Archive for the ‘Bicycle racing’ Category

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Non-Race-Related Blah Blah Blah®

April 2, 2020

Well, it seems sports podcasters have finally caught up with what Charles Pelkey and I were doing all those years at Live Update Guy.

With everyone staying home and the athletic world as a whole looking a lot like the middle 75km of a flat Tour stage, they’ve resorted to (wait for it) Non-Race-Related Blah Blah Blah®, a LUG specialty. As Caroline Crampton writes at Nieman Lab:

“As well as covering how players and support staff are handling the situation, [The Anfield Wrap] is dipping into comedy, history and broader fan culture. Iain Macintosh, chief executive of Muddy Knees Media — best known for The Totally Football Show and other associated podcasts — spoke of similar plans. His team just has “an inexhaustible supply of new feature ideas,” he said. “We’re not trying to replicate what we did before, because we can’t, but rather see it as a chance to go through all those things that we’ve talked about doing that, you know, real life has got in the way. Now we can get them out there and give them some air.” That includes a forthcoming “Pundit World Cup” as well as film reviews, documentaries, and quizzes.”

Maybe it’s time to revive LUG as a podcast. With no irksome bicycle racing and TV images of same to cramp our creative style, we could really focus on just making the whole thing up.

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Posted in Bicycle racing, Live Update Guy, Podcasting | 13 Comments »

(Not) the Tour de France

March 26, 2020

Tom Waits for no one.

But somebody’s still thinking about it:

“Professional cycling reacted with a mix of cautious optimism and scepticism after the French sports minister, Roxana Mărăcineau, confirmed that together with the Tour de France organisers ASO, her officials were exploring ways of running a scaled-down Tour with restrictions on spectator access this summer even though the country is currently in lockdown to limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus.”

Uh huh. I don’t see Live Update Guy cranking up the rusty machinery for this one. But I’ve been wrong before. …

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Posted in Bicycle racing, Feckin' eejits | 17 Comments »

Just say what?

February 13, 2020

“Recovery is possible?”
Not based on my experience with bicycle racing, it isn’t.

OK, I’m bent, twisted, more than a bubble off plumb.

I know this about myself, and I came to terms with it long ago.

But I can’t be the only person who finds this “dose of reality” amusing.

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Posted in Bicycle racing, Casual snark, Cheap gags, Drugs, Journalism, VeloNews.com | 20 Comments »

Stupor Sunday

February 2, 2020

His Excellency confers with the underside of his eyelids.

As you can see, Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment) and his adjutant Miss Mia Sopaipilla can’t wait for The Big Game to get under way.

We don’t follow the feets ball here at El Rancho Pendejo, having gotten our fill of artificially augmented athletes at that Boulder-based journal of competitive cycling.

Miss Mia Sopaipilla stands watch at the rear portcullis.

Indeed, we watch no televised sports of any kind, preferring to participate rather than spectate.

Oh, sometimes I’ll watch the U.S. cyclocross nationals, or ’cross worlds, if I can find a free feed uncontaminated by bots, viruses, Trojan horses, poltergeists, pixies, h’ants, djinni, cooties, boogers, and other agents of Chaos.

But I didn’t even watch worlds this weekend. My gal Katie Compton just missed the podium after a poor start, and Mathieu van der Poel — well, let’s just say that the dude might as well have been racing all by himself.

Anyway, this morning I had other concerns. Ironically, they involved my own doping regimen.

As I stumbled into the kitchen Herself intercepts me and goes all like: “Bad news. The coffee grinder’s broken again.”

Happily, she’d managed to brew just enough joe for me to pour a shot in each eyeball and then get to work rebooting the evil sonofabitch.

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Posted in Bicycle racing, Cyclo-cross, Drugs, Technology | 28 Comments »

12 Days of ’Toonsmas: Day 3

December 22, 2019

Moles don’t get that big, even if they drink beer.
From the March 2019 issue of BRAIN.

Felix Magowan, one of the original Trio that acquired what had been called Velo-news from founders Barbara and Robert George, had long wanted to add Bicycle Retailer and Industry News to the Inside Communications portfolio.

He never got it done. Eventually Inside Communications sold VeloNews to a passing crew of brigands, and Felix wandered off to do other things.

Episode 19 of Radio Free Dogpatch, “Can’t Find My Way Home,” from February 11, 2019.

Imagine giving Dave Stohler’s Masi Gran Criterium to your meth-addict nephew as a present for graduating from reform school. A bleak period ensued, thick with the sort of belligerent dumbassery once found only in high-school locker rooms, family trees shaped like flagpoles, and the lower houses of state legislatures in the Deep South.

