Category: Bike stuff

Pro cycling challenged

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
The peloton rockets down Tejon Street in Bibleburg during stage five of the 2012 USA Pro Challenge. Photo: Herself | Mad Dog Media

Well, shucks. I didn’t have a chance to observe first-hand the USA Pro Challenge as it barreled through Bibleburg.

I’m often critical of pro cycling, but I still like to watch it, the way some guys like to look at fake tits. Happily, Herself, who has neither need nor desire for surgical enhancement — not that this is any of your business — cycled downtown to observe the festivities on my behalf, as I was buried in chores that reminded me of the time I tried to dig my way out of the Supermax in Florence wielding only a cracked plastic spoon, a Mason jar of pruno and a finely honed sense of moral superiority.

Still, I was able to watch stage five from Chez Dog, via Adobe Tour Tracker, and as I had anticipated, spectatorship seemed sparse, confined mostly to Bibleburg’s infamous drinkin’-an’-fightin’ ghetto on Tejon, between Bijou and Colorado. Happily for those who earn a living from such things, the camera adds 10 pounds to everything, including crowd estimates.

Damiano Caruso (Liquigas-Cannondale) screwed the pooch on the finishing circuit, sprinting to victory a lap before everyone else even bothered to queue up. And who can blame him? Given the altitude at home, he might as well be racing on Mars against the Curiosity rover, sans spacesuit.

Tyler Farrar won, with Taylor Phinney second, and now everything shifts north to the People’s Republic, where I expect the crowds will turn out for real on Flagstaff Mountain. I won’t be there, either. But I will be watching via streaming video between chores, if only because Herself won’t let me watch videos of … well … you know.

Lanced

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 40 Comments

It may be the only fight he ever walked away from. Still, you have to hand it to the guy.

Had Big Tex gone to arbitration the outcome probably would have been the same, but he’d have come out looking like he’d done a thousand-mile low crawl through a Third World leach field. This way he remains as clean — on the outside, anyway — as is humanly possible. Lance Armstrong, Cancer Killer.

It’s a cliche, of course, but I think it would have been good for the sport to have had a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle fistfight over the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s charges and a final decision at the Court of Arbitration for Sport. We could point at something then, claim to have an answer, even if it was the wrong one.

This way, the thing will never end. Believers will continue to believe, and haters continue to hate. Nothing has changed.

And for the immediate future, at least, nobody will give a shit about what happens in the Vuelta a España, the USA Pro Challenge or any other two-wheeled sporting competition. They’ll all be gazing upon Cancer Jesus, hanging up there on the carbon-fiber-and-titanium cross that he’s built for himself.

Figures lie, and. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 30 Comments
The 2011 prologue in Bibleburg
Last year saw crowds in the Garden of the Gods and crowds downtown, but not much in between. This year the city is hoping for 50,000 spectators.

The USA Pro Challenge, a.k.a. The Race of Many Names®, is under way, and so are the rumors that early attendance is not quite what organizers had expected.

In Telluride, The Daily Planet says that the hoped-for 20,000 spectators failed to materialize for the finish to stage one. And in Durango, where the race kicked off, The Durango Herald reported that “the number of tourists in town appeared to be far fewer than the 25,000 city officials had predicted,” adding that there was definitely room at the town’s many inns. The Montrose Daily Press seemed content with a thousand or so folks for the start of stage two. I’ve not looked into the stats for Crested Butte or Aspen*, having my back up against a number of paying chores.

Here in Bibleburg, the city fathers are hoping for 50,000 people to pack the downtown drinking-and-fighting ghetto for Friday’s conclusion to stage five. That would be about half of the throng organizers initially claimed they drew for last year’s prologue, and about five times the size of the crowd that actually showed up, based on estimates by a certain Irish-American cycling scribe of your acquaintance and the usually reliable sources.

Based on recent developments, I’d say they’re whistling past the graveyard. USA Cycling had to cancel a planned “Fun Ride” this past weekend (due to lack of interest, according to one source), and two other supporting events — the SRM Ride with Mario Cipollini and the Ride Stage 5 Criterium are said to be pulling disappointing numbers.

