Category: random stuff
i thought the Swiss were neutral?
oh Switzerland. in the name of several million bovine and almost as many annoying little clocks, why? what possessed you to stump up for Mr McQuaid when even his own turned their backs on him?
the Swiss cycling federation
and i thought only King Kong had balls this size – the size required to be able to humiliate yourself the way Pat is doing now. faced with the prospect of the cyclists of Ireland not backing him for re-election as President of the UCI, the man scuttles back to Switzerland and threatens to kidnap the nation’s muesli supply unless they back him – or something like that.
the vast majority of the cycling world want him gone, yet still he ploughs that furrow with his dull old blade.
Switzerland, land of chocolate, built on Nazi gold and a haven for tax-dodging celebrities: seriously, why?
ka-CHING!
this isn’t very neutral at all.
there may be a saving light though, and ironically, it is one of the UCI’s very own rules. UCI regulation 1.1.009 states that individuals may only hold the licence of one national federation. McQuaid holds a current Cycling Ireland licence as an honorary member, so technically he cannot stand as Switzerland’s nominee.
technically.
but then, when have the rules mattered before? if the last thing he does in his current term is to amend that little rule, he may well be ushered in for another.
how this can happen is beyond me. i mean, i know how it can happen, he stands and gets voted in, but, i mean, how is this happening? the evidence is stacked up, it’s all over the web, and yet he still has the brass tacks to stand again.
cheers, Switzerland. thanks a bunch.
Sir Chris Hoy, crankpunk salutes!
i’m not a huge track fan but i do have a great deal of respect for this man and for his achievements, a respect that has grown with this very human and honest retirement announcement.
there can’t be many people who would recognise that their time has come – well, there’s aren’t! usually they/we drag out the demise and can’t accept the realities of the situation, happens all the time – and to have the integrity to step down ahead of a championships that will be held in a stadium that has their name on it, well, you have to take your hat off to that.
eleven time World Champion and six time Olympic Champion, says it all really, and seems a decent fellow to boot. seems foolish, these days, to have heroes, but if the sport needs icons it could do worse than look to this guy.
Sir Chris Hoy – a proper crankpunk.
and here he is having some fun with Danny MacAskill
crankpunkers of the year award goes to: the Afghan Women’s Cycling Team
i have to thank my friend Rachel McPhail for sending this in to me, first of all – cheers Rachel!
“Cycling is not an acceptable thing for women to do in Afghanistan,” begins a paragraph on the website Combat Apathy that has the article on this team, which you can read in full here. you may well think ‘hmm, along with teaching, studying, walking around with an uncovered head or aspiring to be a professional anything,’ and you’d be right, at least in the Taliban held areas.
yet here are a group of women, living in Afghanistan, who are doing just that. riding, that is, and man, may Eddy bless them.
amazingly, the article tells us, there are 60-70 female riders in the war-torn country, a fact that astounds me. perhaps i am very ill-informed on Afghanistan (actually, apart from the war, the Taliban and opium growing statistics, i definitely am), but had there been just one lone woman cranking the pedals i would have been surprised.
the Combat Apathy people are to join in a collaborative effort to produce a short documentary on the Afghan Women’s National Cycling Team, which, they say, will be about “what it means to ride in the controversial country.”
sounds amazing? well, yes. they are currently holding a ‘gear drive‘ in Colorado to collect equipment for the team, something you can maybe go and contribute to if you live close by. i’m going to mail them to see if there is anything else that those of us living in far off lands can do to help.
Shannon Galpin, who spent three years mountain biking in Afghanistan, is the driving force behind the project, and on her Mountain 2 Mountain blog she describes how she first found out about the team:
“..we found out that there are women cycling in Afghanistan, and as part of the National Cycling Team under his [the men's team coach] support. There are 10-12 women on the national team, and a total of 60-70 riding in the country. They are taking their love of bikes to extremes – Afghanistan still does not culturally accept women riding bikes, and right now the women only train once a week due to safety concerns and support. In four years of riding bikes in Afghanistan I have yet to meet a woman that rides, so finding women in Kabul and Mazar i Sharif that are riding, and desire to race, made my heart swell with excitement. The more women that ride, the more that will become accepted, and perhaps we’ll soon see girls riding bikes to school like in other countries!”
you can if you feel so inclined contact the people behind the planned film here:
why the crankpunkers of the year award to these women? even before the year is out?
well, as Rachel wrote, “Boy-o, there ain’t NOTHING in this world crankier and punkier than a Muslim woman on a bike in an extremist front-line war zone nation.”
enough said.
crank on, women, crank on.
