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Get On, Clip In, Fall OffRandom bletherings of a dilletante cyclist. |
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Get On, Clip In, Fall OffRandom bletherings of a dilletante cyclist. |
I guess that most readers (both of you) won't need to be told that since I last got around to posting an update here, there have been a bunch of people expelled from the Tour. T-Mobile's Patrik Sinkewitz was the first to go after producing a positive test for testosterone in an out-of-competition test a month before the Tour began.
Then possibly the biggest shock - pre-race favourite Alexander Vinokourov produced a positive A-sample for homologous blood doping (i.e. transfusion of blood from someone else) after his time trial victory, and was slung out of the race so hard that his entire Astana team went home as well. Then the storm clouds which had been building around Michael Rasmussen ever since it was announced that he'd missed 4 out of competition tests in the last year finally burst when Rabobank withdrew him from the race, maillot jaune or not, and sacked him for having allegedly lied about his whereabouts in the week leading up to the tour.
Along with all that, a positive for testosterone from Cofidis' Cristian Moreni was almost an anticlimax, even if it did result in, yes, the whole of Cofidis booking an early flight home.
As I write this, various blogs (and Politiken, a Danish newspaper) are reporting rumours that one of the jersey holders produced a positive for something after Stage 14, but we'll have to see if that one turns out to be true. As L'Équipe doesn't seem to have anything on it, I'll remain sceptical until tomorrow.
Naturally, it's sad when this happens. It is, however, a good thing that cheats are being caught (although let's not forget that all the above are pending B-sample analyses which may still vindicate them). It's a sign that finally, the anti-doping systems are more or less starting to work. They're by no means perfect, but still, people are being caught. All of the other hundreds of tests carried out before and during this Tour have so far turned out negative, meaning that of the 189 riders who rolled down the start ramp in London, 186 haven't tested positive for banned substances. I'm including Rasmussen in that number as it's fair to do so - he hasn't, indeed, tested positive for anything, and that's important to remember.
The mainstream press has, naturally, reacted predictably (the usual 'Tour de Farce' headlines, calls for cycle racing to be banned, etc, etc). The cycling press is full of readers letters about how "I've followed cycling for 30 years, but this is the end". Dick Pound (now there's a name to conjure with) of WADA has helpfully offered to host an "anti-doping summit" to address the "crisis" of doping in cycling, after dissing cycling at every possible opportunity for the last couple of years. Everyone who has an axe to grind is grinding like crazy in the hope of getting themselves in the papers, even including Greg LeMond, who seems to be trying to set himself up as a representative of a semi-fictional era of cycling when all was lovely and there weren't dopers round every corner. Even Germany's two main public TV channels, ARD and ZDF, have got in on the act by self-righteously dropping coverage of the Tour.
What a load of bullshit. Hypocritical, self-serving bullshit. I tried to find a more elegant and poetic word to use here, but no - bullshit it'll have to be.
Why is it bullshit? Well, it's getting late and there's a lot of typing involved. I'll tell you tomorrow.
The still-dragging-on Floyd Landis case and the fact that cyclists are continuing to note chain of custody and test protocol issues today makes me sad. Patrik Sinkewitz's recent positive test for testosterone came from a session where a number of riders noted concerns about protocol and chain of custody issues on their control forms. Add to that the numerous lamentable holes in laboratory technique that arose during the Landis arbitration hearing, and it's clear that way too many doping tests and their associated analyses are being carried out using shoddy techniques. Even worse, most anti-doping agencies refuse to acknowledge this, preferring to repeatedly claim that their tests are bulletproof when it's clear that when they're being carried out in such a shoddy manner, they're not.
As an obsessive nerd, this offends me. If the lab work is shoddy or the testing protocols are dodgy then the science is bad and the evidence is bad too. Of course people who dope and cheat deserve to be caught and dealt with severely (and in all sports too, not just in cycling), but such terrible evidence handling would never stand up either to scientific scrutiny as a piece of research or in a court of law as evidence. The anti-doping agencies too often prefer to simply rely on their word being stronger than that of an athlete to get a conviction, and that's neither fair nor valid.
As with anyone accused of anything, suspected dopers deserve due process, and right now it seems they're not getting it. Due process is replaced with trial by media as test results are almost routinely leaked even before athletes and their teams have been told (Sinkewitz's result was faxed to the news agencies, for heavens' sake). This runs the risk of ruining peoples' careers and stripping them of their livelihoods and reputations just so an anti-doping agency can hold smug press conferences about catching cheats - never mind if they can be called guilty with near-100% certainty or not.
