Winter Games

~ Patrick O'Grady
A bit of pink tinges Pikes Peak just past sunup.
A bit of pink tinges Pikes Peak just past sunup.

Another blisteringly cold day. Yesterday neither Herself nor I left the house. But today she bundled up and toddled off to work. I spent the morning processing pixels, then slipped out for a short run around noon after things warmed up a bit.

I probably should’ve ridden — after all, I’m not going to be running around southern Arizona next month — but I like to run, and besides it can’t hurt to mix things up a bit. Yesterday my legs felt like giant sausages full of botulism after three consecutive days of riding hills in the cold, and spending all Sunday sitting at the iMac, posting copy and photos to VeloNews.com, didn’t exactly meet my admittedly loose definition of “active rest.”

Speaking of high technology, we’ve finally debugged our Rube Goldberg TV hookup (streaming video via laptop, Blu-ray player, rabbit ears) and have been watching bits of the Winter Olympics. My God, how does anyone get through an evening of American television without the skull exploding like a Pfalzgraff piggy bank zotzed by a .40-caliber hollow-point? The drug ads provide some amusing irony, and there’s no denying the improved sports coverage possible with digital video, but still, damn.

It’s not enough that an athlete kicks ass. No, he or she has to have a touching backstory: grew up living in the trunk of a Chevy Caprice in the Appalachian hills; has a one-eyed half-brother with the yaws and 13 toes: plays the uilleann pipes professionally when not doing something insane involving ice and/or snow.

Speaking of which, it’s gonna be cold again tomorrow. Tonight’s low should bottom out around 11, and NOAA says we’re looking at a high in the mid-30s tomorrow. But a man must ride, and so I’ll be out there, me and my three long-sleeved jerseys, the neoprene leg warmers and pretty much everything else in the kit kloset.

And maybe — just maybe — with my just-completed Nobilette cyclo-cross bike, too. Stand by for fresh bike porn.

29 thoughts on “Winter Games”

  2. ‘spose to be mid-30s here in Dysfunction Junction (home of Josh Penry, y’all) and I’ve got a 30 mile ride on the schedule. It takes real friends to get me out riding on such a cool day, the kind of friends who will repeatedly accuse me of unforgivable wimpiness for the rest of the year should I back out. And so I ride.

    Besides, I’m committed to ride BTC and that’s only four months away. Need to get training!

  4. Khal,
    It sounds like his assertation is accurate. The French don’t like that they got beat so they resort to this kind of tomfoolery. Oh, wait, Larry Ellison did the same crap with the recently concluded America’s Cup. So maybe it’s not just a French thing.

    I find it hard to believe that a bike racer like Floyd could be into international espionage, let alone hacking a computer network in another country. Maybe he is smarter than the average pro, but I still find it hard to believe that he would have the time to do it. Unless the network security of the lab is/was about as ‘secure’ as the Maginot Line.

    “Hey, I wonder if the password is “password”……Bingo! We’re in!!”

  5. Olympics on TV here in Italy are much, much better as long as a)one wants to stay awake long enough into the night to watch live stuff happening in a place 9 hours behind us b) one can understand enough Italian to enjoy the commentary–otherwise the picture and graphics do pretty well, after all unlike in the US, the commentators here know it’s TELEVISION and the viewer can see what’s happening and tuned in to watch, say SKIING rather than get the up-close-and-personal look at the apartment of some figure skater. Weather’s a bit better here in Viterbo (we found yet another vino sfuso place!) than Bibleburg, got out for a couple of hours yesterday though today it’s raining.

  6. Wow! I didn’t know that growing up as a Mennonite meant that you learned how to hack into French drug laboratory internarl networks. I’m impressed.

  10. The bits and pieces I’ve heard is he is suspected of hiring others to do the technical work, which he is clearly not qualified for, and is considered the ‘ringleader’. One report mentioned he had ‘displayed’ files/documents form the lab taken illegally another that the operation was attempting to change his test result records. The guy’s cursed I tell ya.

    Sports talking heads drive me crazy. Yabber, yabber, yabber. Do any of them know anything about the discipline or techniques on display? If they’d just put the commentary on teh left channel and ambient sound on the right I could turn down the idiots and just listen to teh swooshing noise and get into it.

  14. What gets me about this whole “Affair de Landis” is that if the French knew that he lead the ring to infiltrate their security, why are they going after him years later?

    I’m not an attorney but aren’t the items presented in a legal case shared between the two sides, moderated by an impartial observer (aka. Da Judge!) and then submitted for review?

