One of the persistent maxims of professional cycling is that once a rider wins the professional world title, his next season (while wearing the rainbow jersey) will be frought with calamity. Igor Astarloa is the reigning world champion and his season, while devoid of victories, has been remarkably consistent as he hones his form for the season long World Cup and northern Europe’s Spring Classics. Unfortunately, Astarloa dared to suggest that the curse was merely a myth…

March 24, 2004: Cyclingnews.com interview excerpt:
Cyclingnews.com: Another Spanish world champion, Oscar Freire of Rabobank, told me that some people think the rainbow jersey signals bad luck for the one who uses it. What do you think?
Astarloa: No, I don’t believe that. But I still haven’t won a race this season; I ended up second two times and both these times [Paolo] Bettini was first. But, well… I’m not superstitious. I think it was essential to win the world championship and from then on, who knows? But I don’t think it’s bad luck.

March 26, 2004: Cyclingnews.com
Astarloa Injured in Car Accident
World champion Igor Astarloa (Cofidis) has been injured in an automobile accident in Italy. Astarloa, who suffered head trauma but did not lose consciousness, was in the passenger seat when the car he was in was struck by another vehicle. He was released from the hospital in Brescia Wednesday night. Astarloa will miss this weekend’s Critérium International in France, but “if all goes well he’ll be able to do the Tour of Flanders on April 4,” said Cofidis manager Alain Bondue. Sixth in Milan-San Remo, Astarloa counts the World Cup series as one of his primary objectives this season.

Coincidence or curse? I wish Astarloa all the best for a speedy recovery. I’ve always been intrigued by professional cyclists who have iconoclastic tendencies regarding training philosophies, and after reading the Igor Astarloa feature interview in the March, 2004 Cycle Sport I must admit I have a new hero. From Cycle Sport:

“…the Basque is no fan of scientific preparation. He has never owned a heart rate monitor, for example, designs his own training program, and–in this he is different from most Italian riders–has no personal coach. ‘I never weigh myself, either,’ he adds. ‘And I don’t try and go to bed at the same time every night or anything like that’.

Bravo, Igor. While he is indeed a rare talent in the professional peloton, it is heartening to see that in the world of SRM wattage equipment and Armstrong-esque training programs that detail your riding down to the millisecond and your diet to the last calorie, a much more free-form, organic, holistic approach to professional cycling has reaped results.

Steve Tilford-Living Legend

I love perusing the full results of races to see what’s going on beyond merely who finishes on the podium. It’s interesting to note who’s ramping up their fitness and lurking under the radar, always in the front group but not duking it out at the finish, who’s in pitiful shape and struggling to make the time cut, and on the domestic scene it’s always fun to see how the few pros I know personally are doing throughout the season. While looking over the results of this year’s Redlands Classic in California, I couldn’t help but notice that Steve Tilford is still mixing it up with professionals young enough to be his son. At the age of 44 (or maybe 43, but he’ll be 44 some time in 2004) Tilford is poised to finish possibly in the top 25 on GC in this extremely brutal NRC stage race. He’s been a fixture on the US racing circuit for nearly 30 years and provides powerful evidence that athletes can perform at elite levels in endurance oriented sports at an age where conventional wisdom once dictated exceedingly diminished athletic performance. As long as the passion is there, and training remains consistent, national-class (if not world-class) performances are certainly achievable. I was in Baltimore, MD for the 2001 US Cyclocross Championships and personally witnessed a remarkable performance from Tilford. He skipped the masters 40-44 race to race with the big boys in the Elite race and finished an amazing 5th place. He got the hole-shot in the first turn, led a large portion of the 1st lap, and stayed at the front for the remainder of the hour-long race to finish on the podium.

While I’ve never had a smidgen of the success achieved by Tilford, I’ve noticed that at the age of 35 I’m still rather competitive in single day Pro/Am events. As I enter into my masters years I’ve noticed that my recovery is not quite what it used to be so multi-day events wear me down, but on any given day, if I’m fresh and reasonably fit, I can mix it up in the Pro/1/2 ranks. I’m actually riding less, much less, than when I was in my 20s, but I’m training smarter and resting more. I think it’s very cool to partake in a sport where age is not too much of a limiter; where passion and smart training can perpetuate athletic excellence well into your 40s and 50s.