This shouldn't be rocket science. It should be possible to carry out doping controls accurately, scientifically and fairly. I'd like to present Mike's List of rules for drug testing protocols in sports which should help restore the confidence of athletes and fans alike in the ability of testing regimes to accurately catch cheats with as little suspicion as possible of false positives. Just as you don't want the innocent to be wrongly punished, you don't want the guilty to have a question mark left hanging over the validity of their test results.
There. Of course, they stand no chance of being enacted as this is only a random bloke's blog after all, but it makes me feel better.
So the Tour has finally hit the mountains in a big way. Fabian Cancellara surrendered the yellow jersey with good grace after holding on to it for a few days more than CSC had really planned to defend it for anyway. He surrendered it to a bewildered-looking young thing from T-Mobile, Linus Gerdemann, who was so taken aback at taking yellow in his first Tour that the next day he felt obliged to wear the yellow shorts and the yellow helmet as well just in case he forgot. This is just as well, as T-Mobile aren't going to need them this year after their leader Michael Rogers crashed out of the Tour after hitting a barrier on a descent that day. He kept riding for a while before giving up, and was found to have a dislocated shoulder. Personally, I don't think I could even stand up if I had a dislocated shoulder, let alone ride a bike. The same day, Robbie McEwen failed to pay attention to the time, finished outside the time limit and got eliminated from the Tour along with Danilo Napolitano, something which must be making Tommeke Boonen happier about his prospects for holding on to the green jersey.
Unfortunately for the long-suffering T-Mobile, Mark Cavendish climbed off the same day (not unexpectedly), then Patrik Sinkewitz hit a spectator on the ride down from the finish to the team hotel and had to abandon too. Then today, Marcus Burghardt hit an unattended labrador. He was okay and the dog was okay (there was a team car behind with a rack of spare labradors anyway, and a Mavic bike with a few yellow neutral service poodles) but his front wheel was trashed. He still finished the stage, but you've got to feel sorry for T-Mobile right now. This isn't their Tour...
In yellow now, however, is frighteningly-gaunt Dane Michael "The Chicken" Rasmussen, who stormed over the cols so hard on Sunday that he took not only the fetching polka-dot climbing jersey but the yellow jersey too. It'd be nice if he was able to defend it for a while, but the overall win may be a bit of a problem because he finds it hard to time-trial without falling off. We'll see. One thing for sure, though - the Rasmussen Group Of Pain on Sunday looked like somewhere team directors send riders for punishment if they've been very naughty and refused to apologise. He shelled out the rest of his group and just rode away at a speed alarmingly close to what I can do on the flat, leaving the pursuers weeping in his wake and radioing back to the team car to say they were very very sorry for being bad and can they come back to the peloton now, please?
As for me, the 'cycling bounce' which was hoped for in London in the aftermath of the Tour's visit has so far resulted solely in someone trying to push me off my bike today at the lethally-dangerous Albert Gate exit from Hyde Park, presumably to see if I bounced.
Now I've finally started riding my bike enough that it might hopefully be making me a bit better at riding bikes, I thought I'd try something a little different to my normal circular routes this evening. Yes, it was time trial time, but only in a vague sense of the word. For starters, I only decided to actually care about my time about 8km in, which is the kind of thing I don't think ace time-triallists do.
The idea was fairly basic - ride out for 20 minutes, then turn round and ride back again, seeing how close my inbound time was to my outbound and how far I'd got at the turnaround point. This seems like a fairly good measure of overall fitness. Not wanting to waste any more time I started working a lot harder, and 20 minutes out from home I reached the turnround point after having covered just over 10km. The journey back took eight seconds longer - 20:08 - and had some stiffer uphill digs than the outbound, so in general not too bad.
Then I looked at the numbers. My average speed over the whole ride was 30.1kph, which isn't too bad when compared with, um, grannies on shopper bikes. Fabian Cancellara's ride in last Saturday's Tour prologue was at an average of 53.74kph (although to be fair, that was a much shorter and pan-flat course with not much wind), which means that my performance today can be measured as 560 milliFabians. Maybe one day I'll break 600.
I only just noticed today how appropriate it is that way too many of the adverts on Eurosport during the Tour de France are for ambulance-chasing claims firms. You know the kind of thing - "I was walking into my office and slipped on a wet floor with no warning signs. I had to go to hospital and was in great pain."
