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This year’s Tour de France has been fascinating to watch, with Lance retired and the pre-race favorites taken out by the Spanish doping scandal. Some solid riders are left, and the race seems invigorated by anarchy in the peleton, with no one rider emerging as the padrone to take control over the tactics over the 23 day affair.

The Sunday New York Times magazine has a compelling article about the travails of Floyd Landis, the Mennonite cyclist who backed Lance in 2004 but quit to join Phonak, emerging as one of the top four American cyclists in the Tour this year. Floyd is riding with a bad hip — a a very bad hip — the kind of injury that would send normal people howling for the Demerol, but yet the guy was able to capture the top slot and the yellow jersey after an astonishingly difficult stage in the Pyrenees last week, surviving four consecutive cols or peaks and coming out in the lead.

The tradition of cyclists who ride through immense physical pain, in the world’s hardest sporting event, is part of the lore and drama that draws me in every July. Tyler Hamilton riding with a broken collarbone, Lance coming back from cancer, there’s a rider this year riding with a cracked vertebrae.

And now Landis is gritting his teeth (Hamilton allegedly needed dental work because of the griding his teeth were subjected to during his collarbone tour) and powering through what well may be his last Tour de France. No rider has come back to the peleton with an artificial hip, so Landis appears to be sacrificing everything this year for his one and only shot at the palmeares.

And I beef about a concussion?

Washburn Gallery

Good luck to Marta on her ride in “Newton’s Revenge” up New Hampshire’s Mount Washington. The photo is by one of my heroes, Brad Washburn, mountain cartographer (he did the definitive maps of the Alps, the Himalayas, and the White Mountains), photographer, and naturalist.

This ride Marta is doing is an adjunct to the famous “Mount Washington Hill Climb” purportedly the toughest cycling climb. Period. This is where Tyler Hamilton made his name, and the new kid on Lance’s team, Tom Danielson made his. 7.2 miles of nothing but grueling uphill. Marta is shooting for a time under an hour and a half.

Update: Marta made it up the hill a little over an hour and half – Said she had the wrong gearing for the ascent and that is was too “easy”

I woke up this morning to the nasty news that this year’s Tour de France is completely wrecked by the Spanish doping scandal, with the two front runners — Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso — both withdrawn due to a cloud of implication hanging over their heads.

While I despise doping in athletics as much, if not more than the next guy, the waves of scandal blowing over professional cycling are getting very tiresome. Lance couldn’t win a Tour without the European press dredging up some whiff of EPO doping. Tyler Hamilton’s career is in ruins — but his Athen’s olympic gold medal secure. And now the greatest cycling event of the year is trashed by the withdrawal of the two favorites.

Well, off to the Tivo to watch the prologue out of Strausbourg, more hope of George Hincapie to rise from the ranks of Lance’s lieutenant to a leader in his own right, but all without two of cycling’s greatest riders participating. This Tour has already gone down in history as one with an asterix next to it, similar to the 1998 Tour which was rocked by the Festina scandal.

Doping in cycling goes way, way back into the 50s and 60s, when riders chowed down on amphetamines to keep themselves going through three week grand tours. When the British cyclist Tom Simpson died on the slopes of Mt. Ventoux — his last words were “put me back on my bike” — and found with pills in his pockets, the sport began to take notice.

So the New York Times this morning is splashing a front page photo of American face-painters looking despondent over Team USA getting knocked out of the losing its first World Cup game. [thx to Totalbike for the correction] I chalk this one up as a non-event. Indeed, soccer, aka Football, may be the most global of games, but other than soccer moms and hordes of shin kicking American children, the game is not, despite repeated predictions of optimism, taken off to the manic extent it has everywhere else in the world.

Me, I am totally fixated on professional cycling — bicycling — and my favorite game these days is to instant message with my biking buddies to talk trash about our favorites going into the first non-Lance Tour de France in many years. Who will emerge as the “patrone” of the peleton?

I’ll be rooting for three riders. They are:

1. Chris Horner — great American rider for Saunier-Duval. Shows great heart and had a great Tour last year.

2. Ivan Basso. Italian climber. Only man to hold his own on the climbs against Lance. Winner of the Giro d’Italia and poised to be the main man in my opinion.

3. George Hincapie. I’ll go out on a limb, but this is Hincapie’s year to emerge from beneath Lance’s shadow and go all the way.

Why do I love the Tour de France? Imagine running 20 consecutive marathons. That’s why. There’s nothing so grueling nor so noble.

I bought my old erg in 1995, a Concept 2 Model C, one of the first years of that model. I immediately became obsessed and started using the thing at least a half hour every day, losing a ton of weight and turning myself into a beastly 30-something, “competing” online versus the World Ranking and finding myself, at one magnificent point, the fifth fastest man in the world in the One-Hour competition. I rowed a few CRASH-B Sprints (The World Indoor Rowing Championships), and finished in the top twenty every time.

With a daughter who is a US National High School rowing champion, it was obvious yesterday that the old erg had too many millions of meters on the flywheel. So I dropped some credit card cash on this new Model D. I sense another love/hate affair with the Erg coming on. For those who are unfamiliar with the ways of the Erg, let’s put it this way, there is absolutely no piece of exercise equipment on the planet that will kick your ass as thoroughly as a Concept 2 erg. Period. None. Finito. No argument.

