One of the catalysts for the rules, circa 2004

There has been unprecedented and unexpected interest and discussion on this blog since the first mention of ‘The Rules’.  From that very first post, a name that has been oft-mentioned is that of the mysterious Johnny Klink.  A good mate of mine since the late 90s when we first met in some random shop, we forged our friendship through our passion for bikes, and riding them.  We were both primarily mountain bikers back then, and still are, but with a deep appreciation and love of road riding, and the history and traditions of racing.  Klink has an eye, and a mind, for cycling and all things bicycle that few can match.  But he considers himself “a talker, not a writer” when it comes to conveying his passion to other Velominati.  So it took me a while to get him to put down on paper what The Rules mean to him, and how they came about.  Now seems like an ideal time for his modest take on the origins of The Rules.  Brett

Most of us will have a friend or acquaintance who, no matter what they do or how much money they spend, be it on fashion, music or in this particular case bicycles and cycling accessories, they just can’t get it right. Each decision, each new purchase becomes another faux pas or crime against good taste. Fundamentally, this is where the initial mutterings of the idealism which has now been venerated on Velominati as ‘The Rules’ originated from.

I vividly remember beers in the garage with my good mate Brett, putting together any number of new two-wheeled creations and alluding to the unspoken (at the time) rules or guidelines that should be adhered to when one builds or designs a new dream ride. Integral to these discussions were light-hearted taunts and scorn that would be directed at friends or any other random cyclist who we felt had no idea. As Brett was getting into blogging about all things cycling, I recall my instruction to him was always to “blog that shit!” so we could document our rules which would become a jovial talking point amongst our mates who read the blog. I never thought it would go further than that

As an Industrial Designer and, as Brett will attest, a person with somewhat pedantic tendencies, I find it hard to rest easy about a bicycle that has been put together in a piecemeal, haphazard fashion. I feel that somewhere inside me there is an inherent appreciation of the unspoken art of bicycle design. Custom players like Vanilla Cycles, Indy Fab and Australia’s Baum Cycles, for example, build the bikes that ‘The Rules’ embody to me.

Ok, back to that friend that we all know….our case in point could take a top-of-the-line, five figure machine and turn it into a department store Huffy, the bike of your dreams into a carbon fibre tragedy. I have never seen a person who could devalue a bike just by owning it. Gaffer tape used to stop cable rub, packing tape on the cranks to stop heel scuff, and randomly placed pieces of wool and string for reasons we are yet to understand. The certain irony behind all these attempts at keeping his bike’s future value intact meant that it had to resemble something you would have to pay me to own. The Rules had to be enforced!

Needless to say Brett blogged that shit, and on my last look at the Velominati website there were over 70 rules and growing. For me these Rules were always linked towards an appreciation and awareness of the form and function of the bicycle and associated accessories. Using a keen eye for pulling together a final design, which the average punter could see that thought and time had gone into the build. Equally, cycling being a sport steeped in tradition, these Rules also have to be kept at the forefront of the mind throughout the build process.

The Rules, for me, could be a succinct list of guidelines to aid everyone from the novice to the experienced cyclist with no idea. As with everything some people get it and some people don’t, and that is why we must have The Rules.

Johnny Klink

Here’s our great mate Col, who was the inspiritation for The Rules.  No matter how mismatched his clothes were, how bad his bikes looked, he could still put the hurt on you, drink a few beers, and then drive us 4 hours home at the end of it.  Good on ya Col, you legend.

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The other Mr. 60 (photo: Sirotti)

To describe Piotr Ugrumov’s professional career as fleeting may be a tad on the unfair side.  While he enjoyed a good deal of success in his early years, he also seemed to burst onto the bigger stage of the Giro and Tour from relative obscurity, at least to this observer.  Looking back through his results though, reveals a talented climber and time triallist who used those assets to pick up a win at the Baby Giro (the Giro d’Italia for amateurs) in 1984, backed up with the Young Rider classification in his first crack at the Giro in 89, 8th on GC in 1990, and 2nd behind Miguel Indurain in 1993.  But it wasn’t until 1994 that the Latvian made his mark on Le Tour, and when he did, it really did appear to be a remarkable performance.

