Next stop, Palookaville

January 29, 2012January 29, 2012 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

It must suck to train and race all year, dreaming about a strong ride at ’cross worlds — maybe even a top 10! — and then watch the Belgian national team gobble up the first seven spots like a beered-up fanboy snarfing down frites.

And if it sucked to race for those final three top-10 places, it sucked even more to watch.

• Video for those who can bear to watch it

Zdenek Stybar and Radomir Simunek fell out of contention faster than a Mexican national fleeing Alabama. And they were the only contenders in the dunes of Koksijde. Everyone else? Bums, with a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

They aren’t, of course. Bums, that is. But damme if that ain’t how it looked on TV. I don’t recall even seeing a non-Belgian after the first couple of go-rounds, unless you count the finish, where one of the course’s 22 cameras kept tallying the body count.

Between sit-down interviews with the top seven, who were showered off and chillin’ in their post-race kit, Sporza would occasionally cut back to the line to show the poor shlubs finishing two or three days down on freshly minted world champ Niels Albert.

The first non-Belgian (Simunek) crossed more than a minute behind the last Belgian (Sven Nys, who groused afterward that this may have been his last worlds).

I know how he feels. There’s more action in the GOP pestilential contest. Well, more mud, anyway.

Cyclo-cross!

January 28, 2012 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

A Mad Dog at Chatfield — I looked very much not like this during today's cyclo-cross workout at Monument Valley Park.

The thermometer seemed pegged at 30-something, with a stiff, cold wind out of the southeast. Not exactly ideal for a fat-burning spin.

So, having spent the morning watching the first half of the UCI Cyclo-cross World Championships in Koksijde, I decided to pull the bottle cage off my favorite Steelman Eurocross, pull on most of the kit in the winter drawer and do an hour of light ’cross over at Monument Valley Park.

Ho, ho. Was that ever a rude awakening.

Though I do most of my riding on one cyclo-cross bike or another, I hadn’t done an actual ’cross workout for almost exactly a year, since my knees started giving me trouble in January 2011. A month later I quit running and didn’t take it back up until mid-November.

Now I can jog for a half-hour without collapsing into a weepy puddle of beer fat and bone chips. But it’s a whole other game, running uphill in an ancient pair of Sidi mountain-bike shoes with 23 pounds of steel bike on one shoulder. It was slow and unlovely and caused me to gasp like a Republican presented with a proposal to tax the rich.

But you know what? It was also fun as hell. After about a half hour my chops started coming back to me (it’s just like riding a bike, surprise surprise) and I got a few of those looks from passers-by that I value so much (look at that crazy bastard running around wearing a perfectly rideable bike).

Now I’m drinking a well-deserved beer — nope, not a Duvel, a Mirror Pond Pale Ale — and looking forward to tomorrow’s elite men’s and women’s races in Belgium. Would it imperil my journalistic integrity to say I’ll be rooting for Bibleburg homegirl Katie Compton?

Rouleurs and Stooges and ’cross, oh my!

January 13, 2012January 13, 2012 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

Edward R. Furrow — Never give a mad dog an open mic'.

Friend of the site Larry T., commenting over at VeloNoise, directed me to a witty review of cyclo-cross commentary American style by his pals at Rouleur magazine.

Naturally, I was inspired to bang out my own take on things.

Maybe it’s that I’ve spent too many years working alone from a home office, but I find myself less tolerant of racket in my advanced geezerhood. And that’s what I find most homegrown cycling commentary to be.

No disrespect intended to Dave Towle, Richard Fries or Brad Sohner, who had a more restrained delivery than his two comrades. It takes ’nads to put yourself out there, mic’d up and on camera, and then crank up the old P.T. Barnum for a few hours (“Hur-ry, hur-ry, hur-ry!”). I’d just like to see them dial down the theatricality a click or two or three. That sort of bombast is hard on an iMac’s speakers.

There’s plenty of drama inherent in the racing. No need to slather on more. It’s like watching someone take a can of Krylon to a Moots.

Meanwhile, my fellow geezers are mixing it up at the 2012 masters cyclo-cross worlds in Louisville, and all the usual suspects are serving up the whup-ass from a muddy 55-gallon drum. It would be fun to be there.

But it would be even more fun to be there in 2013, when Eva Bandman Park hosts the UCI Cyclo-cross Elite World Championships. Hell, if I can get there I might be doing some hollering my own bad self. “One to go! Onetogo onetogo onetogo!”

Making a joyful (Velo)noise unto the lords

January 9, 2012January 9, 2012 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

Thanks to one and all for playing VeloNoise on Sunday. It was an interesting experiment in what may well be modern journalism’s ultimate corporate goal — one unpaid staffer using his own tools to transform free resources into paying copy.

The only downsides, from management’s vulturine perspective, is that (a) there was no paying copy, since WordPress does not permit advertising on its free blogs; and (2) the enterprise lacked the customary seven layers of senior executive vice presidents farting through silk and issuing contradictory edicts to the pixel-pusher at the keyboard.

I slapped the website together for less than a hundred smacks, most of it spent to nail down the domain names and the rest to point those names to a WordPress blog that uses the same template as this one for simplicity’s sake. The banner I built in Photoshop Elements 8. The only thing left to do was digest video and excrete words.

Where’s it all leading, you ask? Beats the hell out of me. I basically did it for laughs, a bit of performance art directed at Pharaoh as I fled Egypt. “How’s this for bricks without straw, bitch!”

With that accomplished, VeloNoise could become many things — a blog, a column title, a T-shirt. As usual, I’m just making it up as I go along. Whatever happens as a consequence is liable to be a surprise to all of us.

Hey, children, what’s that sound. …

January 7, 2012January 8, 2012 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments

VeloNoise — One bad idea deserves another.

It struck me today, as I was enjoying a leisurely spin around Bibleburg, that this was the first weekend in the better part of quite some time that I hadn’t been confined to the VeloBarrel, shoveling frantically to keep my breathing apparatus above … well, I suppose you could call it water.

Of course, it was also the first weekend in the better part of quite some time that I was “at liberty,” or “resting,” as Steinbeck said the theatrical people had it, or “down to two part-time jobs,” as I describe it.

This gives a man time to ride, weather permitting. Also to think.

So, as Sunday seems more of a snow day, maybe I’ll do for free what I used to do for money at the other place — watch streaming video of the Belgian and U.S. national cyclo-cross championships and pop a short recap of each up on the Innertubes at www.velonoise.com.

That’s Velo-Noise, by the way. Sound it out: velo-noise. And no disrespect to my fellow Velo-comrades is intended. But it’s a new season, and we’re wearing different jerseys. I’ve just reverted to amateur status — which means I’m doing it for fun, not money.

• Late update: I’m gonna try a little experiment and embed the code for the streaming video over at VeloNoise, just ’cause. I owe it to science.