Highlights of 2011 – Part I

I’m going to pick five moments from 2011. They are a personal choice like any list sometimes you omit more than you include but I’ll explain each moment. They’re presented in no particular order.

Hushovd Lourdes

First up is Stage 13 of the Tour de France from Pau to Lourdes. Allow me to set the scene. We had Thomas Voeckler in yellow and a relatively short stage across the Pyrenees dominated by the hors catégorie Col d’Aubisque. Revisiting my preview of the stage I called things quite well predicting a breakaway and pointing out the descent would suit risk takers. But few thought Thor Hushovd was going to win.

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Breaking away (out of office notice)

I’m going away for the next two weeks. But the blog won’t be hibernating, instead I’ve gone through my to-do list of pieces and cued up pieces for a fortnight. There will be something on here almost every day with pieces on rider wages, the art of wheelbuilding, Belgian food, book reviews, competition giveaways, some … Read more

Review: Hincapie George Signature jacket

Having agonised over the difficulty of giving the totally impartial review, I find the more I think about things the only possibility is to emphasise the personal experience. So with this in mind here is my take on the Hincapie George Signature jacket.

As reminder, I’ve been on a quest for a jacket that fits tight, that does not balloon up when riding. After all, rain is not a freak event and putting a shell jacket on shouldn’t mean you look like the Michelin Man just because it’s wet outside or you’re descending a long mountain pass.

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Pro Tour wages compared to a soccer team

Monday’s piece on French teams and their future in the sport resulted in plenty of debate. In summary, French teams have modest budgets and operate under a tax system that makes recruiting big names harder. But for all the talk of rising costs and teams struggling to meet a rider’s wage demands here is a fact to ponder on:

The total wage bill for all of the 489 riders in the UCI World Tour is less than the wage bill for l’Olympique Lyonnais, a French soccer club.

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Where are the characters and personalities?

Bernard Hinault, a man with a big personality (or a personality disorder?)

Read up on the history of the sport and larger than life characters appear. You don’t just have names, you have nicknames. The “Cannibal”, the “Eagle of Toledo”, the “Butcher of Sens“. Bernard Hinault scared, Mario Cipollini wowed. Nowadays pro cycling just doesn’t seem to have these references and personalities.  Today the “The Butcher of Irun” is the man who supposedly supplied contaminated meat to Alberto Contador, not a charismatic racer.

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Book review: The Competition Bicycle

Competition Bicycle Book

“The Competition Bicycle, a photographic history” is the full title of Jan Heine’s book and this is what the book is all about. It features 34 bikes from the earliest race bikes to modern era machines and there are extensive studio photographs of each machine.

The bike is the star in this book. You might have seen black and white images of Fausto Coppi on his Bianchi or faded colour images of Eddy Merckx on his orange bike in the 1970s but now you can see these bikes in full colour. Each bike gets several pages of photographs with some text to explain history and context of the bike. For example Merckx’s orange frame is labelled “Eddy Merckx” but is actually a De Rosa. The author has taken care to find the authentic machine.

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French teams: development squads?

All for one, one for all

Philippe Gilbert used to ride for FDJ but these days there’s little chance he could go back. The French squad simply doesn’t have the budget to hire him. In an interesting piece on Eurosport.fr, Cofidis manager Eric Boyer says “We don’t have the means the to pay a rider one million a year. It’s an eighth of our budget” whilst Europcar’s manager Jean-René Bernaudeau says that hiring a staff would cost a fortune, “Gilbert, he’d cost our entire team budget“.

France is a nation of 60 million people, Europe’s second largest economy and home to the Tour de France and an extensive calendar of other races. How come the domestic teams have such modest budgets? What is their place in the sport?

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McQuaid: “I don’t know exactly where we are”

I don’t know exactly where we are with cases but having said that there was a discussion that did take place in this building about a number of athletes that are being studied because of their parameter data by the experts because we think that there should be cases opened against them. We have to wait for the process to happen and I can’t tell when or if that will happen, the decision hasn’t been made yet. I can’t say if it’s one, two or three athletes. It’s all at a late process but I don’t know exactly where. It could be weeks or days.

That’s UCI President Pat McQuaid speaking to cyclingnews.com. What is going on?

We have the President who does not know “where we are with cases” but confident enough to brief the media that “cases should be opened“, to say he believes some riders have been doping. Then we hear that we have to “wait for the process to happen” and he doesn’t know if this will go ahead.

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Sunday shorts

Tour of Rwanda
The overall classification was won by the USA’s Kiel Reijnen of Team Type 1 but Joseph Biziyaremye deserves a mention too. That’s him above in Pierre Carey’s photo, just look at the crowd’s reaction as he crosses the line. L’Equipe’s Philippe Le Gars tells the story better than me but if you want it in English, here goes.

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The road you ride on

Road cycling. We think about cycling all the time but when was the last time you ever considered the road? It is just there. Perhaps you know where the rough sections appear on your riding routes, but what makes one road smooth and another rough? What makes a road?

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