I finally sat up and slipped off the back because VeloNews seemed to be careening into the sort of future in which plague-carrying aliens burst out of people’s chests while they’re battling killer robots. The Old Guy Who Gets Fat in Winter went with me, to do the occasional walk-on in Bicycle Retailer’s “Shop Talk” comic strip.

And then, shazam! Felix reappeared as part of Pocket Outdoor Media, and not only reacquired VeloNews, but snapped up BRAIN and a couple other properties as well.

The Fat Guy and I didn’t go back to the old home place. I didn’t care about bicycle racing anymore, and anyway, we weren’t invited. But it seemed like a good time to make a meta joke about how Fatso was a spy for his old bosses.

Unlike the vulture capitalists who nearly burned VeloNews down to its foundation, the “Shop Talk” dudes seem to know they’re cartoon characters.

Also, unlike vulture capitalists, they’re funny.

• Editor’s note: Today’s blast from the past includes a bonus audio component — episode 19 of Radio Free Dogpatch from February 2019.

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Posted in Assholes, Bicycle racing, Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, Bidness, Capitalist swine, Cartooning, Employers, Feckin' eejits, Small hat sizes | 9 Comments »

Slainte, Katie

December 16, 2019

You can’t always be the windshield. Some days you’re the bug.

It happened to Katie Compton yesterday at U.S. cyclocross nationals in Tacoma. She never looked quite herself, barring one stellar, gutsy, downhill pass early on. But she never quit — she hung grimly on to finish third behind Clara Honsinger and runner-up Rebecca Fahringer.

“Yeah, I’m disappointed, but mostly I just didn’t feel that great, and it’s always hard to not have your best day, but that’s OK,” Compton told Cyclingnews. “It’s good to see Clara and Becca riding as well as they are.”

And it’s good to see the 15-time national champ gutting it out to the finish, clawing her way back onto the podium when it looked like a lost cause, and praising the two riders who finally dethroned her. She may have lost the jersey, but she’s still a champion.

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Posted in Bicycle racing, Cyclo-cross | 13 Comments »

Here’s mud in your eye

December 13, 2019

That old cyclocrossin’ gang of mine from the Nineties, at a race in Fort Collins. Lee Waldman (second from right) is still at it: He just took fifth in the 70-74 race in Tacoma.

If you’re weary of watching the mudslinging in DeeCee, why not change the channel to cyclocross nationals in Tacoma?

You can stream Sunday’s elite races live at Cyclocross Magazine‘s website or at USA Cycling’s YouTube channel. M’boy Tim Johnson will be providing commentary along with Meredith Miller and Brad Sohner.

Sounds like a runner’s course out there. My kind of course. I coulda been there instead of here, in Palookaville. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it.

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Posted in Bicycle racing, Cyclo-cross | 30 Comments »

‘Everywhere I go it rains on me’

September 29, 2019

This one goes out to all the rain dogs “enjoying” today’s world championship road race. For I am a rain dog too.

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Posted in Bicycle racing | 3 Comments »

Water under the bridge

July 27, 2019

This bridge over the Albuquerque Riverside Drain is just off the Paseo del Bosque bike trail south of Interstate 40.

There was a little water running on Thursday’s 66km ride down to the bosque and back, so I could feel the Tour’s pain when Friday’s stage got its icy wings clipped and today’s was likewise heavily edited, basically dialed down to a 33km, mass-start uphill time trial.

“See, Frenchy, if you keep your water in ditches it won’t make a mess of your bike races.”

Here in ’Merica, happily, we restrict our water to ditches so that it does not interfere with our bikey rideys. Because freedom.

Also, moreover, furthermore, and too, we have air conditioning to take the edge off those 110° days.

The “monsoons” are in session here at the moment, and so far the precip’ has been arriving around dinnertime, which is nearly as good as keeping it in ditches. Open the doors and windows and let the fresh air in.

Meanwhile, somebody else threw the doors open and then bolted right on through. Congress just beat feet for a six-week recess. And “recess” seems just the word for this cluster of kindergartners, though the exodus leaves the biggest toddler of them without any supervision, however childish.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see a “For Sale” sign pop up outside the White House.

Whoops. Too late.

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Posted in Albuquerque, Bicycle racing, Bike stuff, Tour de France | 17 Comments »

This just in from Le Tour

July 26, 2019

I bet Katie Compton would’ve finished this stage.

Gravel is no longer a Thing®. Pass it on.

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Posted in Bicycle racing, Tour de France | 21 Comments »

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