The inaugural Race of Many Names Powered By Many Other Names (That Do Not Include the Tour of Colorado)® kicks off today in Bibleburg, and though I have a deadline to meet I think I might just toddle on down and have a look-see, as it has been many a moon since we’ve seen a field of this quality in these parts.
The prologue starts in the Garden of the Dogs, an ancient array of petrified canine turds dedicated to the Gods of Auto Tourism and Parking In Bike Lanes, and it’s pretty much all downhill from there.
Seriously — barring about a quarter-mile of up from the start, it’s all downhill from there, a brisk 5.2-mile tour of MMJ dealers, tattoo parlors and dive bars that finishes downtown at the headquarters of the U.S. Olympic Committee, the non-profit corporate personification of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen foreseen in Scripture by St. Ronald of Hollywood.
Having been chained in the VeloBarrel this past weekend I’ve missed the various gala dinners, pressers and other hoopla, and to be honest I never even bothered to collect press credentials for the race. So I’ll be just another civilian standing at roadside instead of the mighty titan of cycling urinalism you’ve come to worship like a drug-addled radio talk-show host.
Look for the ugly bastard in the Mad Dog Media jersey. One of them is bound to be me.
Fans of Charles Pelkey’s live updates from top-shelf bike racing as seen at VeloNews.com will be pleased to learn that he hopes to continue providing them via his own website, LiveUpdateGuy.com, during the Vuelta a España, which commences mañana.
Unlike consigliere Pelkey, I am not an attorney. Nevertheless, I don’t consider that I am violating my contract with Competitor Group Inc. by noting that VN.com will not be providing live updates from the Vuelta, by Charles or anybody else, though you may expect the usual post-stage journalistic virtuosity from Andrew Hood, Graham Watson and a cast of … a cast of … well, it ain’t gonna be Cecil B. DeMille, but just pop round the site for a look-see anyway. Hoody and Graham are always worth a good, long glance.
Meanwhile, the occasional high-powered guest may appear at LiveUpdateGuy.com during the Vuelta to provide keen insight, cogent analysis and witty repartee. I may drop in, too.
Mighty Whitey is back on the road again, with some new bits and the same old nut behind the stem.
Notice that the headline reads fun “with” bikes. Not fun “on” bikes. And where fun is concerned, well, your mileage may vary, especially if you’re me faced with a mechanical project more complicated than pounding some irksome object with a hammer.
Mark Nobilette was kind enough to build me a custom cyclo-cross frameset a while back, with eyelets for fenders and racks just in case I decided to do something other than jump off and on the sucker for an hour on Sundays. It’s a beautiful piece of work, equally capable on road and trail, but I cut a few corners when building it up and it’s always felt just a wee bit off as a consequence.
So yesterday I finally got around to replacing a few of the dodgy bits. As I am to bicycle mechanics as Rick Perry is to Constitutional scholarship, there was a certain Stooge-like flavor to the procedure, and I ain’t talkin’ Iggy Pop here.
I had it all, or so I thought. Excel Sports Nimbus wheelset, Vittoria Randonneur Cross Pro tires and tubes; Nitto B135 Randonneur bars; Thomson Elite seatpost; Selle Italia Flite 1990 saddle. But as the man says, “Some assembly required,” and as per usual there were missing bits of this and that, which slowed the march of progress more than somewhat.
For instance, I had one rim strip, but two wheels; front brake cables out the wazoo but no rear; and where the hell were those little rubber donuts to keep the brake cable off the top tube? I knew I had thousands of them, more than Michelle Bachmann has voices in her head, but I couldn’t lay hands upon them.
Finally, I got it all together — a phrase you will only rarely hear applied to me — and got the bike rebuilt, just in time for it to start raining.
So I didn’t get a chance to check my work until today. Squealing cantis, a straddle cable too high in the rear and not high enough in the front, handlebars not quite set to the proper angle, the stem maybe just a skosh too steep — in short, the usual slop job from our resident shade-tree mechanic. Happily, squeaky cantis never killed anybody.
That's "Hanover," not "Hangover," though I have felt hungover here many a time while chasing leather-lunged leg-shavers back in the Nineties.
I don’t care what the calendar says — yesterday was the first day of fall. It was mostly cool and overcast until late in the day, when summer made something of a comeback. Nice change from the 90-plus weather we’ve been enjoying lately.
Naturally, I didn’t get out for a ride. It’s been heavy lifting around here, what with breaking in a new dog, working the VN.com site by myself on weekends, and deadlines for Velo the magazine (Monday) and Bicycle Retailer and Industry News (Wednesday).
The BRAIN column was a real bitch to write. The turmoil at Velo and VeloNews.com has been much on my mind, as has my friend Charles Pelkey’s cancer, and of course the never-ending mad-hattery in the nation’s capital, where the League of Small Hat Sizes holds sway. So I’ve been oscillating between rage and despair, neither of which is exactly fertile ground for bicycle comedy.
