Check out the Stage 8 medical report released by the Tour de France:

Stuart O’Grady…Wow, that’s some serious damage.
Patrick Sinkewitz…nailed a spectator after the stage while descending the Montee de Tignes on his way to the hotel. Just a bad day all around for T-Mobile.
David Millar…WTF? Is Millar a vampire? That certainly sheds a different light (no pun intended) on his prior blood-doping escapades. Maybe that’s why Zabriskie has been known to eat so much garlic.

2007 Tour de France musings…

1. Time to bust out the good stuff. You’ve won Milan-San Remo in grand style, you’ve schooled Boonen in Belgium at Het Volk, you’re Italian, and you’ve a magnificent head of hair. It’s time to lay down the law and write your own ticket, equipment-wise. Filippo Pozzato has a clause in his contract which allows him to rock the Lightweights any time he damn well feels, and Pozzato exercised his option to full effect at this year’s Tour de France stage 5.

Curiously, Linus Gerdemann’s ascent to yellow also seems to be fueled by Lightweights. But I guess T-Mobile doesn’t have carte-blanche to let everyone know who built those wheels, hence the “T-Mobile Team” stickers.

2. Ca-’stache-trophe. So Enrico Degano had a pretty spectacular yard sale during a stage 6 feed zone. He’s obviously dazed, confused, and just sitting in the street wondering what the hell happened. Toss in some curious spectators, the Barloworld team car, and a TdF television crew and it’s all business as usual. And then this freak rolls up on the back of a moto to snap some photos. If I happened to be Enrico Degano and looked up to see the world’s scariest moustache, I’d wonder just how hard I hit my head on the tarmac…

Neurologist: So let me get this straight…you saw Yosemite Sam taking pictures of you when you crashed in the feed zone today?
Enrico Degano: Damn straight, doc. He hopped off a motorcycle and snapped away.
Neurologist: (To team director) Yeah, he’s gonna stay here tonight for observation. Highly incredulous behavior indicative of significant cranial trauma.

3. John Gadret

Or should I say, “Me ‘n’ T.G.”, because Ag2r’s John Gadret will surely win this year’s TdF Tail Gunner extraordinaire award hands down. Every time the production crew opts for its arrière de la course view, there’d inevitably be some Agritubel guys milling about on the verge of getting popped and #66, John Gadret, just riding the wave. At first I thought he was either heading back to the cars for water or on the verge of moving up through the peloton to give team leader Christophe Moreau some needed sustinence. But no…no extra bottles here. Just Gadret firmly afixed at the tail end always expending just enough energy to roll in with the GC contenders group. Perhaps he’s still skittish from memories of his previous Grand Tour experience, the 2006 Giro, where he broke his collarbone. It may be a classic case of survival during the TdF’s first week roller derby, much like my local Saturday morning world championship group ride. If I’m not steadfastly determined to expend the energy necessary for staying in the first 5, then it’s DFL for me out of harm’s way.

Fast forward to stage 7’s Col de la Colombière climb, and Gadret’s tail-gunning exploits faced a rather rude interruption. He almost rolled over the summit with all the GC contenders in the elite group of about 40, but the wee one got popped about 1km from the top and there’s just no way that somebody weighing about 128 lbs. is going to make up the difference on a blazing 12km descent to the finish. And adding insult to injury, on Bastille Day no less, Phil Liggett mistakenly called John Gadret Belgian as he limped across the finish line in Le Grand-Bornand. No worries, though. John Gadret is merely getting a jump on his ‘cross season by subjecting himself to the world’s most excruciating training block known to man. Be very afraid come October.

4. The cryptic title of this post. Just take a look at this installment of Neal Rogers’ daily dose of Dave Zabriskie. Things get decidedly surreal about half-way through when Zabriskie starts waxing eloquent about Russian mullets. I can’t tell if Zabriskie drew the short straw and is obligated to talk with Rogers each day per CSC orders or if he’s there of his own volition. What I do know is that nobody…nobody…in the TdF utilizes his time with the media quite like Dave Zabriskie. He has long since become the ProTour Crispin Glover, and I’m waiting for him to unleash the kung-fu on Rogers’ skull.