Maybe they're looking for some business from the professional cycling world. I could script some new adverts for them if they like -
"I was riding along at the back of the peloton and a spectator suddenly stood out in front of me on a piece of road which hadn't been barriered. I came off my bike, gouged my knee badly and lost my sunglasses. Accident Claims R Us helped me get back on the bike, and I got £5000 from the local council. - Mark C., T-Mobile"
"I was collecting musettes in the feed zone, and a bag got tangled in my spokes and made me crash heavily. The bag didn't carry any warnings about the possibility of this happening. I suffered severe grazing and blood loss, finished 44 minutes behind the leaders, needed hospital treatment and had to exit the Tour de France. Accident Claims R Us helped me, and I was able to get £12000 from my directeur sportif for the distress and pain this caused. -Geoffroy L., Cofidis"
"My chain slipped with no advance warning and made me lose my balance, causing me to crash. I had to wear out my entire team getting back to the back of the pack, spent hours in hospital, and started the next day's stage looking very silly with both knees heavily stitched and bandaged. The pain was tremendous, but worse, the honour of Kazakhstan was damaged and I may now not be able to win the Tour de France. Accident Claims R Us were happy to help me, and I got £8000 from Campagnolo for the distress this has caused me and the Kazakh people. -Alexander V., Astana"
Avoiding all the usual "wow, the start was in London" stuff that would be expected here (and well, it was a weekend of great cheer for the capital and for Kent) the Tour has been pretty spectacular so far this year. Much of this spectacular has been down to Fabian Cancellara, whose demolition of the competition in the Prologue was only the beginning - he and CSC have worked hard to defend the yellow jersey over this first week. It's by no means standard for the winner of the Prologue to hold onto yellow for more than a couple of days, and to see the race leader attacking and taking stages for no reason other than, well, wanting to is great. It's dull, dull, dull (sorry, Lance) when taking and holding the race lead is seen simply as an exercise in mathematics.
The sprinters have put on a good show too - Robbie McEwen coming back from a nasty crash 20km before the end of a stage, getting back onto the back of the peloton and then working his way through to surprise Boonen and Hushovd with a mighty sprint out of nowhere was an awesome thing to watch, and I'm sure the people of Ghent were happy to see a Belgian one-two at the finish there after Tom Boonen... well, either let leadout man Gert Steegmans win or didn't. Nobody's telling for sure. Boonen got to break out his green shorts as a result anyway, although he's now had to give them up (possibly temporarily) to Erik Zabel, who seems to have been taking sprint points since roughly the time of Jacques Anquetil.
The British riders have distinguished themselves, too - David Millar made up for his disappointing form in the Prologue by going on a suicidal break on stage 1 and ending up in the polka-dot jersey for a few days for his troubles, and as I write this Brad Wiggins is 18 minutes off the front of the bunch on a solo breakaway. It's most likely a doomed breakaway, but if the peloton doesn't fancy pursuing him then you never know - tomorrow's the first serious climber's day with the Col de Colombiere near the end, so people will be looking to save their legs. Poor Mark Cavendish hasn't had the best of times, though, not least having had a contretemps with a spectator in Kent which led to a bike change, then the next day getting caught up in another crash near the finish.
Hero of the Tour for me so far, though, has to be Cofidis' Geoffroy Lequatre. Why? I mean, he turned pro in 2004 and hasn't got a single professional victory to his name yet, and rides as a humble domestique. Yeah, but then again, this is a guy who crashed heavily in the feed zone yesterday after his wheel had an argument with a musette, scraped himself raw and was assumed to have abandoned. But no, 44 minutes after the leaders he struggled bleeding across the line while everyone else was packing up and going home. Nobody would have faulted him for abandoning on the spot, but he still made it to the finish, just because.
This was of course well outside the time limit and by rights he should have been eliminated, but the commissaires decided to allow him to start today for 'combativité extraordinaire'. He spent the night in the hospital being cleaned up and stitched and eventually didn't start today after all, but this gesture allowed him a much more dignified exit from the Tour than being simply slung out for being outside the cutoff time. Huge respect to the man, especially in a sporting world where footballers will writhe around on the floor and have to be stretchered off whenever they sustain a slight cut to the knee.
Will Boonen regain the green jersey and hold on to it this time? With Kloden and Vinokourov both suffering from injuries, who will grab yellow from Cancellara? Will Michael Rasmussen use his mysterious alien powers to levitate up the mountains again? Will Eurosport ever start their goddamn cycling coverage on time? Will David Duffield choose a combination of shirt and jacket one day which clash so excitingly that my television actually explodes? Stay tuned for the next two weeks to find out..