I frequently forget that racing is a rather small subset of cycling’s breadth. If you happen to walk down the main quad at Duke there’s a bike very similar to this one locked up at a rack in front of the clocktower quad. I have no clue who owns it or how he/she built it, but it puts a smile on my face to see evidence of someone flying the hoopty (or in Chicago-ese, freakbike) flag on a campus which doesn’t necessarily openly embrace such iconoclastic endeavors. It seems that it’s been inert for some time and North Carolina’s recent spate of unusually harsh winter weather hasn’t been kind to the drivetrain. I feel compelled to do some impromptu community service and restore the rusty chain to a more rideable state.

RIP Marco…

I have a poster of Marco Pantani on the side of my refrigerator which serves as a daily reminder to my vacillating love/exasperation with the sport of professional cycling. Not long after Pantani was kicked out of the 1999 Giro d’Italia (due to an elevated hematocrit only one day from certain victory), I took artistic licence with Pantani’s likeness in outrage at the prevalence of EPO and god knows what else pro cyclists inject into themselves. I added an image of a gigantic syringe injecting Pantani’s outstretched arm. Now Marco Pantani is dead, younger than me at only 34 years old. My reflection upon his mercurial career and descent into the deepest throes of depression and loneliness leaves me troubled for I’m both angry at his denials of cheating, yet saddened that perhaps he was more of a pawn in an increasingly cutthroat profession.

I strongly suspect Pantani’s death on February 14, 2004 to be a suicide, although the exact cause may never be more than the coroner’s initial heart failure diagnosis. I hadn’t really even realized that he was absent from cycling this year. Pantani seemed to be on the comeback trail last year after his respectable showing in the Giro, but being snubbed by the Tour may have served as the last straw in his litany of public humiliations. I remember hearing that he checked himself into a clinic to treat his depression last summer, but I figured he’d be back.

I lost a great deal of respect for Pantani once he was tossed from the Giro in 1999. If he had confessed to using EPO and quietly took his punishment (in the example of Alex Zulle following the infamous 1998 Tour de France “Festina Affair”) then I could forgive him for succumbing to the immense pressure to achieve results, especially in his native Giro d’Italia. Instead he lashed out at the media and police and seemed to revel in his self-annointed martyrdom. For a while I stood amused at his increasingly erratic behavior and poor performances on the bike these past few years, but clearly he was permanently scarred by his ordeal.

It’s disturbing to think of Pantani’s untimely demise, the death of Jose Maria Jiminez in similar circumstances last December, and the mysterious deaths of young professionals due to heart failure which never seem to end. The same day that Pantani was found dead in his Italian hotel room, a young (21 years old?) Belgian professional was found dead having passed away while sleeping. I’m not a physician, and I believe that some of the deaths of 20-something year old professionals have been due to family histories of heart problems, but it seems that far too many young professional cyclists are dying in their sleep under mysterious circumstances. Will our sport take a hard look in the mirror and clean itself up, or will it implode and lose all credibility? I don’t know. I’m watching the unfolding THG scandal involving California’s Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCLO) and it’s ever widening net of big name professional athletes with rapt attention. The scandals involving cycling in Europe never receive media attention in the US, but maybe if some prominent athletes with household name recognition in this country are busted real progress can be attained in cleaning up professional sports.

I’ve got a direct pipeline to Beelzebub, and it’s channelled to me through bicycle and car odometers. It never fails that I’ll be out on a ride, cruising for hours without checking my trip distance, and I’ll scroll over to that screen and see the Number of the Beast : 666. I actually stopped using a bicycle computer that had the daily trip distance out to 2 decimal places because it dramatically increased my chances at seeing the dreaded 666 (6.66, 16.66, 26.66, etc.) instead of with my current computer with a single decimal place (66.6, 166.6, etc.). Not only that, I’ve got some eery link to what I’ve dubbed “half of Satan”, the mysterious 333. Same thing, look down at the odometer and there it is…