Cycling or Psychling? The Insanity of Life on Two Wheels
Insanity
Defined by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as:
1: a deranged state of the mind usually occurring as a specific disorder (as schizophrenia)
2: such unsoundness of mind or lack of understanding as prevents one from having the mental capacity required by law to enter into a particular relationship, status, or transaction or as removes one from criminal or civil responsibility
.
3a : extreme folly or unreasonableness
3b : something utterly foolish or unreasonable
I’m going to talk a little about basketball for a moment, or, more precisely, one particular basketball player, a certain Royce White. I will, I promise, return to the sport of the shaven-legged, just hang in here for a paragraph or two.
It is, I promise, pertinent. I think. Though there is of coruse the possibility that the madness of a life on two wheels will consume me finally, before I get to the end, and then you’ll have just wasted a good ten minutes. But then if you’re reading this you’re probably a little nutso anyways, so all good…
Anyway, back to Mr. White. Mr. White is a phenomenally talented basketball player, and “plays” for the Rockets.
I put plays in inverted commas because, in truth, the 21 year old has yet to step onto the court in a Rockets jersey because he is locked in a contractual (and you could say philosophical) battle with the team’s hierarchy*, because the two parties can’t quite come to mutually acceptable terms about White’s mental illness, one that all accept does in fact exist.
White has anxiety attacks that cripple him and a fear of flying that doesn’t stop him completely from flying, but that makes it an extremely difficult and exhausting experience for him.
What he wants, in a nutshell, is to be able to appoint his own psychiatrist who will then decide before each game whether he is mentally fit to play. The Rockets say no go, fella. Hence the stalemate.
Now that’s kind of interesting, but what is really fascinating is White’s belief about mental illness across society, which, according to the US National Institute for Mental Health, affects 26% of the population.
First off, White says in a recent interview with Chuck Klosterman that the number is higher in both society and sports, stating that the percentage of players in the NBA who smoke marijuana is never taken into account, claiming that those addicted are mentally ill.
He cites the stress caused by the modern world and its attendant problems, which is without doubt a major cause of heart attacks and deaths, as another form of mental illness. He also cites the problems caused by financial insecurity as another form.
His question, at one point in the interview, was “How many people don’t have a mental illness? But that’s what we don’t want to talk about.”
What’s this got to do with cycling? Well let’s take a look. First off, let’s say that if in American society the number of mentally ill people is at 26%, the number must be similar in most western societies, where most of the top pro riders come from.
Now let’s consider the number of prominent cyclists who have had drug problems – and I don’t mean PEDs, that would take a book and a half. Tom Boonen of course, cocaine. Frank Vandenbroucke, cocaine and alcohol, and the rest. Marco Pantani, coke by the Colombian truck load. Go back through the decades and you’ll find tale after tale of riders who took so much amphetamine that by the end they were more like drug addicts with a cycling problem than the other way around.
The Snow King, Marco Pantani
No doubt, our sport has its fare share of midnight monsters. Ride hard, play hard is often the motto for a sizable minority of riders.
And surely, to be even slightly into this sport of ours you have to be somewhat driven by some form of madness. First off, we shave our legs for goodness sake. Now, the pros have a reason to do so – nightly massages and frequent crashes make it essential. But what about the weekend warrior? See what I mean? Slightly nuts, for sure.
Definitely fits Mirriam-Webster’s description of insanity here:
3a : extreme folly or unreasonableness
We also have to be mad to actually go out and take the punishment we mete out to ourselves. What’s that all about? Yes it’s great to summit a hill, to fly down a descent at 85km/hr, to drop a rival or crush a young pretender.
