‘Cross worlds is upon us, in Boogerhead, Netherlands, or some such exotic locale full of windmills, hash smokers and folks who make money running around wearing perfectly rideable bicycles.
Jonathan Page has gotten the all-clear to race and a spot on the U.S. team, and VeloNews‘ man on the scene, Charles Pelkey, reports cold weather and a dry course. This is bad news for my homegirl Katie Compton, who lives for evil conditions and thinks racing on a clean circuit is one step removed from riding the trainer in the basement.
Bibleburg is an Air Force town, and with a little assist from a C-130 fire bomber full of water and a hotshot pilot we could make the Boogerhead course a good deal more interesting, and probably without killing anybody important.
But I understand that money is tight these days, even for federales with access to printing presses and legit pictures of dead presidents. So we’ll just have to go with “conditions on the ground,” a phrase that should earn the next media cretin to use it a vicious beating with a copy of “The Elements of Style” duct-taped to a Louisville Slugger studded with ten-penny nails.
In any case, come rain, sleet or snow, CP, Graham Watson and VeloNews.com will be all over the sonofabitch like mud on a skinsuit, so don’t touch that dial.
Check this out — you can take a virtual spin around the course. I remember seeing one of these on a bootlegged tape of worlds from a decade or so ago. Still kind of reminds me of the “Money for Nothing” video, but without the rockin’ soundtrack.
Late update: As long as we’re talking about cycling here — a comparative rarity on this site, which is the digital equivalent of a dung-stained wall in some cheapjack zoo’s primate house — USA Today‘s bike guy Sal Ruibal was kind enough to mention Mad Dog Media in a list of top-10 cycling blogs at Blogs.com. So you should pop on over to his place straight away and read him until your eyes cross. Gannett needs the hits.
Mad Blog Media 
I tried as hard as I could to spend five minutes watching the video at work the other day. I will have to agree with your assessment: too much like the 80’s video games/music videos.
But still it was a cool way to ‘see’ the course. And yes “pray for rain” ’cause it didn’t look too hard.
I kept expecting my friend Jonathan’s face to pop out of the crowd. The homey is living in Holland and trying really hard to assimilate to the culture. Hard to do if you don’t smoke from what I hear. But he makes up for it in drinking all of their beer (Heineken it is not). He claims that he won’t make the trip down from Zaandam and will watch it on the boob tube instead. Something about it being “cold and freezing.” Oh well at least he gets to see it live and in Dutch. Dat is het.