Maybe it’s got something to do with my long solo road trips to bike races all up and down the East coast where frequently my only entertainment was listening to fire and brimstone preachers. I always got a kick about hearing that “Satan walks amongst us, manifested in Dungeons and Dragons and Ouija boards…” I’d get so amped up that I’d start delivering my own rambling pontifications on Satan out loud in my car. For hours and hours on end. Damn, I wish I taped those road trips. I was raving about how cycling changed my life and can change yours too. “Hear me people…hear what I’ve got to say…Get your fat ass off thy couch…Turn the keys off in your car…Get on a bike and RIDE, RIDE, RIDE!…If Jesus came back to us today he won’t be in a Hummer…No sirree…He’s gonna be on a Litespeed with SPD sandals…Spreadin’ the word, pedalling all over the world…” I should start my own Illuminati of the Pious Peloton, get a pirate FM station in my basement, and start preaching to my flock. Reverend Billy can do it, so can I…

Do yourself a favor, head to your local cinema and see the brilliant animated feature Triplets of Belleville. Somebody, perhaps the director Sylvain Chomet, really knows his cycling: whether it’s the poster of Fausto Coppi on Champion’s wall, the Tour de France stars of the 1940s-1950s in wee Champion’s scrapbook, Madame Souza truing a wheel old school style with a tuning fork, Champion sitting on a scale to weigh his food intake, the vivid alpine scenes of an early 1960s Tour de France, the resignation of entering the broom wagon, or the most realistic depiction of a cyclist in motion you’ll ever see in an animated film, cycling has never been depicted in such a fluid and poetic manner other than the art house work of Danish director Jorgen Leth (and his films such as A Sunday in Hell, Stars and Watercarriers, The Impossible Hour are all actual race footage, not a work of animation). I’ve been enamored by Genndy Tartakovsky’s minimalist, stunningly creative Samurai Jack (on the Cartoon Network) and it’s refreshing to see Chomet contribute a work of art equally as inventive to the world of animation virtually all done in classic frame-by-frame, hand-drawn technique.

Last night I watched the film American Splendor and it vividly brought back memories of watching Harvey Pekar’s confrontations with David Letterman on late night television. I was in high school in the backwaters of upstate NY, with only 1 tv station at my disposal, and Pekar’s recurring guest spots made for eye-opening television moments: raw, angry eruptions of a man who felt fucked over by life. I’d never seen anything like it on network television and was amazed to witness Pekar as one of only 2 guests (the other being the comic/magician duo Penn & Teller) who could go toe to toe with David Letterman and make him uncomfortable. (Well, come to think of it there was also Charles Grodin’s amazing appearance on Johnny Carson where he ripped into Carson, but that’s another story.) I don’t even remember if I knew about his American Splendor comics, I was just intrigued and fascinated by this character who kept showing up on Letterman until he finally exploded on his 8th and final appearance. If I had access to Pekar’s comics then I probably would have bought them, but I don’t know if I would have appreciated them (also kind of like how I was confounded by Ben Katchor comics until one day it all clicked) until I, too, was out on my own scraping to pay the rent and pursuing passions dwelling on the fringe of societal norms. Pekar slogged away as a hospital file clerk in Cleveland, OH and spent his free time reading, shopping for rare LPs and 78s at yard sales, and reviewing jazz records. A chance encounter at a yard sale led to his friendship with R. Crumb and inspiration to put his life’s story in comic form. Pekar could only draw the crudest of stick figures, but he has genius when it comes to dialogue and the narrative portrayal of daily events. His work depends on collaboration with comic artists such as R. Crumb to bring his vision to fruition. One other point, wait ’til you see Pekar’s friend Toby. And listen to him expound about his favorite film. Wow.

I whole heartedly recommend carving out some time in you day (or night) and treating yourself to the tale of an American original. If you’ve got even more time to kill make it a double feature with the equally excellent documentary Crumb. While our world is becoming increasingly digital, fast paced, and homogenous, American Splendor is a refreshing reminder to revel in joyous endeavors that don’t involve computers: walking, reading books, losing oneself in LPs, drawing, and thinking, all to the beat of your own jazz drummer, man.

Do Harvey a favor, buy his books at your local indy bookstore.

