Public Relations failure that could have been avoided with a one-sentence Facebook post
and within 30 minutes we're given exactly such a one-sentence post. This shows us, perhaps, that The Team read this thread but do not post to it.
The FB post tells us steve is OK (which we were told before) and the tracker isn't showing (which we also knew). It doesn't reassure us that, for instance, there is a new tracker, or steve is resting under doctor's orders, or the bike is broken, or steve is eating his way through an entire cow. With chips. It tells us nothing. Which is precisely what The Team intended.
This is rather like Sherlock Holmes The Silver Dagger - what can we deduce from the fact that the dog did not bark in the night?
We are left, once again, to do our own guesswork. We can guess he's not riding and the loss of a couple of days means the end of the attempt as we think he can't recoup those lost miles. We can be pretty sure he's gutted. He's given up his life savings, his job, almost two years of his life, and lived through the evaporation of his dream.
Does this lessen the man in our eyes? Not one single jot. In a way, just to keep plugging away at it through the winter when success seemed to be moving further and further away seems to me entirely in the audax spirit.