Cyclocross! Getcha cyclocross here! Get it while it’s hot!
OK, so more like “Get it while it’s cold and sloppy.”
• Late update: Congrats to Katie Compton on No. 15! Damn, I love watching her race. She puts on the Great Stone Face, hangs out the “Open for Business” sign, and goes to work serving out heaping helpings from that 55-gallon drum of whup-ass.
The USA Cycling Cyclocross National Championships are going on in Louisville, and some decidedly un-’crosslike weather is going on in Albuquerque.
This is nothing new. The weather, that is. I began losing my interest in ’cross about the same time everybody else “discovered” it, in part because winter was starting to seem like something you saw in old movies, or that only the graybeards talked about.
“You call this winter? Pssh! Why, back in ’98. …”
For me, getting cold and muddy was about half the fun. While all the roadies were doing squats in the gym, riding fixed gears on the street, or even worse, sitting on the trainer in front of some old Tour tapes, a select few of us were running around in the slush, wearing thick coats of goo, broad grins, and perfectly rideable bicycles.
“Ooo, there’s some lovely filth over ’ere!”
Anyway, thinking about ’cross and the lack of proper weather for same reminded me of a BRAIN column from 2002, and that constitutes the bulk of this week’s episode of Radio Free Dogpatch, which got a bum call-up and thus is a little slow getting off the start line.
• Technical notes: This episode was recorded with a Shure SM58 microphone, Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack, and the old 2009 iMac. Background music is “Newborn,” a jingle lifted from Apple’s iMovie, which also supplied the “Medal Ceremony” opener.
Sky will leave pro cycling at the end of next season to focus on other projects, according to The Guardian.
One of these projects includes Sky Ocean Rescue, a push to encourage businesses and individuals to give up single-use plastic.
Was the Wiggins jiffy bag plastic? I can’t recall. But Froome’s gotta be, though you can’t argue that Sky only got a single use out of him.
Hey, what could I tell you? Times are tough. WADA ya gonna do?
Hm, we seem to be on something of an Irish-music kick here.
They’re sailing in the other direction these days, at least some of them. Zio Lorenzo and The Professor are settled in Italy and not missing Sioux City one iota, unless I miss my guess.
And now our friends Mike and Liz are bidding adieu and relocating to Lyon, France.
We had them over for green-chile stew last night and caught up. They’ve bought an apartment there, the house here is for sale, and come springtime they will be well positioned to observe Le Tour in its native habitat. Stage 8 will be right in their backyard, or arrière-cour, as we say in le français.
Novelist and poet Jim Harrison thought highly enough of Lyon to write, “If I were given the dreary six months to live, I’d head at once to Lyon and make my way from bistro to bistro in a big stroller pushed by a vegetarian.”
The place suffers from a dearth of New Mexican-style green-chile stew, however, and thus we were compelled to revive them after the house-hunting excursion. We couldn’t find a vegetarian with a two-seater stroller to push them home, though.
It’s a long hard road, to be sure. Especially when you’re sliding along it through clusters of howling drunkards and clouds of noxious smoke while wearing a thimbleful of Lycra. This shit keeps up and they’ll be awarding the final yellow jersey to a moto driver, a journo’ or Bernard Hinault.