June 18, 1983 issue of Cycling

It’s not every day that a bike festooned with Bike Nashbar graphics wins a national tour. In fact, there’s only one day: June 4, 1983 in Blackpool, England…the day that Matt Eaton donned the final leader’s jersey of the Milk Race having protected his slender 16 second lead over Swede Stefan Brykt. I remember Nashbar selling to the public an identical version of the very bike Matt Eaton rode to victory in the Milk Race about a month later. It was a straight-up, no nonsense rig with Columbus tubing, Campy Super Record components, and Cinelli bars/stem. And it was exceptionally affordable if you were thick-skinned enough to take the heat from your snob peers at the Saturday morning world championships averse to all things Nashbar. Several other bikes of the 1980s peloton were similarly decked out in bargain basement brand stickers (7-Eleven on “Murray” and “Huffy”, La Vie Claire on “Huffy”). And just as Davis Phinney’s Murray was in reality a Serotta and Greg LeMond’s Huffy emerged from the hands of Roland Della Santa, Eaton’s Nashbar special likely had a similar boutiqe pedigree. But from whose shop this Milk Race winning bike was spawned, I just don’t know.

1983 Milk Race fun facts
1) 22 year old Matt Eaton was born in England and moved to the U.S. when he was 12. Still a British citizen, he returned to his native England when he was 17 in order to qualify for the junior world championships but was denied a position. Frustrated, he returned to the U.S. and became an American citizen. Then he made the British cycling establishment look decidedly stupid 5 years later.
2) Eaton’s American teammates: Chris Carmichael, Alexi Grewal, Andy Hampsten, Steve Speaks, Steve Tilford. All finished, and all certainly made names for themselves in the years to come.
3) British speed demon Malcolm Elliott won a record-breaking 6 stages and finished 3rd overall.
4) Amazingly, 24 years later, Malcolm Elliott and Steve Tilford are still rocking it at the upper echelons of competition.
5) Poor Paul Kimmage. He thought he had victory wrapped up for the Ireland national amateur squad when bad luck (an untimely flat, then a crash) during the penultimate stage saw him concede 12 minutes and the lead to Eaton.
6) Matt Eaton won the GC without winning a stage.
7) Current UCI baffoon-in-chief Pat McQuaid was the Irish team’s manager.
The West German amateur squad was managed by the legendary Klaus-Peter Thaler. Thaler had just retired from professional cycling and spent 1983 and 1984 working with the West German national team. With 5 weeks of training in his legs prior to the 1985 world cyclocross championships, Thaler came out of retirement and won a world ‘cross title.

Photographer: J.S. McElvery

Sint-Michielsgestel, the Netherlands | January 30, 2000

“STI? I don’t need no stinkin’ STI.”

Let’s all sing praises for Bart Bowen, the last man to rock the bar-end shifters in a mass start world championship event. And bonus style points for the front brake cable treatment. In Bowen’s quest for the perfect brake cable alignment, but a move likely to make any stem manufacturer cringe, the front brake cable has been routed through his stem via a pair of precisely drilled holes in the top and bottom. It’s always a challenge for riders on the smaller side to cleanly route their front brake cable without abrupt or sharp kinks in the housing and the through-the-stem option provides the smoothest cable pull for the bold and those handy with a drill.

And what of the race? Bowen finished 32nd on a day better known for Sven Nijs inciting the wrath of Belgium by putting his Rabobank trade team fealty to Dutchman Richard Groenendaal above national allegiance to fellow Belgian Mario de Clercq.

Another year.
Another sunny day (23 consecutive years and counting).
A new course record.
Another CorestatesWachoviaFirstUnionUSPROCommerceBank extravaganza.

If you slap a fixed-gear bike on the cover of a magazine, especially a magazine not in the cycling section, it will likely get my attention. Intersection describes itself as

“…bringing design, fashion and culture to life for the modern man. An intimate, inspired, below the radar meeting place for arbiters of taste and opinion, it’s where diverse paths cross, united by a passion for living fast and traveling far.”