I recently came across a collection of New Yorker covers with a cycling theme and it always makes me think of the races I’ve done at the crack of dawn in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. There’s nothing quite like riding your bike to the park literally as the Sun rises. The city’s calm, eerily quiet, and devoid of people or traffic. Time permitting, I’d head over to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade afterwards for some people watching and Brooklyn Bridge watching before taking a nap and enjoying a full day of NYC. Today, I was cooped up inside doing school work, out of the glorious sunshine, and this cover picture made me wish I was riding my bike to the Promenade to daydream.

I came across this organization last night while web surfing, and I do believe I’ve found my life’s calling. Hopefully, when I’ve received my library science master’s degree in 1 year’s time, I can find some kind of archival profession where I get to lord over and coddle torrents of ephemera. I’ve amassed a small collection of bicycle racing programs from late 19th/early 20th century 6-day races plus regular track races in the U.S. and Canada as well as an assortment of tobacco cards with racing cyclists from the same time period. Thanks to newspaper databases with full text searching (particularly the New York Times), I’ve also located race results from my great-great (?, never know how many greats are necessary) uncle John J. Gillen who was a professional cyclist in the late 1890s New York metropolitan area. I think there’s a book waiting to be written about cycling in this time period…Maybe one of these years I’ll gather my thoughts, visit Somerville, NJ’s Bicycling Hall of Fame and Bainbridge Island, WA’s Classic Cycle shop’s collection of Pop Brennan material, and put pen to paper.

If W. headed this advice the world would be a better place. And everyone would have really nice bikes, too.

I’m a member, how about you? Read all about professional cyclist Erik Saunders and his fan club. Professional cycling desperately needs characters like Erik…

January Nationals

Harkey won. I survived in the lead group. 53 miles of pain and suffering in Chatham County. Damn that hurt. If there was a prize for highest finishing place with the least amount of training I can’t imagine anyone even coming close to me. I think I’ve ridden my bike about 250 miles in the past 4 months. Most of my fellow January Nationals competitors probably rode that much in the past week alone.

It boggles my mind how much phlegm and mucus exited my body in the 2+ hours of “racing” (remember, this is only a coincidental gathering of 70 cyclists out for a brisk ride with a nominal cash payout at the finish…) At first I tried to consciously make sure my expectorations were carefully aimed to avoid myself and those nearby, but after about an hour I was getting so fried that the gooey mess just shot out without any real regard for it’s final target. I was not a pretty sight at the finish line.

I wish people would learn how to go around corners without using their brakes. Hello, it greatly reduces the acceleration you need to stay on the wheel in front of you! I think people were somehow freaked out by seeing snow on the side of the road and thought that it would surreptitiously migrate into the road and take them out, even though repeated laps of the course should have confirmed that the roads were indeed dry and ice-free.

Muscle memory and experience got me through, but there’s nothing like actually doing some training to make races easier. Imagine that…

Surprisingly, UNC’s Davis Library has a fairly impressive collection of cycling books. While I should have been immersed in my Spring semester’s library school readings, I instead read several of these fine books in rapid succession. Here’s my first review:

Put Me Back On My Bike: In Search of Tom Simpson. William Fotheringham. London: Yellow Jersey, 2002.
Tragically, Briton Tom Simpson is best known for being one of only three cyclists in Tour de France history to die while competing and the only competitor to die without being involved in a high-speed accident. Tom Simpson expired near the summit of Mt. Ventoux on July 13, 1967 due to heart failure induced by the lethal combination of dehydration, exhaustion, sweltering heat, amphetamines and alcohol. His shocking death brought the insidious specter of drug use in the professional peloton front and center, and sadly, to this day, drug use is still an issue in professional cycling. The title of the book is supposedly Simpson’s last words to his mechanic who ran to Tom’s aid after he collapsed on Mt. Ventoux.

Professional cycling had always been a sport dominated by continental Europeans. Tom Simpson, from 1959 to 1967, was one of the early English-speaking pioneers to compete on the continent and to this date his palmares have yet to be equalled by any UK professional: victories in the World Championships, the Tour of Lombardy, the Tour of Flanders, Bourdeaux-Paris, Milan-San Remo, the Tour du Sud, and Paris-Nice, the first English-speaker to wear the maillot jaune in the Tour de France, podium finishes in Paris-Tours, Paris-Brussels, Ghent-Wevelgem, Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne, Baracchi Cup, Fleche-Wallonne, G.P. du Midi Libre, plus a top 10 finish in the Tour de France still stand as the benchmark for any English-speaking professional to emulate.