This was also the year that the Gewiss Ballan team ran roughshod over the peloton, coinciding with their collaboration with Dr Michele Ferrari.  Berzin had also ‘come from nowhere’ to win the Giro, and the now infamous 1-2-3 at Fleche Wallone was in the books with a huge asterisk next to it.  With Ugrumov skipping the Giro, he came into the Tour with a fire in his belly, and rocket fuel coursing through his veins.  Still, by the time he’d appeared on the radar in Stage 17, where the Colombian Rodriguez sucked his wheel all the way to the summit finish at Val Torrens before taking an classless win, Ugrumov only seemed a bit player in the bigger production of the world’s greatest race.  The next two stages were to elevate him into a much larger role.

Somehow finding remarkable powers of recovery after his day-long breakaway, Ugrumov went on the attack again, this time soloing into Cluses over two and a half minutes ahead of Indurain and Virenque, with Pantani even further back.  Then, the following stage saw him smash the long mountain time trial, putting 1.38 into the Pirate and 3.16 into Big Mig, catapulting him into second overall, a position he would maintain all the way to Paris.  And all this at the tender age of 32.  A late bloomer? Perhaps.

He would never reach those heady heights at the Tour again, although a 3rd at the 95 Giro and 7th at the 96 Tour are none-too-shabby in anyone’s books.  Yet, the ‘magic’ that had imbued him and his team in 94 was somehow never as potent, and a couple of seasons of mediocrity would spell the end of his career.  But Ugrumov did have one other impressive number next to his name; after being recorded as 32% in December 1994, his haematocrit level had jumped to a massive 60% in May 95, right in the middle of the Giro, and two days after following Rominger and Berzin in for 3rd in a TT.   

In a bizarre footnote to his involvement with the darker side of cycling, Ugrumov lived in an apartment directly across the street from the hotel where Marco Pantani met his death, and was planning to pay the Pirate a visit when he was told of the deteriorating mental and physical state of his former climbing foe.  He never got to make that visit, and we’ll never know if it would have made any difference to Pantani’s fate.  What we do know though, is that Piotr Ugrumov was one of the few riders who could challenge, and beat, the sport’s best climber on the biggest mountains of Italy and France.  Just how he achieved such feats, well, could it be all in the numbers?

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The saviour of many a skinned knuckle

Every mechanic has encountered a tyre/rim combination that has just been a real pain in the ass to work with. Remembering back to my early days in the shop, struggling to wrangle a particularly stubborn wire bead tyre off a wheel, my lack of experience and no doubt ham-fisted approach saw me snapping the ends off all of the plastic levers in the workshop.  I can’t exactly remember the types or brands, but none of them were a match for me or the tyre.  Finally after all other options were exhausted, I grabbed the levers that came with a set of Mavic Cosmic Elite wheels that graced my bike at the time.  These levers didn’t shirk the task at hand, and had the rubber settled on the alloy in no time.

To look at them, you’d think they would be the most likely to snap, being long and fairly thin, but whatever material they are made from has nearly the strength of metal levers, but without the damaging properties of those bastards.  There is a cool little hook at the lever end, which always grabs the bead just right, and runs around the rim in a smooth, fluent action.  And at the other end, there are molded in pins so you can adjust the bearings on your Cosmics just so.

Luckily, even though there is always one bundled up with my spare tube, I haven’t had to use them many times in the ten years or so since discovering their magic qualities.  That was until today when the new Kenda rubber I’m trying put up a spirited fight against my Roval rims, but the little Mavic soon stamped its authority and spared my curses; at least until I get a flat and am struggling with frozen knuckles on the side of the road, where once again it will step up and save the day.

