Hard to resist

"Then the Tour started. And it was impossible to resist. It always is. It sits there like a slice of key lime pie or the last piece of fried chicken, mocking will power. Cycling may punish you later, but it's so seductive in the present. That is what the sport knows, why it perseveres, despite its repeated, maddening mess-making..."

Only in The Wall Street Journal perhaps can a sports writer compare the Tour de France, "already stuck in a queasy fog," to key lime pie and fried chicken. Oddly enough, though, the references work.