Getting each new copy of Rouleur is almost a religious experience. It is printed on heavy paper, and has a particular smell about it; the pages are printed with a mat finish, so the heavy, rough pages feel a certain way in your hands as you turn them. There is no other periodical that I’m aware of that has the same feel to it; reading each issue is an experience unto itself.

Issue 16 came yesterday, and it has some incredible features, including a retrospective on Team Z – one of the coolest teams ever – and a history of Shimano – one of the most iconic component manufacturers in cycling.

As I thumbed the pages through my first pass of the content, I took some photos in an effort to share the experience.

Of course, you’ll have to order one for yourself for the full effect.

I suppose cycling has always been flush with enthusiasts such as us, The Keepers, and readers such as yourselves.  One of the greatest things about the web is that it lets us, the irrationally-impassioned, freely speak our voice should we want to, and freely share our ideas and work with others.   This blog, for example, is proof of the very notion that you can pour loads of energy into a labor of love that no one has ever given any indication of wanting to have anything to do with, then post it on the internet, and have people share in the novelty of it.   It’s one of the unpredictable side-effects that Al Gore probably didn’t have in mind when he invented the Internet.

Take, for example, the Periodic Table of Professional Cycling, published by Cyclocosm.  This is the product of what I have to assume is a chemistry major with idle hands who lacks the initiative to become a Meth dealer.  It’s beautiful, actually – a work of art; I could print this and hang it on the shop wall.   And, aside from it’s aesthetic qualities, it’s also surprisingly informative: besides showing the common (and sometimes made-up) abbreviation for each race, each element provides information in terms of it’s length, how long it’s been run, it’s name, and it’s difficulty and significance on the professional calendar.

This is the internet at it’s best, if you ask me.  Which I realize you didn’t.

In 1998, Marco Pantani staged one of the most prestigious coups of cycling by winning the Giro-Tour double.  He made this run aboard what I believe to be the most beautiful bike in history, a Celeste steed with a yellow section of frame starting at the seat collar and spreading out down the tops of the seatstays, top tube, and seat tube.

Very little is actually known about this bike; it was a one-off creation made especially for Il Pirata by the Bianchi Reparto Corse division which makes all the top-end bikes for the company.   Some say the frame is aluminum, others claim it was boron.  The frame undeniably used a compact geometry (this is commonplace now, but it was unique in ‘98), but whether the top tube sloped up or down seems to be a point of contention: did the top but slope up to give a longer head tube to bring his bars up to accommodate his unique in-the-drops climbing style or was the top tube sloped down towards the seat tube in order to reduce the weight of the frame and increase the stiffness of the rear triangle?

The bike has captured my imagination for a long time.  I love the way the saddle and tires match the portion of the frame where they intersect in what I call the “Yellow Cluster”; the vision of Pantani climbing out of the saddle on the Col du Galibier with those flashes of yellow swaying back and forth as he danced up the mountain remains one of the coolest images of cycling.  I studied his bike extensively when I was building my Bianchi XL EV2 and I mimicked it’s setup, choosing a yellow Flite saddle and solid yellow tires.  To this day I love the looks of that bike, and Pantani’s setup has even influenced one or two of The Rules.

I’ve searched the net over for information on his bike, hoping that at some point someone would find and catalog it for the world.  Occasionally, there will be an article posted somewhere that covers the bike, but each of these has ended up a disappointment as upon closer inspection, it is revealed that the bike is not in fact his tour-winning bike.

I did, however, find one article on Campy Only which appears to showcase the real deal.  It comes from an account by a fan at a post-tour criterium in 1998 where Pantani made an appearance:

Here you have the pictures of Pantani’s bike. Note that he is using tubulars on his Electron wheels, even for this small race. He seems to love this bike. In the Giro he used the normal team bike on the flat stages, but since the mountains he has not been apart from this ultralight “hillclimber” (except for time trials). I think the weight is about 7 kilos, but is is of course a very small bike.

The use of a downtube lever and the modified Ergo lever is a funny detail. It is very unusual these days to see homemade stuff like this on a pro’s bike, and he even won the two major tours on it–it’s a classic bike, this one!