But why do we need to do it? Personally I’ve stopped questioning why. Hour after hour of training. Banging up hills repeatedly til I’m retching. Missing out on parties and all the fun to get up at 6am to go out in the rain for 5 hours.
All I know is that, for some reason, it feels good and that’s ok by me, but I do know that essentially it is a little mad.
And that fits 3b:
3b : something utterly foolish or unreasonable
OK, but that’s the lighthearted stuff. Let’s look at what happens at the extremes. Two words.
Lance. Armstrong.
that’ll be 7 vials for tomorrow, thanks…
Utter psychopath. Sociopath, even. To say he’s devious is like calling Richard Nixon ‘sneaky’. The adjectives don’t even come close.
Armstrong, like Nixon, crossed the line so thoroughly that even the knowledge that there once was a line was eradicated. They bent the truth to suit their own realities to such a degree that their reality became the truth, and thus all who opposed them opposed truth.
There are other drugs cheats in other sports but there’s never quite been one like Lance Armstrong, and there’s a reason why he managed to become so successful, both as an athlete and as a liar, in this particular sport.
Because this sport rewards the mad, the insane. It’s the premise upon which all our traditions are built. From Henri Desgrange’s wickedly brutal early Tour de France to the madness of the Classics such as Paris-Roubaix, you don’t have to be mad to be a cyclist, to paraphrase that popular office jolly, but actually you do.
Armstrong, by the way, fits Merriam-Webster’s definition #2 perfectly:
2: such unsoundness of mind or lack of understanding as prevents one from having the mental capacity required by law to enter into a particular relationship, status, or transaction or as removes one from criminal or civil responsibility
(And for the record, so do all the drugs cheats).
Finally we have the truly insane amongst us, who are worth a mention. Pantani and Vandenbroucke, may whomever bless them, were up there. Poor troubled souls who were not meant for this world, for they were far too fragile.
Another was the legendary climber Charly Gaul, the Luxembourger who won the Tour in 1958 and the Giro d’Italia in 1956 and 1959. An incredible climber, he was also a fan of amphetamines, and known to froth at the mouth during some stages.
Charly Gaul
His teammate Marcel Ernzer recalled a conversation he had with Gaul in his heyday (Gaul was known to speak of himself in the third person):
“Charly’s going to die,” said Gaul.
“Why do you say that?” asked Ernzer.
“Because Charly takes too many pills.”
“But everybody takes them.”
“Yes, but Charly a lot more than the others.”
When he quit the sport a few years later, Gaul went to live in a forest in the Ardennes, wearing the same clothes daily and known to locals to be suffering from depression. He lived as a recluse until 1983 when he somehow married and made a gradual move back into society.
Another was Jacques Anquetil. One of the true greats, the Frenchman won almost everything worth winning, including five Tour de France.
However when he retired he was known to be somewhat of an insomniac, heading off into the woods in his estate with his dog to sit quietly under the trees for hours on end.
He also – and this is truly troubling – began a ménage a trois between his wife and his step-daughter, eventually impregnating the girl, who was then only 18, and going on to marry her!
Yes, quite insane. But then again this is cycling, so, by our standards – no, still insane!
One could stretch the argument and say that both Gaul and Anquetil, and in turn VDB and Pantani, match Merriam-Webster’s definition #1:
a deranged state of the mind usually occurring as a specific disorder (as schizophrenia) .
Mad people in a mad sport. But then, I can talk. I am, after all, a cyclist. But then, so are you.
Welcome to Bedlam!
*Royce has since been released by the Rockets.
This article originally appeared in the March 2013 edition of Spin Magazine.
exactly how do you ride your bike?
it’s just like walking right?
as easy as riding a bike? get in the saddle, grab the bars, push the pedals? simple, no?
well, apparently not. new research is suggesting that the skills required to ride are in fact incredibly complicated – and yet, somehow, not too closely connected with the act of walking.
imagine a man with Parkinson’s who cannot walk more than 10 steps without falling to the ground.
then imagine him mounting a bike and riding away perfectly smoothly, looking for traffic, turning, then riding back and even standing up out of the saddle.