This is not surprising, as most folks who’ve promoted bike races in Bibleburg can tell you. Getting the Boulder-Denver crowd to cross the Palmer Divide is as easy as persuading Mitt Romney to speak the truth. They’re afraid we’ll make ’em go to church and then scrape the Obama stickers off their Subarus while they’re bubbling in the dunk tank, getting right with Jeebus.

When Team Mad Dog Media-Dogs At Large Velo was still running local cyclo-crosses, it took years to even approach the kind of numbers routinely seen at events up north. We eventually settled into a role of providing what amounted to an easy, early-season, transitional sort of event that let roadies ease back into the notion of getting off the bike now and then. Dudes are worse than cowboys in that regard, always wanting to stay on that horse.

And if you found yourself up against a competing event up north, well, then it was time to piss on the fire and call in the dogs, Hoss. That’s like bringing an old banana to a gunfight.

So, good luck to the grunts shoveling madly away behind the folks with the figures, working stiffs who as always have a tough row to hoe. It’d be nice if this town got a rep’ for something other than GOP asshats, junior-varsity Elmer Gantrys and dark streetlights.

* Late update: The Aspen Times reports fewer fun-lovers on Independence Pass, possibly thanks to an ill-considered ban on camping.

And it’s 1, 2, 3, what are we riding for?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

“Pamplona” is the sound of three Garmin-Sharp guys hitting the deck in the team time trial at the Vuelta a España.

Sport director Allan Peiper said Koldo Fernandez laid it down in a corner in the short, technical TTT and took Michel Kreder and Thomas Dekker with him. Ouch. Nothing like shredding the old skinsuit — and the old skin, too — on stage one of what will be a very long Vuelta.

“It’s a little mistake that makes a bigger damage,” Peiper said. “It’s a pity because we had started well.”

Charles Pelkey and I had a similarly rough start to providing live coverage of the stage over at Red Kite Prayer. Time trials are always a pain in the ass to cover live, especially short ones, and extra especially short ones in which the folks on the ground keep changing the times and standings on you in some foreign lingo. It was like herding kittens, to be precise.

But we got ‘er done, and Sunday brings an actual road stage, one for the sprinters. So y’all come. Coverage should commence five-ish Mountain time and end around 9:40 a.m.

Let’s get ready to rumble. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

Rig for heavy weather, me hearties —the Vuelta a España starts Saturday, followed on Monday by the USA Pro Challenge, which in just one voyage has had more names than a Limey brigand in an Irish witness-protection program staffed entirely by informers.

I’ll be assisting Charles Pelkey with the former as he performs his magical Live Update Guy act for Red Kite Prayer, so if you’ve nothing better to do around 11 a.m. Bibleburg time tomorrow, drop on by and heckle us. We’ll be on duty throughout the entire three weeks. You’re welcome.

This year’s Vuelta sounds like a real bear. Our old colleague Andrew Hood says it’s even nastier than last year’s edition, which caused cycling scribes worldwide to cramp up, fall off their barstools and abandon the race in tears just watching the goddamned thing. There are only four Americans in the 2012 Vuelta, so nobody on this side of the pond will be paying the race any mind, which means more bandwidth for the rest of us.

Where are the Yanks? Why, in Colorado, of course. Matthew Beaudin at VeloNews and Liquigas-Cannondale pro Timmy Duggan both think this year’s edition could go right down to the final time trial in Denver. This would be a good deal more interesting than last year’s race, which started with a lame-o Chamber of Commerce prologue in Bibleburg and pretty much ended with the Vail time trial … on stage 3.

I like a time trial for a finale, especially if it’s going to decide the race, so let’s hope for a nail-biter, if only to distract ourselves from the Never-Ending Story that is the Big Tex investigation. I won’t even link to that endless game of One-Handed Spit-In-the-Carpet At $300 Per Hour, having had my fill of the cop shop in my brief tour of duty as a police reporter back in the late Seventies.