Recently on CyclingNews.com, they did a Retro Bike review of Pantani’s 1998 ride, reportedly stored at the Bianchi museum.  I was thrilled and dove into the photos, looking for answers to questions I probably didn’t know I had.  Unfortunately, closer inspection revealed a host of problems with the bike;  I am sad to report that this is not in fact Pantani’s bike, and in all likelihood did not even exist in 1998.  It appears to be nothing more than the Bianchi team replica frame clumsily loaded with a 1999 Campy Record 9-speed groupo.  The items that give this fact away are: non-compact geometry, carbon Ergo levers, no front down tube shifter (and accompanying left-side Ergo lever with guts removed), black and yellow tires (instead of his solid yellow tubulars), and silver Time mag pedals (he rode red ones in 1999).  This could possibly be a late-season racer or a 1999 trainer, but in any case, it is not his 1998 Giro-Tour winning magical steed.  Since it appears his real bike eludes even the Bianchi museum, my only hope is that he kept it for himself and it resides somewhere in the Pantani estate.

Issue 15 just arrived on my doorstop, and it is especially good and is going to take a good long time to work through all the way to the back cover. But I can tell you about the beginning, which was particularly captivating. It started with a great piece on Jeremy Hunt (written by Domestique/Journalist extraordinaire Michael Barry), then slid into a wonderful one-pager on what it means to be a Super-Domestique. It was the next piece, however, that stopped me in my tracks. It’s entitled only “Gios” and the cover shot is of an old Gios gingerly tucked under a translucent plastic tarp like a Michelangelo during a remodel, with it’s corked bottles perched on the handlebars providing the only real clue as to the bicycle’s age.

The author starts with a two-page rant asserting that it is, in fact, about the bike and anyone who says otherwise stands a nonzero chance of be a douchebag. Those aren’t his words – I’m paraphrasing a bit – but it is the gist of what he’s getting at.

Then comes the following quote. This particular section describes “a friend” who is at this stage of his marriage not allowed to mention his bicycle in his home for fear of suffering a painful divorce as a consequence. I’m assuming part of the risk is that he would somehow loose his bikes in the divorce. He is relegated to a small room where he and his cousin may mention la bicicletta.

It is there that he and his unhinged cousin, the one who wears his heart rate monitor while gardening, yabber on pedantically about life’s rudiments such as Speedplay, VO₂ max and float while their incredulous, shell-shocked wives deal with all the peripheral stuff – their children, their homes, the public preservation of the sham of normalcy, every single thing that is not cycling. My own father retains expensive bicycles in three separate European countries. My mother has a 25-year old microwave oven.

That actually sounds a lot like my own parents, aside from the fact that my mother actually has a good number of bicycles of her own – including an old-school Aluminum Alan and a Scalpel – although I suspect her accumulation of bikes has more to do with my father’s guilt than with her desire to groom a stable.

We are a strange lot, we cyclists.

To me, there is nothing cooler than riding in awful weather.  It automatically associates you with the Spring Classics, held in wet, wind, and rain, over the the worst roads you can imagine.  There is no image of cycling that I love more than of a tough Belgian Pro dressed in knickers, arm warmers, cycling cap perched beneath their helmet, grimace upon the face, and rain pouring from the skies.

The only good thing about winter and spring training is the fact that simply climbing on the machine that day means you are an automatic badass.  Hell, you don’t even have to ride hard, just being out means you’re awesome.  But I’ll be honest: I never ride harder than in the pouring rain, the drops of water dripping off my cycling cap tapping out my rhythm like a metronome, looking down at my knee warmers and shoe covers and imagining I’m cutting my teeth as a Pro on some godforsaken road somewhere in Belgium or Northern France.

Today was actually a beautiful day, but it was cold, so I dressed in my warmest gear and headed out on the road, Badass by Association.  It’s one of the Rules.

I even took some shots of myself, Dan O Style.  How did we satisfy our narcissistic self-portrait needs before cell phones?