An envelope arrived today with my race number for the Cabbage Patch 10, which is the weekend after next, and it should be, well, interesting as I haven't actually run very much if at all recently. I just hope the cardiovascular fitness the cycling I've been doing has helped to maintain will get me round, but I'm not exactly likely to post a hugely impressive time. We'll see. I'm going to pretend I never entered the Dublin Marathon, though - that's at the end of this month and there's no way I'll be in any kind of running form for it.
Other than that, it's cycling at the moment. Commuting into work by bike most days is proving fun, although it's fairly frustrating when you're wearing Lycra (makes sense as I have to change when I get in anyway) and riding a road bike to keep getting caught at traffic lights and in traffic. The more devil-may-care cyclists around me will happily jump the lights and zip through gaps between two buses that leave only a few inches on each side, but I personally have a strange desire to keep living, and tend to be very defensive. I'm possibly a little too careful sometimes, but given that paranoia is a virtue when cycling around central London that's fine by me.
Longer distance rides are a problem as living in inner London means that to get anywhere involves riding out of London first, taking the train or fitting the bike rack to the car, but I've recently discovered that Shooters Hill Road (which a long time ago was the A2, the Dover Road) seems quite promising - there are a couple of sharp climbs (as the name suggests) but once there the road seems to point quite nicely towards Canterbury and Dover. I might try just keeping going along there for a day sometime and see how far I get. Most of the traffic takes the M2 these days, so it should be reasonably tolerable from the traffic point of view.
Of course, we shall see how this resolve sticks as the nights draw in, the days get colder and I find that staying indoors in the warm is a much more pleasant prospect. I might just have to do more running, which is something I'm happy doing in all temperatures.
I think I'm getting used to being a cycle commuter in London. The rules are really quite simple - trust nobody, assume everyone in a car is going to be a psychopath and every pedestrian is going to run out in front of you, and obey traffic laws. I know the latter is controversial, but I have no choice but to utterly reject a lot of the bleating from various cycling pressure groups in London until I can be convinced that most of the cyclists who get injured or killed in London are actually obeying the law at the time. I see too many cyclists jumping red lights straight out into intersections and generally behaving suicidally to think otherwise. The first thing you should do if you want to be treated seriously as a road user is behave like other road users are expected to and as the law requires rather than somehow considering yourself a special case to whom those funny coloured lights have no relevance.
Sorry, bit of a rant there. I know that drivers regularly cut you up, or park in bike lanes, or occupy the bike boxes at traffic lights (and take note, motorcyclists, that's a picture of a pushbike in that box, not a motorbike). That's no excuse for cyclists not to set a good example, though, and until that starts happening I prefer to distance myself from the cycle lobby somewhat. There are sane cycling organisations out there - kudos, for instance, to the CTC for doing sensible things like defending the guy who got fined for cycling on the road. But I digress.
I may complain about light-jumpers, but there's one really big pleasure in bike commuting, and that's reeling in and overtaking them after the lights change. A lot of the time this happens quite quickly as they're wobbling along at a fairly constant pace, but speed demons can be a bit more tricky. After a couple of months of regular cycling I'm able to cheerfully pass people on bikes more expensive than mine quite often now, which always produces a warm, fuzzy feeling. And that's with a heavy rack and a pannier on the back carrying my work stuff, which adds a few kilos to the weight of the bike - I should work on ways of reducing the weight I have to carry in order to make my commute more pleasant.
The other activity nobody should miss is riding through London in the dead of night. In the small hours there's virtually no traffic and very few people around, so you basically have the capital's wide roads to yourself. Great fun, and makes for some rather speedy journey times. However, this also brings home just how terrible a state some roads are in - I recommend avoiding, for instance, Oxford Street as it's more potholey than I thought was possible for a non third-world country. This is easily countered by stretches of clear, wide road like the Victoria Embankment late at night and the Mall at, well, most times of the day - there's a reason the Tour of Britain's finishing sprint was held on the latter. I can recommend hitting the drops and stamping on the pedals in a nice high gear for this one, but you have to keep your fingers crossed that you won't get stopped at the pedestrian crossings or other lights en route. If you do, just look casual and pretend you're doing intervals.