Snipped from a recent Journal article on bicycle commuting:

“The biggest downside of cycling is wrecks, particularly with cars. Per kilometer traveled, a cyclist in America is 12 times likelier than a car occupant to be killed, according to a 2003 American Journal of Public Health article.
“Yet the number of cyclists killed in America fell nearly 10% to 724 during the decade that ended in 2004, according to federal statistics. And studies show that as the number of cyclists increase, collisions with automobiles decline because motorists become more alert to bikers’ presence. As cycling in London increased 100% from 2000 to 2005, the accident rate for cyclists fell 40%, according to Transport for London.

“The danger of cycling is far outweighed by the benefits, says Rutgers University’s John Pucher, a professor of urban planning specializing in cycling issues. Cycling builds muscle, deepens lung capacity, lowers heart rate and burns calories. ”

Now to persuade my skeptical wife. Having my friends nickname me “Glance” in the aftermath of Saturday’s bike-car mashup does not help.

www.cyclingnews.com news and analysis

I have a big case of bike lust (actually the name of a bike cleaning product) now that my LeMond has gone to the peleton in the sky.

This is what I want. A Cervelo Carbon Soloist. In my dreams, and not if my wife has anything to say about it. She’s declared an end to my cycling days and want me back in the rowing scull.

iBikeMount – Gizmodo

A dumb and dangerous idea for cyclists. Anything that blocks out the world on a bike is a bad thing.

Gmaps Pedometer

This is a map of the bike ride I took this morning. Nice warm spring morning with some sunshine looking like it wanted to give way to rain, so I donned my spandex, strapped on my cleats, clicked in, and started rolling with no destination known.

Like a rolling stone.

A little out of shape — the Lenovo gig and North Carolina have not been conducive to solid cycling these past three months — but I got around the roads just fine.

This cool tool on the link is the Gmaps pedometer — a neat tool for saving favorite hikes, bike rides, walks, and runs. I like it — this, in my mind, is what a “mash-up” is — take a strong tool like Google Maps with an open API — and make it better.

I came home, fell on the couch, and watched the Criterium Internationale on OLN. It’s been a bike day all around.

The Galveston County Daily News
A Baton Rouge man was in jail Tuesday after a Monday theft report involving fire, two packs of pantyhose and two bottles of cologne.

It’s been too long since a cycling post. So here’s one. I would have loved to have written that lead.

 Cycling keeps me sane. I like to take my exercise sitting down, or as my Olympic silver medal winning friend (rowing, eights, 1984) Charlie Clapp says, "weight-bearing exercise" is the way to go if you’re big and want to spare your knees the hell of running on pavement.

Someone on roadbikereview.com (my favorite cycling forum, where I post as Cape Cod Dave), said of one sub-genre of cycling that it was a "cult within a fetish, within an obsession." I think the entire sport is an obsession in its own way. Some cultures, the Dutch, the Chinese, the Swiss, are so cycling-centric that it is an essential of their society. In the U.S. the pastime runs the gamut from kids riding Wal-Mart tricycles, to single-track mountain bikers, to wanna-be Lance Armstrongs on $6000 carbon fiber rocket bikes.

Anyway, there are a couple special sites I’d like to list in no particular order:

1. Ken Kifer’s Bike Pages: Ken Kifer was a spiritual cyclist, who as a young man rode a Schwinn Varsity from Alabama to Canada. A disciple of Henry David Thoreau, he poured his creativity into his website, chronicling epic rides around North America, subsisting on the kindness of strangers and loaves of bread. In 2003 he was killed by a drunk driver, but the site lives on in his memory. Tragic is an understatement.
2. Sheldon Brown: In Newton, Massachusetts, at Harris Cyclery, lives Sheldon Brown, aka Captain Bike. I have never met the man, but his website is an astonishing insight into the mind of a master. If you need to know about the history of the Sturmey-Archer hub, Sheldon has it. Want to know the in’s and out’s of aligning a fixed-gear chainline? Sheldon has it. He also digresses wonderfully into his world of music, books, movies, and France. Sheldon is an icon. I am proud to have built my fixed-gear with his stuff.

3. Peter White Cycles  : Somewhere in southern New Hampshire is Peter White, the man who can equip a randonneuring bike better than anybody. What is Randonneuring? Riding a bike extremely long distances against the clock, through the night, with lights, just because you can. This is the cult within the fetish I was talking about. White is the master of lighting, bicycle packs, and outfitting man’s most noble invention to do things most people think is impossible.

4.  Drunk Cyclist: What can I say? This blog is insane. Pornography, tales of drunkeness, politically incorrect humor: the title tag on the homepage on 2.1.06 asks the post-State of the Union Question, "What the f$%k is Switch Grass?"

5.  Lucas Brunelle: take a bicycle messenger, put a video camera in his helmet, and then watch him ride a race down 7th avenue in Manhattan at rush hour against equally crazed messengers, all to the soundtrack of Guns n’ Roses Welcome to the Jungle.  Lucas is a genius. He turned a couch into a bicycle. He rides his bike on the Charles River (when the river is frozen).

6. Fixed Gear Gallery: how to explain a fixed-gear bike? It’s a track bike. It’s what messengers ride. It’s a classic steel racing bike but with no gears, and usually no brakes. You can’t coast. Ever. If the rear wheel turns, the cranks turn. This is zen cycling and I love it. This site is pictures of fixed gear bikes. Thousands of them. There’s a forum too, but its bike porn, plain and simple.

7. I could go on, and on, and on. And I will. I’ll move this page to bike link page to make it more permanent.