AP Photo/Keystone/Karl Mathis

The inaugural Velominati Super Prestige makes an unscheduled stop this week at the Tour de Suisse.  Originally left off the VSP roster, it was decided among the Keepers that the ‘fourth Grand Tour’ is indeed worthy of inclusion in our humble tipping competition. As one of the final hit-outs for many Tour de France contenders, the Swiss race shows who might be ready to step up in July, who’s needing to pull their finger out, and who might be targeting this race as a worthy addition to their palmares.  With a couple of  TT’s, stages that could go to the sprinters or a daring breakaway, and some of the most picturesque mountain passes in Europe, it has something for everyone, and anyone could win.

Can Motorcus find an ‘extra gear’ and back up his 09 victory?  Will the EgoTesticle show signs of his old self on the bike, or just behave like his old self off it?  And are the Brothers Grimpeur finally going to do something, anything?

Let us know your thoughts, and make your picks to pick up a sweet Obey The Rules bumper sticker, in the posts section on this page.  For a full rundown on the competition scoring etc, visit our VSP Schedule, Rules and Results page.

Good luck!

Book review: The death of Marco Pantani by Matt Rendell

It’s always a let down for a fan to realise his or her idol is not all that they were held up to be.  And while I was somewhat a fan of Marco Pantani, it was neither a surprise nor a let-down to read about his troubled life, and his subsequent sad, lonely death.

It wasn’t a surprise, or a let-down, to read that possibly his whole career was fueled by a dependence on recombinant EPO, among other performance enhancers.  I knew it while watching him win the Tour in 98, I knew it when I watched him vainly struggle to hold the wheel of a super-charged Armstrong in the 2000 Tour, and I knew it when I saw him valiantly try to re-capture his former climbing prowess against the lesser gifted, yet somehow superior Simoni and Garzelli et al in the 2003 Giro, his ultimate swansong as it would eventually transpire.

Did I care that he was loaded?  No.  All his contemporaries were, it was no secret.  Did I get an invigorating thrill from watching him fly up iconic mountain passes while holding the bars in the drops, sitting, standing, always accelerating, striving to get to the summit as quickly as possible, to shorten the suffering as he often stated?  Hell yes.  He was an entertainer.  He was a craftsman.  An aesthete.  And he was a loner, foregoing any real support from a team that lacked talent and panache, something that probably pleased him as he loved to be the centre of attention.

And just as he rode alone, he lived alone.  Although he was surrounded by an entourage who all claimed to be doing their best for him, ultimately he was neglected by them, and left to die a lonely, depressed, paranoid and disturbed man.

The Death of Marco Pantani doesn’t try to dispel the notion that his career was based on deception, nor does it try to glorify it.  It is a stark assessment of the facts, and only the staunchest of tifosi could argue against those facts.  But it still hits hard to read of such a spectacular fall from grace, the downward spiral from the pinnacle of the sport, and indeed from the pinnacle of celebrity, to a demise that one would normally associate with that of a rock star or actor.  Maybe that’s how he saw himself, and how he thought it would be befitting for him to be remembered, like an Elvis, a Jim Morrison or even a James Dean.

Just as we still buy CDs by The Doors, and watch Viva Las Vegas or Rebel Without a Cause and take pleasure from the experience, so too will we remember Les Duex Alpes in 98, or l’Alpe d’Huez in 95 and 97, not because we were watching a flawed individual, but because we were being entertained by a consumate showman, a master of his craft at the height of his profession.

And for that I can only be appreciative.  RIP Marco.

A familiar sight in the 1993 Tour: Jaskula (at back) and Mejia hang on in the Alps

While the talk of the week has been on the Fraud Landis Chronicles, whether he cheated (of course he did), whether or not he’s telling the truth (he is, this time) and whether or not Pharmstrong is a doping, fraudulent COTHO (he always has been), my head has exploded trying to make sense of the naivety of those still duped by the belief that one man, and one man only, is the sole clean rider of the last twenty years.  For the sport that we love is a dirty, corrupt one.  And I really don’t give a flying fuck.  I’ve known for a long time that our heroes are flawed human beings, just like you and I, yet I still love it.