    Thus, if he did in fact do this, wasn’t it the point of the prosecution to point out at the time that the information was pilfered? Or were they so out of it that they failed to recognize that fact? Keeping in mind that the entire case was heard in an American court, I would presume that the American legal system would have some say in this matter.

    Methinks that the only reason that they have done this is to keep Landis away from France for a year (or two). I know where I won’t be spending any Euros this summer when I watch the Tour de Country Between Spain and Belgium.

  15. Everyone wants all the dopers out of cycling, instantly. Hang ’em, ban ’em they all shout — until their guy gets nabbed. THEN they want US-style “justice” so the perp can get off on a technicality ala OJ. Landis so-called defense was largely financed by lawyers eager to test the USADA and CSA arbitration procedures. Landis offered a series of lame excuses from day 1. His final descent into the crapper for me was the same as for O’Grady — when he told his friends about LeMond’s misfortune which resulted in the ugly phone call to Greg. Doper or not, he and his cronies revealed themselves as classless pieces of excrement at that time. He should find another job along with Tricky Ricky Ricco and Danilo DiLuca, etc. If Landis is such a great rider these days he should have no trouble finding a team to race him everywhere other than France. So far that’s working for another cheater who’s avoiding Italy and winning elsewhere — that Green Bullet fellow. I’ll be toasting the day when he’s finally thrown out of the sport along with the rest of the blood dopers!

  16. Landis never said a cross word to me, never left me with the bar tab, never wrote his name in the snow on my front yard. Seems to have some demons, and I hope he works them out. But wasting time worrying about whether justice has been served is about as productive as … me trying to figure out anything about my fellow human beans.

    I love the winter Olympics. The summer games are too straight-forward. Run in a straight line for a certain distance, first one to the finish line wins. Snore. But the winter games have that element of luck, chance, happenstance, and whatever else the weather or course wants to throw at you. Plus, a lot of it is just damn silly. The world needs more silliness.

    The downside of the winter games is that the announcers make all other teevee talking heads look like rocket surgeons. I caught half a dozen of that snowboard four-dude race thing, and I’m pretty sure they taped one clip of the play-by-play and just hit repeat for each heat. Some sports are just so basic (go fast) that it’s a bit ridiculous to try to over-analyze the damn thing. Just shut up and let us watch.

  18. One might hack into a site if one wondered if the institution was being totally honest or if there were skeletons in the closet to be uncovered. Such as an email saying “hey, who trained the idiot analyst who ran all those testosterone samples…not me, I wouldn’t trust him/her with a test tube brush, say nothing of a mass spec…” Basically, an analog of the OJ defense, which was designed to doom the credibility of the police laboratory.

    I’m neutral on this one, guys. From what I could see of the technology regarding mass spec recognition of the banned testosterone metabolites vs. the real thing, I was amazed that someone could decipher that stuff with high confidence. But that’s not my field of mass spectrometry, so I’ll defer to the experts rather than make a fool of myself (more than I usually do, anyway…)

  19. I think Landis took shit he wasn’t supposed to. I also think most of the riders in the pro peloton take shit they’re not supposed to. I think they have from the very first bicycle race.

    Bike racers have done crazy shit from day one in order to go faster–tobacco, alcohol, speed, coke, espresso, aspirin, our own blood, other people’s blood, other species’ blood and body parts, HGH, EPO, CERA, lighter fluid.

    They eat it, drink it, snort it, shoot it, shove it up their asses, wear it around their necks, pray to it, whatever.

    Our sport is professional. It was invented to sell newspapers and advertise products and services. It was and is a business first. We don’t sell tickets. Our riders don’t have any representation. It’s as close to mercenary as one can get without having to carry a gun. It’s bloody. It’s heroic. It’s Homeric.

    I follow it on the internet–for free. If I go see it in person, I stand on the side of the road–for free. So does every other enthusiast.

    Let the riders do what they think will get them over the line the quickest way possible (while still riding a bike on the course). Winning or leading the peloton (and looking sharp doing it) make good press for sponsors. It’s the sponsors who have the money that we need to carry on our madness.

    Police the bikes at the finish line, measure them, weigh them. Take pictures of the finish. Make sure the riders finish the whole race on their bikes. But leave the riders to their own devices when it comes to building and maintaining the engines.

    Oh, and get our sport out of the Olympics and away from their bullshit idealism or get the Olympics to back off from testing. Oh yeah, give us back our traditional velodrome events, too. Fuck the Olympics.

    I don’t want the trophies handed out on the podium only to be confiscated in a court room several months later. It takes the fun out of it. It’s confusing and frustrating to the enthusiast and totally ridiculous to the casual observer. Corporate sponsors leave and they don’t come back. And then we’re RAAM instead of Il Giro or Le Tour. We’re left with pass-the-hat primes and half-off coupons for prizes and no media coverage and no hot podium girls.