.
yet once dismounted, he’s back to stumbling again, practically frozen to the spot.
sounds mad huh? watch this:
following below is an essay from Catherine Hess, who with this piece entered the Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize - it was by reading her essay that i came across that amazing video.
As easy as riding a bicycle?
by Catherine Hess
Most of us remember our first proper bike. It’s a rite of passage, symbolising our transition from “little” to “big” kid. Even more exhilarating is the day we take our first ride without stabilisers. What most of us don’t realise is just how complex the art of riding a bicycle actually is. So complex, in fact, that researchers are just beginning to investigate how on earth we manage to propel ourselves, constantly rocking back and forth with the movement of our legs, on two skinny wheels; simultaneously navigating movement in multiple planes while trying to avoid countless obstacles.
Most extraordinary is what the act of riding a bicycle can tell us about the human brain. In 2010 researchers from the Netherlands published a dramatic case study n the New England Journal of Medicine. Medical researchers at Radboud University in Nijmegen examined patients afflicted with Parkinson’s Disease, a neurological disorder that results in tremors and involuntary muscle movements. In severe cases, Parkinson’s affects balance, co-ordination and limb control and can leave patients unable to walk or carry out basic tasks.
One such patient, a 58-year-old man, suffered from what researchers call “gait freezing”. He was incapable of walking to the extent that he required visual guides to help him move one foot in front of the other and was unable to turn while walking. After a few steps the patient would lose his balance and would require his wheelchair.
Astonishingly, however, this patient could still ride his bicycle. Flawlessly. Video evidence (and now available on YouTube), shows the patient, with severe tremors in his arms, shuffling slowly and unsurely down a hallway while being guided by another individual. After several steps he begins to stumble forward until he falls to the ground.
In a second video he is seen riding a bicycle with perfect movement and balance, the marked tremors in his arms are gone and he pedals at a consistent pace and with perfect balance and co-ordination. He cycles away from the camera, turns around and cycles back, slowing, stopping and dismounting perfectly. Once dismounted, however, he is again incapable of walking.
This phenomenon is called kinesia paradoxica. While the mechanisms involved are still not understood, the knowledge is invaluable. It may lead to new forms of physical therapy and exercise for people with Parkinson’s disease or other neurological disorders that affect movement, co-ordination or balance.
Currently, the “bicycle sign” is being suggested as an effective and inexpensive way to differentiate between Parkinson’s and the rarer atypical Parkinson’s. One way in which the two diseases differ is in the ability or loss of ability to ride a bicycle. Individuals with Parkinson’s who were able to ride a bicycle before the onset of symptoms retain the ability to cycle. Those with atypical Parkinson’s do not.
But how is it possible for a man to ride a bicycle when he is essentially wheelchair-bound? More importantly, how does anyone adapt to the sensory whirlwind that is bicycle riding? Research teams at the University of California, Davis in America and the University of Delft, Netherlands, are trying to find out. What they have discovered is surprising [and very much worth reading - cp.]
While we take it for granted that riding a bicycle is as easy as, well, riding a bicycle, it turns out that it is anything but. Led by Professors Mont Hubbard and Ron Hess, American researchers are attempting to model human-bicycle interactions in a similar manner to pilot-aeroplane or motorist-car interactions. However, there are many more physical and neurological processes involved in riding a bicycle than driving a car.
“Riding a bicycle involves continuous use of all the human’s primary sensory capabilities, visual, vestibular [balance] and proprioceptive [the awareness of one's body and limb positioning],” says Hess. “The latter involves sensors in the arms providing information about steering inputs. What is more interesting though is the ability of the trained cyclist to ride a bicycle ‘hands-free’.”
Recent research at the University of California, Davis has demonstrated how subtle body leaning by the cyclist enables this behaviour.
“Imagine trying this control technique in an automobile or an airplane,” says Hess.
The goal of this research is to understand how the cyclist interacts with both the environment and the bicycle and to develop bicycles that maximise performance, whether the rider is a Tour de France cyclist or a disabled cyclist needing greater stability or control.