So I got to thinking back to the early days of my love affair with pro racing and Le Tour in particular, and the July evenings rushing home from work to catch the half-hour highlights package on SBS TV.  How enthralled I was watching the classic battles in the heat of the French Alps, as these giants of the road repeatedly attacked each other, in huge gears at speeds that seemed superhuman.  Because they were.

And while I was recalling these great memories, some names were dragged from the recesses of my mind, pushed back there by the fact that they weren’t big names of the peloton, but nonetheless were elevated among those legends whom we still revere. For a fleeting moment, three weeks to be exact, these transients became superstars, transformed somehow magically from nobodies and elevated to the highest level in one of the toughest races in the world, then disappeared just as quickly.  Miracles do not happen, no matter how much some shamen try to make you believe they do.

The 1993 Tour stands out in my mind for some of the best racing I’ve witnessed in the race to this day.  I still have the VHS tapes of the race and love to revisit them occasionally, marvelling at the pure diesel power of Big Mig, the accelerations of Rominger, the Lazarus-esque rides of Chiappucci, the long, failed solo escape of Robert Millar over the Bonette.  Classic stuff.

But it was the performances of some previously undistinguished riders that stood out.  One Bjarne Riis, 107th two years earlier, suddenly 5th.  One Johan Bruyneel, who finished 7th and set the fastest ever winning average speed in stage 6 (since bettered only twice, once in 1999 by coincidence).  Two days later, one Lance Armstrong took his first Tour stage win, before abandoning while in 97th place.  One Alvaro Mejia, a Colombian grimpeur who was ever-present in the mountains.  And one Zenon Jaskula, a Pole who’d had some solid results, but never anything to match his remarkable 3rd place in the 93 Tour.

So who the hell was he?  Apart from success as an amateur in Polish national time trials, and also in the Sun Tour in Australia, his biggest result was 2nd in Tirreno-Adriatico behind one Tony Rominger in 1992.  He rode for Team MG-GB in 92 and 93, alongside the likes of  Tchmil, Cipo, Ballerini and later-proven dopers like Rebellin and Museeuw.  He was in good company, at the right time as EPO was flooding the peloton and the racing was becoming supercharged.

Every night as I watched, his name would be mentioned more and more by Phil and Paul.  They had no idea who this guy was either, but were equally as impressed/surprised/baffled by his performance as I was.  With Indurain and Rominger doing their best to annihilate each other over the big Cols, there’d always be the same faces hanging on to them like barnacles on a ships hull.  Riis, Mejia, Jaskula.  They were revelations.  They were riding like men possessed.  They were juiced to the gills.

Rather than just hanging on, defending his GC position of third, not making too many waves, Jaskula must’ve been thinking it was all too good to be true, and with the magic potion coursing through his veins probably making him feel like Superman, he took his chance for ultimate glory.  Stage 16 to Saint-Loury-Soulon saw him outsprint Rominger and Mig after they decimated the field on the last climb.  The speeds and ferocity of the attacks were incredible.

Jaskula looked somewhat sheepish on the podium in Paris, and Indurain and Rominger had a look of “who the hell is this guy?” as they shared the steps with the unheralded Pole.  Perhaps he knew that he would never reach such heights again, that this performance couldn’t possibly be repeated, and that he would rest on his laurels and fade into obscurity with a huge question mark over the validity of its credibility.

And then, he was gone.  Other riders would emulate his ephemeral performance in years to come, products of the influx of doping programs masterminded by the new breed of team management and sports ‘doctors’.  And of course, the wonder drugs they administered.  I didn’t really know what was going on back then, but I knew the racing was enthralling, and in hindsight it’s easy to see why.

Tino Tabak

Up until a week ago, I’d never heard the name Tino Tabak.  Tonight, I’m brimming with anticipation about reading his life story.