    We police our sport harder than any other sport is policed. Are all these great swimmers, soccer players, skiers, and runners performing strictly on organic chicken, fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and water? Fuck no. The other sports know that it’s not in their best interests to kill their heroes. So they don’t.

    In our rush to judge the purity of blood and piss, we fail to tell the awesome story of how, after six-and-a-half hours of racing in sub-freezing temps, through sleet and snow, over mud and Roman roads, two men sprinted shoulder to shoulder, handlebar to handlebar, with 50 meters to go, to get to the line first.

  20. Wow. I guess Jeff really is unemployed now, and with extra time on his hands. Great diatribe, Jeff! I’m not sure what it all means, but I think I agree with it.

    And Khal, with respect to the “skeletons in the closet” at the French lab, I think it depends on what constitutes a “skeleton”. I’ve done course work in environmental science that involved taking and tracking soil and water samples; and I’ve read a little was what Floyd and Arnie Baker put together for the defense: accusations of altered sample forms and broken chains of custody. If half of what Floyd and Arnie said were true, then his samples wouldn’t have held up in a US court even if they were just dirt samples! However, in a French court, that’s another story, they appear to have a far different standard over there.

    So basically, what we would consider a “skeleton in the closet” by our standards may be just acceptable standard operational procedures to the French. In other words, maybe none of them are qualified to handle a test tube brush, but by their standards, that’s OK. They are French after all.

  21. I used to sing the same song as Jeff (nicely done!) but when reminded that kids too young to know what they’re doing emulate these pros and destroy their health with dangerous substances while trying to get into the big-time, I’ve changed my mind. Do we want the sport to be like pro wrestling where it’s just entertainment with zero credibility? It would end up being Squibb vs Pfizer as to who can cook up the best dope to get some poor schmuck across the finish line first — I have no interest in that just like I have no interest in pro wrestling. Others might enjoy it, might even increase the sponsorship and fan base, but it won’t be SPORT anymore. The Olympic movement is the only thing that’s put enough pressure on the various sports federations to do anything to combat doping. I think it would be sad if cycling left the movement so they could make their own rules like NFL. THAT’s a big biz played by huge monster-men who I have a hard time believing get that way just by eating well….has zero credibilty to me and I’d hate to see cycling end up there by design.

  22. I would agree, Larry, but I think the role model industry is pretty much dead. Not just in sports, either.

    What would give the cycling world some credibility would be if the cyclists formed a real labor union and had a hand in drafting the rules and controls. Then they could say they established buy-in from the players, who would have more incentive to police their peers.

    Frankly, I doubt any self-respecting racer wants to end up dead at the top of a hard climb like Tom Simpson, or face a lifetime of disability like some of the older East German athletes thanks to their national “better competition through chemistry” approach. But the peer pressure has to be against doping rather than the recent dope-to-survive-in-the-peloton mentality.

    When I was on the board of directors of the University of Hawaii professor’s union, we were drafting an intellectual property agreement as part of the contract. The University’s own attempts were heavy handed and merely ensured lawsuits or resignations by those who thought they had an idea too good to share. Teamwork between labor and owners, or labor and management, sometimes works better than the alternative. You gotta design a system that rewards compliance rather than cheating.

    And if I find a syringe in the garbage can at the start of this year’s Tour de Los Alamos, I’ll spread broken glass across the road at the start…

  23. Training, O2 tents, 10spd gear trains, carbon fiber, Vo2max testing, wind tunnels, special diets, vitamins (real ones) all man made means for extending an athlete’s abilities. Aren’t drugs EPO, CERA, blood doping the same thing? Well no. Beyond the health risk for short term gain issue.

    At a fundamental level I want to know that the athlete is someone like me – well OK they’re faster, stronger, lighter – but we share a body chemistry and the pro’s performance comes in no small part from work. The same work I could do if I had the drive and resources. Once the deciding factor between my idea of what I could do and what the pro does is an injection/transfusion well that link is broken for me.

    Larry’s comment regarding the NFL is spot on. I’ve no interest in an artificial sport played by artificially enhanced humans.

    The drug issue clouds the often glorious story of cycling. All the more reason to get drugs out of the sport.

  24. John: It’s true. My honey-do list is long, but not long enough to keep me from blathering on about how to solve all the world’s problems. I may have to take away my internet privileges. But here goes anyway:

    Larry T: Every sport, hell, every thing is already Squibb vs Pfizer.