What is clear from research into both the human brain and the bicycle is that despite the bicycle’s simplicity we have yet to fully understand how it is that we manage to control it, and what is happening in the brain when we do. Our first wobbly bicycle ride, then, is a more remarkable event than we ever imagined.
did i miss anything?
you ride because you love it. you ride because you need it. you ride because you want it. sometimes you ride because you don’t love, want or need it, you just do it because that is what you do. you ride because it stops you getting fat, you ride because it makes you well, you ride because you need the therapy, you ride because you need the escape. you ride because she rides. you ride because she doesn’t. or he does. or he doesn’t. or, you ride because they do. or because they don’t. (everyone covered there? good.) you ride to find God. or you ride because you know there is no God and because everything, ultimately, is futile and yet that matters so much and you may as well ride anyway because your time here is finite. you ride because you love the earth. you ride sometimes because you hate your self and f*ck can you ride fast when you are angry. you ride because you saw Stephen Roche fight his way back to within touching distance of Pedro Delgado on Stage 17 of the 1987 Tour de France, a feat that made you cry and still does, or you ride because there may be no finer thing in this world than the sight of a young Edouard Louis Joseph Baron Merckx in his Molteni jersey and that is all the inspiration you need. you ride because you once saw a grainy clip of the great Fausto Coppi and saw that pedaling motion, you felt its power and the touch of grace fleetingly upon your being and it has stayed with you forever, and you ride because Gino Bartali saved the lives of dozens of Jews during the Second World War, riding along the lanes through the hills near Florence with falsified travel documents stuffed down his seat tube, destined for desperate people in fear of their very existence, you ride because you love the flora and fauna of the sport, the tales of men like José Beyaert, the Frenchman who won the Olympic road race in ’48 and then disappeared to the South American jungle to become a gem smuggler and an assassin, and you ride because of Anquetil carrying a comb in his pocket so that his hair would always be perfect as he crossed the finish line ahead of the pack, or because that young Malaysian kid fell on the track and got that piece of wood stuck in his calf but had to finish to become World Champion so he calmly stood up and pulled the goddam thing from his leg and got on his bike and carried on and they cheered him like it was Caesar coming back from war victorious through the streets of Rome. you ride because of Octave Lapize screaming ‘vous êtes des assassins! oui, des assassins!‘ at the race organisers as he climbed the Tourmalet way back in 1910 in horrendous conditions, because men were mad enough to plan such a route and because there were others insane enough to ride the thing, and you ride because the tale of Major Taylor inspires the blood to rise in your veins and makes you want to shake the man’s hand, long dead though he may be. you ride because you love the smell of linament oil, you kinda secretly love applying butt cream, you love taking an age to get your bartape perfect and the sound of a freewheel thrumming, love even more the sound of a hundred of the things humming, you ride because when the sunlight comes through the trees above and dapples the road and the rays catch the spokes, however briefly, you almost think that you might just understand this entropic and essentially unknowable universe, and you ride because it needs no language to be on a bike with someone and to look over to them and to smile and to get one back, you ride because the bike is our language – we speak cyclish – and you ride because no one else really understands why the f*ck you ride, because this is our brotherhood, our togetherhood, you ride because you miss the hurt, you ride because you don’t fit in anywhere else, and you ride because you dared once to dream and you don’t ever want to stop.
you ride because you are you.
you ride
because
you
ride.
bikelove? or bikeporn?
Brailsford & Sky ready to tear open the sport, and it might be a good thing
UCWHY?
funny, in a way, that the name ‘UCI’ means so much still to so many. like ‘FIFA’ or ‘NBA’, those three little letters meant, for many of us who grew up with a passion for the sport, a stamp of authority, a measure of goodness and a sign of quality. attaching ‘UCI’ to ‘World Championships’ meant that the thing really mattered. it was real. it was glorious.
sure, the UCI was a bureaucracy, it connoted the shuffling of documents and filing cabinets and sausage-like, pink-skinned fat white men on the wrong side of the middle of their years in bi-focals with receding hairlines and ill-fitting cheap suits and sensible shoes and probably a few too many slaps on the backsides of young female secretaries, but it still felt good. it used the rainbow colors right there in its badge, linking itself very firmly to the kind of honest (or so we thought) endeavor and good ol’ hard work that defined our world champions.