The Kennett brothers have produced a series of great books on some of New Zealand’s most successful, least successful, hardest, most famous, infamous and iconic cycling heroes. Their latest offering, written by Jonathan, looks at arguably the most naturally talented of all the subjects, the often-times controversial Tino Tabak. This evening I was lucky enough to attend the launch of the book at Wellington’s National Library.

Without going into too much detail (mainly because I know little of his story), Tino mixed it up with the likes of Merckx, De Vlaeminck, Maertens, Zoetemelk, Kuiper and Post on Europe’s biggest stages in the 70s.  He is the highest Kiwi finisher in Le Tour (18th in 1972).  Almost won Ghent-Wevelgem.  He could’ve had it all, almost did, but saw it slip away.

He had a few wines, signed a few books, told a few stories, and engaged everyone in that room.  Foyer.  Church.  We were his disciples.  He was a God.

As he was signing Rachel’s book, he said to her “I hope you enjoy it, but please don’t think I’m a bad person.  If you do, read it again, and if you still do, well that’s ok too.”  Keeping it real, all these years later.  Can’t wait to get my teeth into it.

*This post first appeared on More News From Nowhere November 3 2009.

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photo: bettiniphoto

Sad news today that two-time Paris-Roubaix winner Franco Ballerini was killed in a car rally accident.  A man who lived for the cobbles, a true legend of that particular race, and the sport.  R.I.P. Franco.

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More here.

The aroma.  The taste.  The ritual of the preparation, and the anticipation.  It’s more than just a drink.

Coffee is an integral part of cycling and cyclists lifestyles.  But, like Campy versus Shimano, or white socks versus black, the way we imbibe the magic bean can be just as polarising.

We received an email from a reader with a suggestion for The Rules. Rob infers that anyone partaking in a soy-based brew, or a ‘lite’ milk additive, should be ceremonially beaten.  ”Harsh but fair” he believes, such as we always imply with The Rules.

Already I am receiving unflattering, downright tempestuous emails from my fellow Keepers regarding my soy intake confession. Yes, I unashamedly admit to this ‘foam pas’ and will accept any abuse like a man.  A soy-drinking man, dammit!

But no matter how you enjoy your bean, there’s one thing for certain;  coffee is good.  Some say it should only be consumed black, sans sugar, in a ceramic cup.  Others, like Rob, suggest it can be enhanced with a small amount of milk, i.e macchiato. While everyone has different tastes, I’m sure most of us would agree that caramel, butterscotch and excessive amounts of foam, sprinklings and flavourings have no place in any cup.

And personally, I feel that the very act of sitting in a cafe in Lycra is a little more embarrassing than drinking soy. Call me a hippy, call me lactose intolerant, call me soft, but at least I’ll never be a ‘cafe racer’.  Not in my own town anyway, maybe in Belgium…

It’s a badge of honour, and while neither of those comparisons are glorious in their deployment, the reward, or possibly even notoriety, is somehow noble.  

You’ve gotta earn your stripes, right? Even if it could result in sunburn, or much worse.  Will Lance save me if I get cancer? 

So this is what greeted me in the mirror on my return from a long session in the hills of Wellington yesterday.  

When I left the house in the morning, a dense fog shrouded the skyline, even delaying the arrival of one Prince William to our fine city.  

Nah, I won’t be needing sunscreen today, I thought.  Actually, I didn’t think about it at all, I just got on the bike and went, the crisp morning air not hinting at the heat to come.

Now, being follicly-challenged, my bonce is usually one of the first areas to be slathered in SPF 30.  

It’s the nearest point to the sun, after all. Like a solar panel for a sex machine.  

Now, it just looks like a stubbly template for an S-Works 2D.

And the arms and legs copped a bit too, but at least I can go out in public with no more than the usual embarassment that spindly, hairless limbs cause.  Looks like it’s hats on for the next week or so.

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