    I wish I could believe that kids want to grow up and be clean adults (not just clean athletes), but we’re not in a culture like that anymore. Just the concept of drug-free doesn’t exist. I can’t watch TV without Big Pharma telling me I can pee at my convenience, sport a four-hour woody, control my diabetes, and lower my cholesterol–with one pill a day per health issue for the rest of my life.

    I want to watch televised sports with my seven-year-old daughter, but I’m not quite ready to define “erection” and then explain why an erection that lasts more than four hours warrants a call to the doctor, or why middle-aged men and women sit in empty bathtubs in grassy fields and hold hands and watch sunsets. (Instead we watch cartoons and I try to explain why she can’t have Sugar Chocobomb Pops for breakfast even though they’re made with whole grains and are a nutritious part of a complete breakfast.)

    I’ve got two much younger half-brothers (one an undergrad and one in high school) who tell me how parents of high school GOLFERS they know are trying legally to score HGH prescriptions from pediatricians to make sure their boys don’t stop growing at 5′ 7” and 130 lbs. Golf. Really?

    The horses left the barn already and are now sponsored by Big Pharma.

    As for the Olympic movement, they’re hypocritical in their idealism. I’m surprised they even still tout it.

    I’m afraid credibility is in the eye of the beholder. It sucks, but it’s true. Merckx won a third of all races he entered–on just spaghetti, steaks, cigarettes, riding rollers in his attic, and coffee? No. But he’s still a hero to me, ’cause he was beating guys who were taking the same shit he was taking. And he crushed them at every kind of venue.

    Lemond was my hero. But his beef with Armstrong rings hollow to me. Lemond’s rivals were jacked up and some have admitted as such. Hard to believe Lemond was clean. And I don’t care because the videos I have of him and Kelly and Roche and Criquelion and Delgado and Hinault and Moser and all those dudes are just awesome.

    FYI, I don’t hate Armstrong because I think Lemond is right and Lance is wrong. In fact, I’m pretty sure Lemond has completely lost his fucking mind. No, I hate Armstrong because he was an arrogant teenage asshole who’s become a Hollywood douchebag wannabe and who rode one race a year and left his hot wife with three babies after selling a gazillion copies of a book describing himself as an excellent husband and father–not because he’s lying about drugs. The guy really was the greatest talent. Holy crap, he won 7 Tours in a row and came in 3rd at the Tour after douching it up for three years! But he’s still a douchebag. Probably a drug taking douchebag with an excellent chemist/pharmacist on his team. Just sayin’. And yes, I am extremely jealous of his talent.

    That said, I hope the Shack, Sky, SaxoBank, Garmin, Columbia, Cervelo, Quickstep, and Astana try to ride each other’s legs off all season long. I’m a huge fan!

  25. Jeff,

    Glad you got that off your chest, dude!

    But seriously, “d-bag” has overstayed it’s welcome. Unless you are refering to feminine hygene products. Then “d-bag” bomb away! Otherwise, maybe “scumbag” might be a better term?

    Nevertheless I can’t disagree with your assesment of said ‘athletes’ (or in Eddy’s case: “GOD”).

  26. I can’t share the cynical view that everything’s already gone to hell and ain’t comin’ back. Sport can be made more fair — the whole thing is an artificial concept created by man — who creates the rules. You can’t race in bicycle races on motorcycles (yet anyway – though the industry might have it that way) so don’t tell me we must let technology (chemical or otherwise) just runaway with the sport. Role models aren’t the point – it’s that some kid wanting to get into cycling can quickly decide that he needs dope to succeed — before he’s mature enough to know the consequences. I want to see competition among athletes using bicycles — athletes competing fairly following rules they all agree to obey when they take out a license. If they don’t want to follow the rules, they can go elsewhere — pro wrestling or the NFL where it’s not about “sport” and all about entertainment having the same credibility as “Dancing with the Stars” or some other reality TV crap.

  27. But Larry, that is the whole point of the role model argument. If a kid getting into bike racing thinks he has to take dope to succeed because the pros are doing it, then that’s the model. And as you say, they are too young to fully understand the consequences.

    I recall an interview some time ago with some East German former athletes who are not battling the long term effects of performance-enhancing drugs. They said that they were just injected with this crap and never told what was going on. As my mom used to say, “you get too soon old and too late smart.”

    But that is the little problem. The whole dope argument goes beyond the illegal stuff as Jeff and others have said here. It really is a Squibb vs Pfizer world. Gracie Slick was more than prescient with White Rabbit.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EntBFYOPIcE

    (God, she was hot…)

  29. My response was to the “there ain’t no more role models” idea. Trying to keep SPORT (vs entertainment) fair and safe is a worthy, though difficult (some would say impossible) task.

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