Ahead of Jonathan's arrival, Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, a former militant leader, rode through the crowds, his fist raised in the air as he sat on a black Mercedes.
A friend once got a lift from Stonehenge festival in a batmobile, and I rode into a town in Nicaragua on the juddering mudguard of a tractor.
The Olympic time trial champion delivered the performance he needed when he needed to do so, and he rode in past the Meerkat Manor and the Elephant House to a convincing victory.
By a cruel coincidence the Dail resumed business just 24 hours after the so-called "troika" from the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund rode into town.
"The tactics were left to me today … and we landed in front so I rode a race from the front and he did it the hard way," Hamilton said.
No one likes to see a mechanical rob a rider of overall glory – but spare a though for Oscar Gatto, who had been the fastest man in the breakaway that rode away to victory in Forli and who was also the victim of a disastrously timed puncture that robbed him of a stage win.
Another time, he rode a motorbike around a rugby playing field pursued by police.
My next-door neighbour and best friend and I built cubby houses, talked across the fence, rode our bikes for hours and would disappear, free as birds, coming home only for a feed or to sleep.
She tells me she farmed locally (one of the few women that did so on her own in the Cotswolds), has hunted for 70 years and rode until she was 80. "I loved riding," she says, "and was quite good.
When patches of drying rice blocked my way I was unsure how to proceed, but smiling women in nón lá paddy hats waved me across, and I rode gently over the grains.
"Beat it!" This is the woman who, as singer and songwriter of L7 – the all-female punk band who rode the grunge wave – removed her tampon onstage at the Reading festival in 1992 and threw it at hecklers.