sound a little naive? probably was, but through great swathes of the 80s and even the 90s the sport seemed like most others, there were crooks and cheats here and there but on the whole it was a healthy pursuit, governed by an association that might have been getting fat along the way but that essentially was taking care of this sport beloved by so many.
right?
un-huh.
the truth was that Hein and his cohorts were building an shark-toothed behemoth on the squalid practises of the past, one that overlooked the culture of rampant doping at a time when the new dope on the block was killing otherwise supremely healthy and starry-eyed youngsters in their sleep. the UCI wanted the megabucks and they needed a star system and by golly they got it by both hook and by crook, fueled by EPO in a way that Hollywood has always been fueled by coke, staffed by Supermen and Terminators that were doing stuff up pretty high hills that now seem more akin to acts committed by criminals than sporting achievements.
yet still… it’s the UCI!
yes, there may be some bad apples but the thing surely, inherently, is good?
right?
well……..
no. not now anyways. and yet still, when Vaudevillian Vaughters trotted out in his Little Boy Blue oh-so-finery and his feathered locks and began very strongly suggesting a breakaway league, my blood just got up. it bubbled. i could hear it a-cracklin’ behind my ears.
why? well, because:
first off, i don’t think he should be in the sport.
second, if that preppy-boy-my-momma-dressed-me style of his is really style, i’m starting a dirty protest.
third, he and the rest of his dirty generation milked that system for so long and did fine by it, without a doubt, so complaining now seems all a bit suspect. he gets control? no thanks.
fourth, we all love these races, we love the history, keep the Monuments, keep the Grand Tours, keep it all and stuff the rest.
fifth…. it’s the UCI! surely we can rescue it? surely the bad apples (all of them) will go? they can’t hang on anymore!
right?
wrong.
the more indignation i felt with every mention of ‘breakaway’, the more flustered and blustery i got, the more i dragged the feathers from my mouth, the more i realised it was pointless. there is NOTHING to be gained from the UCI any longer. it’s a derelict building teetering on a cliff edge. there’s mold in the walls and termites the size of Jack Russels rampaging through the timbers. there are individuals still inside refusing to budge, but like those mad sad folk who refuse to leave their houses as the volcano behind them roars into fiery life, they are nothing but depressing examples of the unfathomable potential for pointlessness that humans from time to time offer up to the sighing universe.
so today when i read that David Brailsford was saying that cycling has reached its ‘tipping point‘, i realised that for the first time since i’ve read anything about a breakaway from the UCI, i agreed – this is indeed absolutely necessary.
keep the Classics. keep the Grand Tours (though the Vuelta is increasingly looking like the injured wildebeest at the edge of the pack). keep the mini-classics, the Strade Bianche, Omloop, the Worlds. maybe, sure, create one or two more classics in Asia such as the Japan Cup, on great roads, tough arse routes with lots of spectators.
but yeah. rip it up.
Chicago, Cycling City
Chicago’s gained notoriety for many things, from the Italian Mob to, um, wind, but i bet you’d never have guessed that it aims to become America’s most bikeable city within the next 8 years. of course, every city should be loaded up with bike lanes and bike-friendly zones – in fact, if i had my way, i’d like to see every city in the world have a bike-ONLY zone at its heart – imagine how nice that would be…
Chicago’s most infamous son, Al Capone – not, as far as we know, much of a cyclist….
Bradley Wiggins wins British Sports Personality of the Year
‘Wiggo’ fancy dress costumes will be in the shops soon, complete with ModTop Hair Helmet
Tommy Simpson was the first two-wheeled winner of the prestigious BBC Sports Personality of the Year award back in 1965, the same year he became the road World Champion, and it was a whopping 48 years later that another cyclist won, when Sir Chris Hoy was awarded for his dominance in the velodrome. just three years later Mark Cavendish repeated Simpson’s feat at the World’s and also won the SPOTY, and last night Bradley Wiggins made it a cycling double by also winning the award.
