The Archives

Bruyneel’s Bad Year

For most directors, winning Le Tour for the billionth time would make for a successful season, but not for Johan Bruyneel.  It turns out that dealing with the Kazakhi backers of Team Astana really put a stinker on his season.  Add that stress to the considerable logistics involved in buying off testing laboratories and bribing…

Bikeography

I’ve reflected on my bike stable, where it started and where it is now. Peugeot PX10-LE. 1977. A champagne gold hunk of French madness. It was advertised as Monsieur Thevenet’s current racing model but I doubt he got this. The frame was nothing out of the ordinary but copper wire wrapping at the spoke crossings,…

VDB: 1974-2009

Every now and then, I see a headline that I know won’t soon drift from my memory.  Frank Vandenbroucke was found dead today in his hotel room; he had apparently died of  a blood clot.  The death reminds me of a similar headline in 2004, of the death of Marco Pantani. Both capable of incredible…

Expect The Unexpected

Unless you spend a lot of time with the Dutch, you probably don’t realize how awesome we are. We can pretty much walk into any situation and immediately understand the landscape and explain to all the non-Dutch in the room precisely why they are inferior.   For the mathematically-minded, let me put it in equation form:…

TT Toledo

Coming to you live from stage 20 of the Vuelta, and reporting whilst still marginally sober. Racers are coming in fast on the 30+ min time trial, with several overlapping at the finish. We’re parked at a beer garden along the last little stretch, having run the last 10 km of the course earlier this…

On Location: Performance

I posted SpandX’s excellent and funny cycling-centric music video for “Performance” here the other day.  Watching it again recently, I noticed the that the character riding the fixie, whose name I assume is Fred, is doing a trackstand in front of popular Portland coffee roaster, Stumptown, as you can see in the shot below: That…