Nevertheless I prevailed — I shat out something, words in a row, and beat the clock with minutes to spare. And today I fled the office and the Innertubes for a fat-burning 50-miler that really flushed out the old headgear.
I’ve been contemplating a short bicycle tour, but finding a safe, pleasurable route out of Bibleburg has proven problematic. I’ve never liked riding Highway 24 west — too easy to get picked off by an 18-wheeler or RV between Manitou Springs and Cascade. North lies Jesus country and then Denver; no, thanks. And nobody in his right mind goes east. We’re Westerners, goddamnit.
That leaves south. But Highway 115 is under construction through October at both ends — Fort Carson and Penrose — and after a short recon by Subaru the other day I crossed that formerly delightful highway off my list, too. Single-lane climbs, gravel trucks and commuting prison guards give me the heebie-jeebies.
Thus the mainline out of Bibleburg is Interstate 25 — not exactly the sort of bucolic backroad one sees chronicled in Adventure Cyclist magazine. Still, you tour with the road you have, not the road you might want or wish to have at a later time. So today’s outing was something of a recon on two wheels, and it proved very illuminating indeed.
I wanted to avoid as much of the interstate as possible and so took Las Vegas Street to Highway 85/87, and portions of both roads sucked very much indeed, as in crumbling 55-mph two-laners with little or no shoulder. Nonetheless I survived and picked up I-25 at the Fountain exit. Hoo-boy, was that ever a barrel of laughs. At least the endless parade of tractor-trailer rigs blunted the headwind until I pulled off at the defunct Pikes Peak International Raceway, 22 miles south of the DogHaus.
Coming back was excellent. I not only had a tailwind, I skipped the interstate in favor of Old Pueblo Road, which is a staple of the leg-shavers’ Saturday ride out of Acacia Park downtown. It’s a winding two-laner that heads back to Fountain, and traffic was light, practically non-existent.
At Fountain I briefly considered revisiting the 85/87-to-Las Vegas route and then said screw it, instead picking up the Fountain Creek Regional Trail, which leads to the Pikes Peak Greenway Trail and home. Fat city, especially with a tailwind. More miles, but more smiles.
This, incidentally, is how Brian Gravestock of Old Town Bike Shop and the Bike Clinic Too gets out of Dodge when he has a hankering for some Mexican food in Pueblo, 45 miles south of here. He rides the trail to Fountain, picks up Old Pueblo, and then takes the frontage road where it’s available and the interstate where it’s not.
Sure beats sweltering in the office, awaiting evil tidings.
It took a while for the word to filter down to the cycling press, but it seems that even a blind dog finds a Milk-Bone now and then — Bicycle Retailer and Industry News reports today that John Wilcockson and Charles Pelkey both got the heave-ho last week from Velo (formerly VeloNews) and VeloNews.com. They followed Velo editor in chief Ben Delaney out the door shortly after the 2011 Tour de France wrapped. Ben was not pushed; he jumped.
I’m not a staffer with Velo or VeloNews.com; never have been. I’m a free-lancer — an “independent contractor,” in the parlance of our times — and my contract with San Diego-based Competitor Group Inc., now the owner of Velo, VeloNews.com and a number of other publications and events, bars me from discussing any “confidential information” that I may come across in the course of doing my little bit of business with the company.
Given that the information about the sacking of John and Charles has become generally known — throughout the industry, anyway, via BRAIN, for whom I also perform my one-ring circus act — I no longer feel compelled to refrain from discussing it, albeit with some circumspection. Like John, Charles and Ben, I have bills to pay.
John has covered more than 40 Tours and Christ only knows how many other races in his years with VeloNews and other publications. He is a walking, talking VeloHistory book, so crucial to the chronicling of the sport that I even forgive him for having been born a Limey instead of an Irishman. He and the original Trio — the other two being David Walls and Felix Magowan — hired me as a cartoonist in ’89, and the work that they and editor Tim Johnson kicked my way when I quit my last newspaper job in 1991 helped keep food on the table, beer in the fridge and the wolf from the door.
Charles, in his 17 years with the company, not only covered a ton of races, he became a respected authority on cycling’s governance, the abuse of performance-enhancing drugs and the arcane testing/appeals process. He wrote a popular online column, “The Explainer,” and assembled a worldwide audience of devoted fans who attended his live updates from the Tour and other events as if they were papal addresses from St. Peter’s Square.
The silly sod also routinely got up at 3 a.m. to post cycling news from Europe. You might get me up at that hour to face a firing squad, but probably not. “Fuck it, just shoot me here. Bring me a cup of coffee first. And a newspaper. And Elle MacPherson. Not necessarily in that order.”
Charles and are old pals who tag-teamed the VeloNews.com op’ for a lot of years, and I always worked the late shift, because I was not born a German and have no children to interrupt my sleep. Being old newspaper guys, we have the sort of professional relationship that lets us shout “Fuck you!” at each other without anyone’s feelings getting permanently hurt.
I’d say we’ll miss these guys, but that seems kind of obvious.
Mad Blog Media 