Cycling. Punctures. Two things which often go hand in hand, especially if you insist on riding around places like London where it seems that the streets aren't paved with gold (very slippery, bad for traction anyway) but fragments of broken glass and grit. My bike came supplied with 28mm Bontrager Race Lite Hardcase tyres, designed to withstand the rigours of life, with Kevlar anti-puncture belts. Well, after a few days of commuting I got a rip in one of them which meant that I had a nice surprise when I got back to my bike after a day in the office. So much for them - their puncture protection was about as useful as homeopathic insect repellant during the Scottish midge season. The tyre wouldn't have lasted long even if repaired, so I called in the heavy mob in the shape of a pair of two Specialized All Condition Armadillo monsters.
Armadillo tyres are basically considered to have the best puncture protection in the business, and they're what people always recommend when you're not desperately worried about weight but find fixing punctures a bit of a bore. They have nice red sidewalls, and were fine until I noticed the regular scraping from the back indicative of the wheel rubbing on something. I took a look and found a big bulge over the tyre, and seeing as I'd forgotten the lessons I learned as a kid assumed that this must be to do with overinflation and let a bit of air out. The bulge went away. I let some air out of the front tyre too, just in case.
A couple of days later, I'm turning off Camberwell New Road and "pssshhh" - down goes the front tyre, in a matter of seconds. "Huh?", I think. "These Armadillos suck!". I found a little hole in the tyre wall right down almost at the bead, fixed the inner and rode home carefully before the hole grew too much. Another tyre written off, because, well, I just don't trust damaged tyres. The back tyre turned out to be at about 40-50psi (recommended - 70-100), so I think I may have been a little overzealous with letting air out when I thought they were overinflated.
Of course, they weren't overinflated. I'd just forgotten a basic lesson of my youth - when you fit a new tyre, push the valve into the tyre and pull it back out again so the rubber seal around the valve is inside the tyre, not between the bead and the rim. That's what had caused the bulge in the rear tyre. I'm undecided as to whether the front puncture was due to underinflation or due to what looked like the brakes rubbing very slightly on the tyre sidewall and weakening it (the 100km Audax ride I did a weekend or two ago had some very brake-heavy descents on it, so they'd have certainly heated up a lot).
This time the shop only had 25mm Armadillos, so we've got a spare slightly used 28mm and I have two new tyres yet again. Let's see how long it takes before the next "pssshhh" - in the meantime, I'm re-learning important things I need to know about how to maintain bikes competently.
I got a bike for the first time in some years a few months ago, after Tara decided she was bored of riding her bike around by herself and bought me one as a Christmas/birthday present (oh, twist my arm, do). It's a road bike - a Trek Pilot 1.2. It's red, and I like it a lot. After several months in which the poor thing looked neglected and ignored while I started a new job and dealt with all the accompanying excitement I finally started riding it more a few weeks ago, and it seems to be catching.
Apart from all the usual joys of cycle ownership (buying Lycra bib shorts and falling off in amusing ways while getting used to clipless pedals) I've now started commuting to work by bike most days. It's more pleasant than the Tube (not least because the tube station's a 10-minute walk away, by which time I'd be a third of the way to work by bike) but, more interestingly, it's a lot less difficult than I thought it would be.
London does not really have a reputation as a cycling city, but with a few street smarts it's really not all that difficult. The main thing to remember is that traffic in London, by and large, moves slowly, so especially during peak commuting hours you'll probably be faster than most of the cars anyway. Keep your wits about you and pay attention to what's going on and you'll be fine.
The other thing to remember is that Transport for London and Sustrans' idea of what constitutes cycle routes should be taken with a major pinch of salt. For instance, there's a lovely-looking nice straight bike route right through the middle of Wimbledon Common marked on TfL's cycling maps, which in reality is... gravel. Fine if you're on a mountain bike with knobbly tyres, but not so fine if you're on a road bike with 28mm slicks - and 28mm is actually pretty wide for a road bike. I had to get off and walk after a while, which now I come to think of it seems to be the sole purpose of many councils' cycling initiatives.
While I'm definitely happy with my road bike, the standard riding position (forward on the hoods) isn't all that optimal for commuting, especially for things like cornering on city streets and looking behind me. I'm thinking that I might get a straight-bar urban hybrid with a more upright position for commuting and bumbling around town. The justification for the expenditure here is, of course, "Well, it's money I won't be spending on Travelcards."
Anyway, if you see me around town give me a wave. Should be fairly easy to spot - I'm the one with the helmet and without the iPod who stops at red traffic lights.
More on this subject later. There are rantings and ravings galore to be had on this subject.