.
"I would be careful not to define the incident as a mishap," he said.
Odysseus' story is that of a man who seems, in some metaphorical way, to land always on the same beach as he moves from mishap to mishap.