In the simplest terms…it’s a car magazine. And I’m not really sure they understand urban fixed-gear bikes beyond the parameters of fashion and modishness. Look at the cover: “Why your car needs a bike rack!”. The minimal text accompanying the 12-page spread treats the bike as a prop which hipster car owners have affixed to a bike rack and when confronted with gridlock one can then hop on their fixie and beat that damned traffic (but doesn’t seem concerned about the conundrum of the abandoned car). What’s amusing to me is that the 11 men who grace the magazine with their track bikes all live in cities (NYC or London) and either work as messengers or utilize their fixies for utilitarian transportation. And I’d be highly surprised if any of these gents owned a car. You’d be insane to own a car in either city for any number of reasons: the cost, especially at their likely respective salaries; the efficacy of travel by bike; efficient mass transit…

I haven’t quite figured out if there are cyclists on the masthead who’ve happened to successfully infiltrate the publication and are sowing the seeds of dissent from within, relatively under the radar…or…it’s all fashion of the moment to be cast aside when fixed-gear machines are no longer hipster du jour props. In the current issue one of the writers admitted to having a 1950s Holdsworth and a 1930s era Schwinn track bike as her pride & joy wheels…not a car. There’s also a compelling 2-page map of the world with country size determined by the amount of velodromes each nation has within its borders (France is HUGE, followed closely by Japan…and who would have known that Trinidad-Tobago has more velodromes than China). And the articles are largely fascinating, with transportation themes frequently only skirting the tangents (definitely not your typical gear-head, road test magazine dreck) and its international, non-US focus is easy on the eyes…a world with far cooler design principles at work.

1. Northern Dominance
The last time I laid eyes (in person) on Danilo Di Luca, he was approximately 350 meters from the summit of Passo Lanciano in the 2006 Giro d’Italia. The collective groan which rippled upwards to the summit when Di Luca was dropped from the Basso express several kilometers from the finish line belies the adoration of his native Abruzzo tifosi. And how wrong I was to right him off as “merely” a man for the one-day Classics. Bravo, Danilo! What’s also remarkable is that Di Luca is the first Italian from the southern half of Italy to ever emerge victorious in the Giro. Check out the complete domination by pros from the northern regions:

Image source: http://www.big-italy-map.co.uk/

Di Luca is well aware of his place in history, and he spoke of his terrone heritage with pride.

2. Is Andy Hampsten really the first American Giro winner?
While I was investigating which region each Italian Giro winner came from, I came across this interesting tidbit about the 1924 champion Giuseppe Enrici. If Italian Wikipedia is to be trusted, it appears that Enrici was born in Pittsburgh, PA. Now I’m not much of a legal scholar, but I believe that birth on American soil automatically confers U.S. citizenship. I haven’t the faintest idea about the length of Enrici’s stateside stint before he hopped a boat to Italy (where as best I can tell, he resided in the Piemonte region), I’m equally as clueless about whether dual-citizenship was ever embraced or if he only ever considered himself Italian, but maybe USA Cycling can retro-actively claim him as one of our own (just like the Mormons) to boost our country’s Grand Tour palmares. He would also be the first American to start the Tour de France (1924 [DNF on 4th stage] and 1925 [DNF on 11th stage]), but it looks like Jonathan Boyer still has dibs on the first American to finish.

3. Conventional Wisdom
Unless your physique is Jose Rujano-sized, I thought it a given that every pro cyclist sports at least 172.5mm cranks. With that in mind, I was somewhat surprised to see that Robbie McEwen has been winning Grand Tour stages on 170mm cranks. Specs on pro bikes aren’t too plentiful, at least when it comes to crank arm length, but here’s some other sprinters for comparison:

Of course, Oscar Freire and Allan Davis are the only riders listed who’re approximately the same size as McEwen, but McEwen seems to roll to the beat of a different drummer with his slightly stubbier cranks. And just for comparison’s sake, I looked at 2 Giro riders who are definitely tinier than McEwen (Di Luca and Simoni) and both of them have 172.5mm cranks. I don’t know if this means anything or not, it’s just the random kind of factoid that gets my mind revved up.

