In the pantheon of cycling's most recognisable baldies, John Gadret is right up there with the late Marco Pantani.
It was a shame, then, that till Wednesday the pint-sized Frenchman had done nothing to come close to match the achievements of the Italian - despite a questionable penchant for piratical hooped earrings.
In fact, the most notable thing Gadret had done on a bike was a Gallic shoulder-shrugging snub towards AG2R team-mate Nicolas Roche in last year's Tour.
Refusing to lend his punctured team leader his wheel on Stage 15 of the 2010 Tour prompted an irate Roche to write an article in the Irish Independent in which the Franco-Irish rider admitted that "on the team bus I had great difficulty in not putting his head through the nearest window".
"Although I wanted to smash his head in, and had visions of a baldy French climber exiting through the windscreen, I let Vincent (Lavenu) do his job as team manager and said nothing," he wrote.
Stephen Roche's son then warned that during Gadret's final two years under contract at AG2R, "I hoped he never asked me for anything again, because I would not forget today for a long time."
Well, Roche has clearly calmed down somewhat and moved on from last summer's low point in his "workmanlike relationship" between himself and Gadret.
For after the veteran climber's last-gasp win in Castelfidardo, Roche was one of the first to congratulate the stage 11 victor on Twitter, writing: "Grand bravo a John Gadret! Exiting finish!!!!!"
To be fair, it was a pretty astonishing finish from the poor man's Pantani.
In other Twitter-based news, Saddles was taught a lesson in politeness today by Mark Cavendish.
Between winning stages and hanging out the back of the HTC car, Cavendish had taken some time out to tweet about the bumpy stage 11 route.
Cav described the stage as "the hardest of the Giro thus far" which Saddles thought was a bit high-brow for someone usually so liberal in his use of the F-word.
Thinking out loud, BS suggested that perhaps Cav had a ghost writer to pen some of his tweets in his own inimitable style - especially half an hour before the start of "the hardest stage of the Giro thus far" when most riders would be undergoing some serious preparations.
A minute later, Cav's piercing reply hit the twittosphere: "Good job you're not a professional poker player then. You'd be f***ing useless."
The stern reply was all the more unexpected considering Ghost Cav's earlier erudite tweet directed towards those riders, such as Francisco Ventoso, who had accused Cavendish of cheating last Sunday.
"If some people put as much effort into their own lives as they do at trying to bring down others, they might actually achieve great things," it said.
Cav's a talented guy: not only can he bring others down but he can also achieve great things.