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,…
For anyone who has just witnessed the Tour de France, the single most amazing point is, these guys are super-human freaks of nature. A few thousand kilometers, untold meters gained climbing, all at an average speed us mortals could not do for an hour, on the flat. Six days after Paris and there are only…
[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…
Damn. Was I not just raving about this a year ago? Why start a major women’s race in Italy when the TDF is firing up right over there in France or the Netherlands? Actually it was more like 363 days ago as we are late as hell getting to the Giro Rosa VSP. You see, another…
Cobblestones make the race, I’m not ruining any fantasies telling you that. Wet cobblestones, well, those make a legend. Nibbles rose in my esteem considerably when he rode the wet cobbles as well as he rides any mountain descent or climb; that is a boy with some nerves and some mad bike handling skills. Wet…
The conundrum for the Cyclist (but not the bike rider) presents itself daily. We try to keep ourselves safe every time we get on our bikes, and we want to achieve a balance between form and function. Sometimes function wins, though mostly it’s form with the upper hand. A YJA isn’t going to protect you…
The Tour de France is France’s race. Actually, that isn’t quite fair. The Tour de France is France’s Olympics, World Cup, and National Identity all wrapped up into one big sweaty peloton of hopefuls. My first trip to France to watch the Tour in 2003 (I’d ridden there many, many times before, but never to…
My bike weighs about 6 kilos. It is no waify little thing either, with it having a 61cm frame and and three stories of seatpost. It has beefy tubes, a stiff bottom bracket and steerer, and deep section wheels which are laced 3x in the back and 2x in front. This bike has never made me go faster;…
If Gatorade had any marketing sense whatsoever, they would have plastered photos of this pair all over every billboard in Europe.
I pump my tires up every single day, and every day it is the only part of Cycling I don’t like. The act of pumping while holding the pump in place is itself a bit of a bummer, especially if you are trying to do it in your Cycling shoes because your brain is too small to…
We are bipedal creatures. Fact. Bipedal locomotion sucks. Also a fact. This makes being a human somewhat challenging in the sense that we don’t have opposable toes or a tail with which to swing from tree limbs. Swinging from your tail seems a little bit like bliss, if you ignore the associated demotion back into the Food Chain….
Words of advice for the lads: If your girlfriend is a very good cyclist and you two are going to get engaged, a nice racing bike is not a substitute for a ring. I tried it. In my cyclo-centric male brain, she needed a proper racing bike a lot more than she needed a ring….