Sean Kelly | Liège-Bastogne-Liège podium | 04.15.1984
Seth Goltzer photo

Because nothing says I’m a penny pinching hardman like winning La Doyenne with shoes held snug with a liberal application of duct tape. I bet if Kelly had his way, he would have figured out some means to nail Look cleats on to the bottom of those shoes for the latter years of his career, that is if the they hadn’t just out-and-out vaporized into leather dust from Kelly’s wear and tear. I’m sure he shed a tear (just one solitary tear…deep in the heart of Flanders while riding alone in the rain so nobody could tell Kelly had a soft side) when they finally gave up the ghost.

And my god…those legs are unreal. Hewn from tens of thousands of miles of primeval suffering, still sporting a healthy layer of Belgian road grime. Kelly could have torched everyone at Liege wearing flip-flops and riding a Huffy.

“Nothing to see here…move along, please…it’s just Paul Kimmage”
Graham Watson photo

I don’t know if Paul Kimmage is laughing or crying these days. But he just took a huge, steaming dump on Sean Kelly’s legacy.

A couple of months ago I re-read Kimmage’s book Rough Ride, and it struck me as being even more depressingly bleak than I remember from my initial ingestion some 15 years ago. Talk about living the 12k dreamer’s life…Kimmage probably made about that much in salary each year, yet he was expected to ride a full calendar of Grand Tours and Classics. Kimmage only fessed up to taking amphetamines on 3 occasions in post-Tour criteriums, and I’m inclined to believe that was the extent of his doping. What he did expose to the world, however, was the spectre of drugs among his teammates and peers. The proliferation of personal “medicine” suitcases; the compact, modified syringes which came out mid-stage for a quick amphetamine shot in the ass on the peloton’s way to the Champs-Élysées; the “wink wink” about the ease of beating doping controls. Kimmage was simply trying to survive, and for most pros that was the impetus to juice. Random testing was virtually non-existent…you could dope up to your eyeballs in service of your team leader and then just make sure you didn’t win the stage or a jersey. Or die.

Kimmage walked away from the sport and his 4 year career as a professional cyclist when he quit the 12th stage of the 1989 Tour. As a pro is highlights were relatively few: Kimmage finished 2 Grand Tours (1986 Tour, 1989 Giro) and played a role in Stephen Roche’s 1987 world championship. As an amateur, Kimmage was an Olympian at the ‘84 Los Angeles Games and finished 6th in the road worlds. Since Kimmage hung up his wheels in disgust he embarked on a career as a journalist, an occupation he dabbled in as a pro (Kimmage supplied a weekly diary to the Dublin Sunday Times). These days he’s employed at the London Times, and if you plug “Kimmage” into the search box you’ll unearth Kimmage’s body of work over the past 5 years. There are approximately 65 interviews, all worth reading. It’s an enlightening view into a world of sports for the most part totally foreign to Americans. The bulk of his subjects are either either Brits or foreigners taking place in the world of British professional sports. Sports such as soccer, rugby, cricket, Formula 1 racing, snooker…Articles about cycling do appear, but always through the lens of doping. You can almost sense Kimmage’s gritted teeth permeating his cycling prose. To say he was a persona non grata among pro cyclists for publishing Rough Ride is quite an understatement, but who better to hurl a brick into cycling’s glass house than an angry Irishman wracked with Catholic guilt. And Ireland is ground zero for Catholic guilt…I lived in Ireland for approximately 6 months as a foreign exchange student, and there was a creepy placard on the dining room wall of my house which said, “Jesus Christ is the unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener of every conversation”. Kimmage cracked…and his very public confession was his means of coming to terms with the farce of professional cycling.

Image courtesy of cyclingnews.com. Photo © Fotoreporter Sirotti.

Did you ever wonder what kind of idle chit-chat takes place among former world champion pro cyclists while they’re waiting for a Classic to start? Click on the photo to find out what my ears on the ground overheard between Igor Astarloa (Milram) and Oscar Freire (Rabobank) just prior to the kickoff of the 2007 Amstel Gold.