Tom Simpson was in many ways a man ahead of his time regarding diet, team structure, financial investments, and technical innnovations. Simpson was obsessed with his weight and he maintained a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and lean meat. Perhaps his greatest dietary staple was a daily dose (1 liter) of fresh carrot juice. Incredibly, this required his wife to peel and juice 10 pounds of carrots everyday. Simpson had a revolutionary approach to financing a professional cycling team which never got off the ground in his day (due to his untimely death), but is now the model for the successful Basque squad Euskaltel-Euskadi. His idea was to sell subscriptions to the public to foster a sense of regional/national pride. Also, not satisfied with the Brooks leather saddle which was really a rider’s only choice for a seat, Simpson designed his own saddle which is the model for contemporary racing saddles: a plastic shell, thin layer of foam padding, and a thin leather covering stitched to the shell.

Of course, no summation of Tom Simpson’s career and life would be complete without commenting on the tragic ignorance on the part of pro cyclists regarding drug and alcohol use plus the dangerous practice on the part of race promoters regarding the limited amount of fluids allowed to riders during races in stifling heat. Amazingly, on hot days racers would actually stop in bars along the route and steal water to drink since the race caravan provided no neutral water to the riders and prohibited handups from team vehicles. Also, there was a belief that small amounts of alcohol were beneficial in the heat. On the day Simpson died he was severely dehydrated, had consumed brandy at the base of Mt. Ventoux, and popped some amphetamines for an added boost sealing his fate. Simpson’s defenders, his wife and some former teammates, claim that it was the race doctor’s fault that Simpson died due to medical incompetence. Sadly, they seem to be in denial about the drugs in his system. Their prevailing belief is that since Tom Simpson had used drugs before and hadn’t died that he knew what he was doing. Ergo, the amphetamines in his system couldn’t have been the cause of death. Simpson was a pretty bright fellow, but he had no medical or pharmaceutical training and therefore was in no position to properly self-prescribe performance enhancing drugs.

Fotheringham truly admires Simpson and his book meticulously documents Simpson’s professional career and family life without sugar-coating his tragic death. Drawing from the journalism of Simpson’s era plus recent interviews with Simpson’s wife, former teammates, mechanics, soigneurs, and professional cycling peers, it was interesting to note the raw emotions and sense of loss still vivid and unresolved after 37 years. I’m a student of cycling history and was duly impressed by Fotheringham’s masterful job of situating Simpson within the larger milieu of 1960s professional cycling, a period characterized by the domination of Jacques Anquetil (whose dandyism inspired Simpson) and the dawn of Eddy Merckx. Simpson was a phenomenally gifted athlete; driven, focussed, and professional. Unfortunately, while undoubtedly not the only champion of his era to dope, the extreme pressure to succeed coupled with the financial uncertainty of the professional athlete in the 1960s forced Simpson to utilize any means to win. The monument to Tom Simpson near the site of his death on Mt. Ventoux should be a warning to the pros who still race past this hallowed ground, yet 37 years later the pressure to win and feelings of invulnerability still claim young lives. What a waste.

One last tidbit which I found fascinating: the only professional cyclist to attend Simpson’s funeral was his young teammate, the immortal Eddy Merckx.

The past couple of weeks I’ve actually made a conscious effort to get back on my bike after letting it lie out to fallow ensconced in cobwebs during my first semester of grad school.

Have I just forgotten how pervasive traffic is even in the rural areas surrounding Durham/Chapel Hill, or are we totally overrun with the vehicular menace? I thought, “Hey, it’s a weekday and the afternoon. The roads will be all mine!” Wrong! Even at 2pm up near Butner or Hillsborough on back roads the traffic kept coming. And coming. I was trying to have a conversation with our new tenant/fellow Cooperstown transplant/younger doppelganger Ben and it was hard to actually ride side by side without getting buzzed by cars. What are all these people doing in the middle of a weekday afternoon driving around in the middle of nowhere? I guess I’ve always had this odd notion that the roads were like school hallways. When everyone’s in class, the halls are deserted. Therefore if everyone’s at work, the roads should be deserted. Oh well, so much for that idea…