We’ve remarked many times on the connection between the pained musician and the Cyclist. Layne Staley and Marco Pantani being a prominent example of a reflection in a pond of mental strife. Perhaps something about finding strength – or at least some kind of peace – through suffering is a personality trait that Cycling shares with being an Artist….
Bicycle racing is a strange beast. Some races are over before they’re even a third completed, any mystery of a victor negated by methodical displays of team riding and tactical strangulation of opponents. Other races are so hard to pick that to even attempt to is committing VSP suicide; yet still we pick. For three weeks out of the year,…
[rule number=41/] Look, people. We’re not making this up; we’re mainlining this shit straight from the rivers of Truth flowing down the slopes of Mount Velomis. They draw from the history and culture of the sport, and from good common sense. They make sense, in fact, even if the Keepers don’t necessarily know why at…
The Prophet had never been dropped by anyone in a race-threatening situation during his entire Grand-Tour career. But he was dropped on this, a relatively minor climb to Pra Loup due to a combination of circumstances involving a chest injury, overconfidence, and savvy Frenchmen who could read the road surface well enough to understand what side of…
We don’t like to talk about crashing. Talking about crashing before you crash feels a lot like tempting fate and talking about it after you crashed feels a lot like a fisherman bragging about his catch. But crashing is the worst part of our sport apart from getting hit by a car, which has all the worst…
If Rule #12 does not smolder deep in your soul, you might not be a Velominatus. I’ll still be riffling through bike magazine porn, from the inevitable wheelchair, in the old folks home. Some of us have hidden new bikes from our better halves. Every known bit of subterfuge has been employed to downplay the…
In Japanese, “Santoku” means “Three Virtues”. Exactly which three virtues it is referring to is unclear, but I am fascinated by the idea of a single word with such a rich, if ambiguous, meaning. I have several kitchen knives that goes by this name, and within the scope of knives the three virtues are generally accepted to…
“Like one who after a night of drunken revelry (and VSP picking) hies to his bed, still reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him (Voeckler, really, fourth place?), as the plungings of the Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; (huh?) as one who in that miserable plight still…
It used to be that you could choose any color shoes you wanted, so long as they were black and any color socks, so long as they were white. Easy times, those. Then Gianni gave me his White Ladies and all of a sudden my life was complicated. First of all, the shoes were so beautifully white in…
When it comes to hardmen, there aren’t many tougher than this guy. That he manages to mix massive amounts of V with similarly massive amounts of Casual Deliberation only serves to heighten the man-crushes of a bunch of older, fatter, balder men who see a visage of Spatacus looking back at us in the mirror every time…
Three days in, and it’s already been a brutal opening week of the Tour. I’ve never heard of the Tour neutralizing part of the stage unless a Schleck was involved, but I was relieved to understand that the reason for the neutralization had more to do with how many doctors were available for the second…